The Rhythm of the Day

Aligning with local environmental conditions

Originally published 26 June 2013

Although we left Newbold House a few days ago, I had one more comment about our experience there and it relates to the rhythm of each day for the community and visitors. I think that living in harmony with nature is much more than just growing some vegetables.

At the time we were there, in mid-summer, each day looked like this:

Sunrise 4:15am

Breakfast 8am

Morning meeting 9am

Workday starts 9:30am

Morning tea 11 to 11:30am

Lunch 12:30pm

Work through to dinner (although for us this was free time)

Dinner at 6pm

Sunset 10:18pm

It can be a very long morning if you haven’t properly closed the curtains and the morning light peeks in. We needed to sleep-in on the first few mornings, just to get over the jet-lag but after that we found the morning to be a useful time to catch up on emails, write or google. Getting used to the long mornings was only half the battle, in the evenings the sun refused to set. I quickly realised how important it was to align the rhythms of your own activities with the natural rhythms of the day and those imposed by others.

One morning at breakfast I asked one of the community members how the daily rituals changed in the winter when the days were much shorter. I had googled ‘sunrise in mid-winter’ and found that the sun rose at 8:45am and set at 3:30pm. He answered that in fact the work times and the times for breakfast, lunch and dinner were the same all year round. I had also asked whether there was any flexibility in the timing of meals. The answer was that, of course, meals could be put aside if someone was late or was otherwise unable to come at meal time. Generally, though, meals were at the same time each day so that individuals could structure their day around them and the rostered cooks knew when and for how many people they had to cook.

I felt that for me it would be difficult to live perpetually under such a rigid schedule, to have little if any input into the meals and the times they were served. I don’t want to sound overly critical here because I think that our days are structured quite rigidly in most work environments. We start and end work each day at particular times and this generally sets our breakfast, lunch and dinner times and none of this changes according to the seasons. I just felt that the fluctuations in the length of the days, as well as the temperature were much greater in northern Scotland, so it seemed to be a greater necessity.

Anyway, perhaps the rigidity of meal times and the structure of the day is a personal preference and many people might prefer to have order and constancy in their day. What I’d like to discuss in more detail is the fact that these times don’t change between summer and winter.

I recall a couple of my favourite books, Jean Auel’s ‘The Clan of the Cave Bear’ and its sequel, ‘The Valley of the Horses’, which follow the story of a girl named Ayla. The book is set about 25,000 years ago but is meticulous in the detail with which it describes daily life in Europe at the time of the coming of the last Ice Age. What is interesting and relevant to my comments here, is the way communities planned for the long, cold winter. They would work much harder in the longer days of summer, collecting food and other supplies, which they could store and use in winter. The pace was much slower in winter, to conserve energy so that less food would be consumed at a time of year when less food was available. The diet was also different as the winter meal tended to include more preserved meats, nuts, dried fruits and other foods that could be stored in the cold underground storage areas. Winter-time was also the time for story-telling and so the activities of winter were very different to those carried out in the summer. It seems that these traditional rhythms made more sense as they perfectly aligned with their environment. It also occurred to me that the period of Lent before Easter became a period of fasting because by that time, at the end of winter, the stored meat had run out and the community would countdown until the spring lamb was able to be sacrificed.

While managing the cold winter was the necessity in the north, in the south the concern was to manage the heat in summer. As a result, life in the Mediterranean, until just a few years ago, included a midday siesta to conserve energy and avoid the midday sun. This has disappeared in many of these countries because, as the common market increased its demands, they tried to conform to the work patterns of their northern neighbours.

The creation of a local community should include the recognition of the local environment in which it is located. It should develop its unique qualities and traditions through its understanding of local conditions. This is not to suggest that modern technologies should be discarded for a return to ancient traditions but instead that these too should be developed so as to maximise the capacity of the local environment to provide for the needs of the community. This enhancement of the natural environment would mean that humans start to improve it rather than cause damage, we become true stewards and more than living in harmony, we start resonating with nature.