When the Cycle Returns, Do We?

There is a way the day slips away without ever announcing its departure. Not in hours, but in fragments. A glance that lingers too long, a scroll that begins without intention, a thought that drifts and quietly takes the rest of the afternoon with it.

I noticed it one evening while adjusting the position of a chair by the window. It had been slightly off for days. Not enough to trouble me, but enough to pull my gaze every time I passed. That day, I moved it back into place. Just a few inches. The room did not change. But something in me settled, as though a small piece of myself had returned.

A few days later, I sat across from a colleague at a café. His phone lay between us, face up, lighting up every few moments like a pulse that refused to steady. He spoke well, thoughtfully even, but his eyes kept drifting, not out of disinterest, but habit. Each interruption was brief, almost harmless. Yet by the end of the conversation, it felt as though we had never quite arrived anywhere. Words had been exchanged, but something essential had remained elsewhere, scattered in small, unattended moments.

That night, I found myself doing the same. Opening something I had no need for. Moving from one thing to another, not out of curiosity, but compulsion. Minutes folded into each other without leaving a trace. When I finally looked up, there was a quiet heaviness, not from what I had done, but from what I had quietly given away.

The next morning, I visited an old mentor. His home carried a stillness that did not feel empty. When he spoke, there was no rush, no reaching for the next thought before the current one had fully landed. At one point, he paused mid-sentence, not searching for words, but allowing something to complete itself within. It was not silence as absence, but as presence.

“You seem to have a lot of time,” I said, half in jest.

He smiled, a kind of knowing that did not need to explain itself. His hand rested lightly on the arm of his chair, unmoving, as though it belonged exactly there.

“I don’t,” he said. “I just don’t leave it lying around.”

The sentence stayed with me, though he moved on as if nothing had been said.

That evening, I returned to the chair by the window. It had shifted again, just slightly. Or perhaps I had. I adjusted it once more, slower this time, noticing how easily something moves out of place when left unattended. How naturally it drifts, not by force, but by neglect.

As the days leaned into the edge of the year, someone mentioned it in passing. This samvatsara is moving away and giving way for another one. Will it be a new chapter or a repeat of the old one? We know it comes back every sixty years, but how many times do we truly meet the same?

The thought did not stay as a question. It lingered like the chair, slightly out of place. As if the years themselves were not circling back, but we were, carrying the same fragments forward, placing them again into new days, calling it time.

Days passed. Conversations continued, some full, some partial. Tasks were completed, others left midway. And beneath it all, there was a quiet pattern I could not unsee. Not in what was done, but in how it was inhabited. Some moments held me entirely. Others seemed to take me with them, leaving very little behind.

The chair still moves, now and then. Just enough to remind me.

And somewhere between what is held in place and what is quietly given away, there is a way we keep placing ourselves into the world. Not in large gestures, but in small, almost invisible offerings.

Until one day, we begin to notice.

It was never just time that passed.

It was something of us, returning, or repeating, with it.