Why Rhythm is a Systemic Question - Not a Lifestyle Choice

In the beginning, there was rhythm.

Before words, before structure, before measurement. The sea beat against the shore, sap flowed from trees, plants exhaled oxygen, animals followed light and warmth. No creature was separate from the whole – every life was a beat in the same composition. It lived in the body. We were in rhythm.

Then something happened.

We took the rhythm out of the earth and placed it into tools. Turned the drum into a metronome, the day into a clock. We began to speak of time instead of rhythm, of production instead of pulse. And the world, which once breathed with us, drew a deep breath – and has been holding it ever since.

But the rhythm is still there. You can hear it when you fall asleep, when you walk barefoot, when you watch an animal or a fading flower. When you hum something without knowing where it came from. An echo of something we forgot.

I know exactly what it feels like to live without rhythm. All my life I’ve negotiated with fatigue and hunger. Grit my teeth through pains whispering that something was wrong. A slave to rhythms that were never mine, calling it responsibility, performance, professionalism – while the world cheered me on. I know I’m not alone. We became so used to not listening that we didn’t even notice we’d stopped hearing.

Life accelerates

When the train arrived, it wasn’t just a new way to travel but a new way to experience reality. For the first time, we could move faster than our own senses. The body, shaped over millennia to the pace of walking, was thrown into a rhythm it wasn’t built for – where the speed was too great for the eye to grasp the blurred world outside.

The reaction of the time was a mix of ecstasy and fear. People wept as the trains set off; others fainted in terror. Early passengers spoke of dizziness, shortness of breath, and pounding hearts – symptoms soon named “railway spine.” Doctors described it as a mix of anxiety and mechanical overstimulation: the nervous system simply couldn’t keep up.

Mechanical speed broke the link between movement and experience. You could no longer count seconds by the rhythm of your steps or follow the sun across the horizon. Humans became passengers, not participants. The traveler, enclosed in a compartment, turned into “a human parcel” – a body transported without involvement.

Speed soon became an ideology. To hurry was to be modern. To slow down was to fall behind.

When the clock came to the village

Somewhere here, we changed at the core. But perhaps it didn’t begin with the machine itself, but with the clock. Maybe the first revolution wasn’t industrial but rhythmic. Because the moment we began to measure time, we began to measure ourselves.

Before the clock, time was something you lived in. The farmer’s time was bound to the earth and the light. He rose when the sun did, ate when hunger called, rested when his body demanded it. Work followed the seasons, not the schedule. There was no such thing as “wasting time” – because time wasn’t a resource, it was a web that everything else was woven into.

When the clock arrived in the village, something shifted – quietly, slowly, but profoundly. At first, it hung in the church tower. Then in the manor house, the office, the shop. Then it ticked loudly on the kitchen wall, and finally, on our wrists. Suddenly, time wasn’t just something that passed – it became something that could be lost.

A new kind of morality took root: the punctual as virtuous, the slow as careless. Time was no longer God’s, but the individual’s responsibility. And responsibility turned into guilt. For the first time, people said, “Hurry up.” For the first time, one could be late.

The clock created efficiency, but it also gave us haste. And with haste came the shame of not keeping up, of not being enough.

Time becomes money

When Benjamin Franklin wrote that “time is money,” he laid the foundation for an idea that would shape all of modernity. We gained a new moral worldview where time was no longer life, but capital.

For time to become money, it first had to be separated from the body. From the earth. From rhythm. In the agrarian world, time was something shared – with the seasons, the animals, the weather, with one another. A rainfall could change an entire week’s work. No one owned time; it moved through all living things.

When the clock arrived, time could suddenly be divided. Work time. Free time. Overtime. The very word “free time” revealed the shift – time was now something you had to free yourself from, not something you lived in. Time became a contract between employer and employee, no longer an all-encompassing reality.

In the factories, clocks hung as symbols of obedience. Every minute of lateness was deducted from one’s pay. The whistle didn’t sound for rhythm, but for control. People began to measure themselves in the same units: How efficient am I? How much did I accomplish today?

It was no longer the body that set the limits – it was the economy.

Industrialization changed humanity’s experience of time at its core. Time was no longer something to live within, but something to use. As the economy broke free from the landscape, time broke free from rhythm. And so, the crisis deepened.

It runs deep. Even though I’m privileged enough to mostly set my own schedule, I still measure my days in output. Fatigue is something to be fought. The body is a project to be managed – not a voice to be deeply listened to.

Rhythm as resistance

Throughout history, cultures have created recurring pauses – holy days, days of rest, rites of passage. Whatever their names, they shared the same function: to help us reconnect with life itself, with one another, with something greater than work. Perhaps these were humanity’s first acts of rhythmic resistance – collective reminders that the world cannot be kept running without pause.

In systems built on constant motion, all this becomes a provocation. In today’s economic logic, rest is no longer a right – it has become suspect. Those who rest too much are questioned. Those who fall ill must prove their worth. Rest is expected to be functional, fast, and productive; the message is clear: recover so you can perform again.

We keep moving the boundaries. Scrolling instead of resting. Answering work emails from bed. Filling every silence with activity. Apps, notifications, reminders – everything optimized for motion, not recovery. To reject efficiency is to resist. To rest without purpose is to disrupt the machine.

Rest is dangerous to systems built on constant motion – because in stillness, the body starts to feel what it truly desires.

Throughout history, people have used rhythm to reclaim power. Not only through strikes or uprisings, but in the everyday – in small, embodied acts of protest: resting when expected to perform, walking slowly when everything rushes, listening to the body when the schedule is too tight.

And collectively: in sit-ins, hunger strikes, silent actions – where the absence of movement itself becomes a disturbance. In songs. In drumming.

When 19th-century workers in England shut down their machines to demand shorter workdays, it was an uprising against tempo itself. And when we speak today of regenerative movements or “slow” culture, it is a continuation of that same struggle: to reclaim rhythm from the market, and let the earth and our bodies set the pace once again.

The rhythm of the ecosystem

One of the most frustrating things about advocating for a new economic logic is the assumption that it’s about going backward, when in fact it’s about remembering and restoring how life actually works. Bodies, ecosystems, and cultures don’t need to be managed the way they are today; they need to be coordinated. And that happens through rhythm.

For centuries, we’ve sought balance through control. We’ve tried to tame every kind of variation, standardizing processes in every domain – work, education, healthcare. We’ve tried to keep the same pace regardless of need, season, or feeling.

But life isn’t even. It pulses. Regenerative thinking –whether in agriculture, organizations, or leadership – is not, at its core, about technique or methodology. It’s about understanding rhythm as systemic intelligence. Seeing that balance doesn’t arise from stability, but from flow.

Ecosystems breathe. A tree sheds its leaves in autumn to prepare for rest and renewal. A river floods its banks as part of how nutrients spread and the land regenerates. A wetland may seem still, but beneath the surface an intense cyclical process of decay and renewal unfolds. Intelligence.

When we force nature to produce without rhythm – through fertilizers that break soil cycles, monocultures that never rest, forests that never age, or production systems that must endlessly generate more in less time – we not only deepen the ecological crisis. We also destroy the knowledge ecosystems hold: how to live sustainably over time.

Regenerative agriculture is a practical example of what it means to reintroduce rhythm. Instead of forcing the soil to yield maximum output every season, it works with periods of growth and rest. Nutrients are returned, animals graze in rotation so the land can recover. The work follows the logic of the seasons instead of trying to override it.

The result? The soil grows richer, not poorer. Harvests become more resilient over time. The system heals itself.

The rhythm of organizations

Organizations are made up of people but are often managed as if they were machines. We plan in quarters, optimize for constant output, and encourage continuous productivity, as if energy were linear, stable, and detached from the rhythms of life. But humans don’t work that way. We move in cycles. We need both pressure and pause, creation and stillness, in different proportions, in different moments.

Oh, the number of organizations I’ve met where what truly breathes has to sneak out in secret – in hallways, smoking areas, off-sites, hidden Slack channels. A quiet search for something more alive.

We are not simply awake or asleep; we move through deeper rhythms: periods of creativity followed by integration, times of social presence followed by solitude, seasons of expansion followed by recovery.

Modern work rarely honors this. The same hours, the same expectations, the same logic –regardless of a project’s phase, a person’s age, energy level, or the time of year. The more you work, the more valuable you are presumed to be. Yet what’s still measured is volume – not direction, not quality, not sustainability.

What if we instead designed work with rhythm as a foundation? Or at least allowed space for it in different ways?

Such an approach might include:

• Project cycles that breathe – with intense creative phases followed by time for reflection, integration, and the transfer of knowledge to other contexts.

• Organizations that shift tempo – where teams and individuals rotate between tasks with different energy levels, allowing growth instead of depletion.

• Decisions that mature – where important questions are given time to settle, both individually and collectively, rather than being forced to meet a deadline.

• Time off as real rest – not an excuse to recharge for more performance, but a necessary part of the system’s vitality.

The most resilient ecosystems are not those that produce constantly–they are those that know when to rest. Companies that seek endless growth think they’re building strength but are often building fragility. When crisis hits, they have no reserves, no buffer, no sensitivity left.

And where we stand now – facing global shifts, climate threats, exhausted societies - it’s no longer thinking alone that will save us. We have to start listening to our inherited, embodied, and collective intelligence.

A future with pulse

We already know what happens – to the planet and to ourselves – when rhythm disappears. Bodies burn out. Soils dry out. Ecosystems collapse. But we’re also beginning to understand what happens when rhythm returns.

The earth heals faster than we think – if we let it rest. We rediscover our sense of meaning when we stop forcing ourselves to perform endlessly. Organizations grow wiser when given time to digest their experiences. We grow through stillness, through the spaces in between, through what cannot be measured but carries all that we are.

I don’t know exactly how rhythm will return. But I’ve noticed that when I listen – truly listen – the world listens too. It responds. And every time, it feels like magic.

Maybe that’s where it all begins: in a body that dares to rest, and a system that dares to let it. And perhaps by seeing and speaking about rhythm, we can begin to see our inner and outer systems with new eyes—and slowly bring it back. To stand for its value. To not just push the world forward, but move with it. To remember that time doesn’t only move forward – it moves in circles. To realize that rest can be a way to repair the world.

When the clock came to the village, a long story of loss began. But it is also here, in the awareness of that loss, that a new rhythm can begin to pulse again.

About this essay

We’re facing challenges that cannot be solved with the same logic that created them. In exploring our vast “knowing–doing gap,” I’m developing a tool to help us see our inner and outer systems – and the friction between them. Like a compass, it offers a set of lenses or directions that can be explored individually or together.

Rhythm is the first of these lenses. It opens the way for the next thirteen – such as position (how we place ourselves in systems to be of most use), gaze (what we say goodbye to and what we choose to let in), or relation (who we became and who we might be in connection with others).

You can subscribe to follow this work, or explore it through your own life and context by joining 100 Days.

Want to start noticing rhythm in your own life? Begin here:

Rhythm is everywhere but our systems have taught us not to see it. Here are a few entry points to begin listening and, hopefully, to take some of them more seriously by bringing them back into daily life.

The body’s rhythms

• The heartbeat – a constant dialogue with the world (fear, rest, closeness, alertness)

• The breath – the rhythm that both carries and reveals emotions, thoughts, presence

• Sleep cycles and waves of fatigue – not always tied to night, but to processing, hormones, the nervous system

• Menstrual cycles – recurring periods of power, pain, and drive

• Hunger – not only what you eat, but when, how, and with what intention

• The rhythm of movement – how the body wants to stretch, move, rest

• The rhythm of aging – the body’s wisdom, new needs, new forms of care

The earth’s and place’s rhythms

• Seasons, bioregions, microclimates – the fog in September, the afternoon wind, what sun and warmth do to seeds

• Bird migrations, pollen seasons, blooming cycles – rhythms now shifting, yet still showing what is possible

• The moon’s cycles – shaping water, sleep, emotion

• The earth’s breath – CO₂ flows between day and night, winter and summer

• The silence of snowfall, the wind before a storm, colors fading at dusk – rhythms felt more than heard

• The rhythm of light – dawn, zenith, sunset – biological transitions that bring distinct energies

• The rhythm of soil – its rest between harvests

• The soundscape – crickets, traffic, silence, birdsong

Relational rhythms

• The ebb and flow of friendship – times of closeness, times of quiet

• Projects that need time to ripen – yet are forced into delivery before they’re ready

• Conversations that need pauses – space for thought, emotion, integration

• The rhythm of children – swings between intensity and rest, the need for predictability

• Places you return to again and again

• A group’s collective tempo – moments of harmony or dissonance

Ritual rhythms and possibilities

• Marking transitions – fires, celebrations, meals, endings

• The rhythm of grief – loss that returns, memories tied to seasons or dates

• Time off – moments when you consciously step outside the logic of work

• Sacred rhythms – sabbath, Ramadan, equinoxes, holidays – connections to something larger

• The body’s small, daily ceremonies – showers, walks, cleaning, watering plants, phone calls

• The creative ritual – making as a way to restore focus and meaning

And the systemic rhythms we are caught in

• Deadlines, quarterly goals, school years, annual budgets – rhythms that harden into structures

• The week – Monday as beginning, Friday as freedom

• Digital rhythms – notifications, updates, scrolling, algorithms

• Capital flows – when money moves, when “funding windows” open, when it’s “time to launch”

• Election years, political cycles and pendulums

• The market’s rhythm – hype cycles, trends, waves of speculation

• The 24/7 economy – when nothing is allowed to rest anymore

Photo by Martin Parr.