Bob Dylan, in one of his many iconic songs, said:

Come gather 'round people, wherever you roam

And admit that the waters, around you have grown

And accept it that soon you'll be drenched to the bone

If your time to you is worth savin'

And you better start swimmin' Or you'll sink like a stone

For the times they are a-changin'

Come writers and critics, who prophesize with your pen

And keep your eyes wide, the chance won't come again

And don't speak too soon for the wheel's still in spin

And there's no tellin' who that it's namin'

For the loser now, will be later to win

For the times they are a-changin'

Come senators, congressmen, please heed the call

Don't stand in the doorway, don't block up the hall

For he that gets hurt, will be he who has stalled

The battle outside ragin'

Will soon shake your windows and rattle your walls

For the times they are a-changin'

Over the last few years, especially post-COVID, how many of us have felt the need to change, maybe even reset our lives, either by force or by choice?

The patterns of change are worth a closer look: be they career transformations toward the environment, agriculture, wellbeing, sustainability, home gardening or increased flexibility in the workplace, the nomadic workforce and the gig economy.

Movements from big to smaller cities, off-grid livelihood, increased anarchy, unstable governments, decreased trust, detachment from mainstream media, unemployment and are also trends that can be seen as a prospective reset or major revolution on the horizon.

A faculty member of a music school I worked for spoke of a drop in creativity among musicians and a rather insipid output from the musician community. We don’t have to go far to comprehend the almost bland and characterless forms of creativity in movies, art, theatre, poetry and the like. To me, creativity has a strong connection to originality, being inventive and the fresh perspectives needed to revive an old, forgotten tradition of skill.

Connecting the dots or a deeper perspective indicates a move towards an inflection point, a bridge across tomorrow or a cyclical shift into a new reality or an imminent renaissance.

Renaissance means "rebirth" in French, and although it typically refers to The Renaissance in Italy between 1400 to 1600 AD, the phenomena occurred in several countries as a consequence of disaster, devastation or disillusionment. A positive change, a transformation or a revival in the disciplines of art, culture, architecture, politics, literature, science and education were stereotypical attributes of or Renaissance periods. Most of these transformational periods lasted for two or three hundred years or more.

While there are a few documented inflection points and subsequent renaissance periods, we can be certain of many such unknown occurrences in the long history of human civilization. It however throws up an interesting study into how we humans react, adapt or sense these transformational periods, without most of us being through one.

Retrocausality, or backward causation, is ‘a concept where an effect precedes its cause, so that a future event affects and early one’, gives us some interesting insights into what all of us are going through in these times of trouble, trial and tribulation. 

“The Unitary Theory of the Physical and Biological World”, by mathematician Luigi Fantappiè suggests that the physical/mechanical world is governed by the forward-in-time solution and by the law of entropy, whereas natural life is governed by the backward-in-time solution and by a law symmetric to entropy, called syntropy. 

Simply explained, Entropy is governed by causality (cause-effect), whereas syntropy is governed by retro causality (effect-cause), raising a very interesting question for us to comprehend, what comes first, cause or effect?

More realistic interpretations of retrocausality, occur in movies when we desire the hero to overcome the villain or good over evil, in everyday life when we expect sunshine after rain or laughter after pain or the much-discussed topic today of the golden age after the iron age and satyug after kalyug. All cyclical recurrences that defy the very idea of causation.

But encouragingly enough, the thought of future events influencing the current gives us rays of hope to manifest a better tomorrow in an otherwise chaotic and controlled regime of politics, culture, art, urbanization, healthcare, environment, education and technology among others.

If retrocausality or syntropy is being researched and written about as a phenomenon that transcends timelines, then parallel realities, string theory and the aristocracy of deities also come into play. The eternal teachings of the ages, great art & music and ancestral wisdom have transcended time and are still accessible to us in spirit and soul.

Manifesting then a flourishing, nourishing and promising future, that reaps long-term outcomes for the next generation, can be among the most pertinent purposes for the human collective. If we can all dream and drum up a global renaissance of creativity, celebration and consciousness, our todays will be brighter and surely more benevolent. 

As we transform from a period of forgetting the old and remembering the new, I can’t help but close with a verse from another iconic song, ‘The Hills are Alive’, from the even more iconic movie, The Sound of Music. 

“The hills are alive with the sound of music,

With songs they have sung for a thousand years’ 

The hills fill my heart with the sound of music,

My heart wants to sing every song it hears (every song that it hears”)

The meaningful lyrics give us a crystal clear perspective that Nature – the trees, mountains, oceans, rivers and their surrounding ecosystems are indeed syntropic, in contrast to the entropic world of fast food, fast money, fast fashion, AI-generated content… all gravitating towards a never-ending abyss of chaos. 

Syntropy and entropy are like soul pods and shadow pods, required to co-exist for a balanced world perspective. But small changes in the way we consume, conserve and converse will ensure syntropy is prioritized over entropy, for the sustainable health of our planet and her people. 

This article is also published on the author's blog. illuminem Voices is a democratic space presenting the thoughts and opinions of leading Sustainability & Energy writers, their opinions do not necessarily represent those of illuminem.