After some weeks of intense cold and much raining, we have been gifted with some sunny, warm days. These days carry a new energy, providing a needed stimulant for all the tasks I have to carry on. In particular, this Spring breeze has helped me to put order in my thoughts and organize myself.
Weather influentiates people on a psychological and even physical level. It depends from person to person, I suppose, but I always feel vigorous when cloudy days give turn to a shiny, bright sun, even if that period of light and heat is temporary. However, cloudy days must always exist. They mark a difference and add to the diversity. The contrary is true as well – what a great mass of energy comes to me when, after so many months of intensive temperatures, the clouds arrive and they bring rain and wind.
This is the natural weather; one that cannot be tamed and so often is unpredictable. There is another “weather” or, how should I say, universal time.
(An interesting curiosity: Portuguese considers a single word for both time and weather: tempo.)
Men have invented a calendar in order to count that very same time, and sometimes that comes with curious consequences. For instance, let’s take for example this particular day that happens once in a while and is, simultaneously, the 13th day of a certain month and a Friday of a certain week. Friday the 13th is regarded as an unlucky day; this happens because Friday is thought as the unluckiest day of the week and number 13 the unluckiest number of… well, all numbers. Apparently, 12 is a number that transpires organization: there are 12 zodiac signs, 12 hours of the clock, 12 main gods of Olympus… 13 suggests that there is one more element, and that one element brings chaos and disrupt among the order we so strive to achieve.
I have retrieved this information from Wikipedia, which I searched in the hoped of understanding why do people fear this day. For me, it has absolutely no meaning. I neither like or dislike number thirteen, although I am forced to have some empathy towards it, given it is was already so mistreated. As for Friday, I happen to find it one of the best (not luckiest!) days of the week, as it’s the day before the weekend and we realize the hard-working week has come to an end. From reading the article on Wikipedia, I found myself pitying Friday the 13th. The poor thing… if only it were day 29, or a Tuesday, or Q’saskloj the |»th the day would not have the significance it has, and no Friday the 13th virus would exist, nor paraskavedekatriaphobia. Or perhaps a new phobia would develop.
Maybe we are in need of abstracting ourselves from men-arranged days. Although it is understandable that a particular day was unlucky, I cannot understand why every Friday the 13th must be, from now on, unlucky. Fortunately, this Friday the 13th proved to be quite good to me. It was a lovely day, lots of sun.
February 13, 2009 at 8:42 pm
The only reason to be scared of Friday 13th is that superstitious people, being more nervous, may cause more accidents… :)
March 1, 2009 at 12:38 pm
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March 9, 2009 at 1:16 pm
Man has always been a creature very much in love with every aspect of organisation. He loves to arrange the seconds into minutes, the minutes into hours and the hours into days. Unsatisfied, he arranges days and weeks and months and years, eventually reaching the boggling time spans of millennia; time frames that no man will ever fully experience.
Why this is so is a question worthy anyone’s answer; the answers are as many as there are people with an opinion. Is it philosophical, or scientific–or maybe both?–in nature?
It is however intriguing how weather and time in the Latin languages are so closely related. I think it is because those languages have taken their time to ponder the reality of both matters: that they are visible changes in the world, closely correlated, and both equally impossible to manipulate.
In a sense, it can be said that the sunshine depends on the time of day, and the time of day on the sunshine. And neither point of view is wrong, because they are all nothing but attempted explanations to describe the wonders f the ever-changing cosmos.