the felicitous clusters of years

06 Jun, 2026

Prior to today, I hadn't looked at a canonical grouping of my years in anything but septads; had always thought of it in that Biblical/pseudo-cellular sets of sevens — the first modality literary-mythic, the other organic.

To be sure, neither stands up to rigorous scrutiny with respect to one's actual lived experience over the years and decades, but the selected span nevertheless provides a kind of logical AND arbitrary mapping that can make sense in the context of one's own story/history.

But then, yesterday I thought "...hmm — wouldn't it work as well in 5s?" and then today, "...and why not also in sixes, eights, even nines? ::chuckle::

And so down this rabbit warren I go.

Wow. I'm old. ::chuckle:: That's all. ;-)

Actually, no... that's not just all. There's quite a bit more. A lot more.

As I stare at the columns and rows, the valence of each year pops for me, in my mind's eye — the instant I see a year, I associate it with something memorable and elemental that emerged or took place in my life.

But that's the first and obvious thing; it's almost reflexive. What's ultimately more evocative for me is what happened in those segments of years — the time in between the year-markers. That's what the segmenting is for, to begin with: what happened in the arbitrary era defined by the arc from one group's beeginning, to its end point. E.g., what happened between the pentad 1995 to 2000; or the heptad 2009 to 2016, or the ennead 1969 to 1978; and so on and so forth.

[ Lafayette Park triptych... ]