The Sine wave

I learnt that trigonometry wasn’t just about angles and they involved graphs whilst in High school (which is probably called Middle School in US and most other places). And that was when I came in touch with the sine wave.

It’s beautiful; lined up on the rightly scaled axis, it resembles a series of semi-circles alternating directions. It runs up a peak and then down the trough. In-between, the gradient is changing at a different rate continuously and forms inflexion points where the function strikes zero, which is when it changes concavity. Interestingly then, the gradient of the Sine function is given by the Cosine function.

There are cycles all around us; small ones and big ones. Cycles are representation of learning and unlearning, or learning and forgeting. They are also a stark reminder of the falseness of “This time it’s different”. Yet they also present opportunities. If you missed the peak or trough, get on the next one. Train yourself to watch the cycle and catch the indicators.

Thanks to cycles, we can bounce back, we can be sure anything and everything probably won’t last, but also that “only once” is probably not going to be true.