Groundhog Day: Repetition Need Not Be A Rut
By TIMOTHY CHAMBERS
February 2, 2010
When I noticed Groundhog Day was approaching,
my thoughts tugged in two directions.
I first found myself thinking about ruts. In the movie
"Groundhog Day," Bill Murray's character, Phil,
finds himself rooted in a rut to end all ruts: The alarm
clock blares. Phil awakes. He struggles through his
day. He goes to bed. Then the alarm blares - and Phil
finds himself reliving his day all over again. And
again. Ad nauseam.
The movie prompts its share of mirth, but it also
carries a morose message: Repetition can be toxic. It
riddles too many spiceless relationships. It transforms
workdays into stifling routines. Witness the endless
cliches we've coined to capture this ennui: When our
days are filled with the "same old, same old," that's
when "familiarity breeds contempt" and so we just
"go through the motions."
"If life is change," runs the saying, "then sameness is
death."
But then I realized that matters aren't quite so simple.
Yes, familiarity sometimes breeds contempt; but at
other times, it breeds comfort instead.
I found myself thinking about rituals: the reliable
rites attending baptisms and bat mitzvahs, weddings
and funerals, Tet and Ramadan. In these events,
custom constrains spontaneity, but few would say
that life would be more worthwhile without these
timeless routines.
So, if ruts and rituals have repetition in common,
what differences account for our different attitudes
toward them? For one thing, rituals often mark life-
changing transitions: A wedding merges two lives
into one, for instance, and a Quinceanera marks the
movement from girl toward woman. Other rituals
commemorate unique events: Purim celebrates a
salvation of the Jews, as recounted in the book of
Esther, and Easter echoes Jesus' redemptive return
from the grave.
Seen this way, rituals work to combat the fatigue
caused by life's numerous ruts. Ruts suggest that
history is homogenous - that our days are a faceless
phalanx of one thing after another. Rituals send the
opposite message: They commemorate history's
unique moments -they designate days where lives
commence novel phases. In short, rituals are
reminders that, contrary to Solomon, there are
sometimes new things under the sun.
Many rituals are serious, but solemnity isn't essential.
Some rituals, in fact, seem to serve as the calendar's
jesters, breaking monotony by providing comic relief.
Take Groundhog Day, where tradition demands that
we summon a lowly rodent to play the season's
prognosticator.
For all its silliness, though, Groundhog Day carries
some seriousness at its core. It stems in part from an
urgency to know - if unreliably - the future. Not long
ago, when agriculture was a more common means of
subsistence, an early spring could mean the
difference between prosperity and ruin. At the same
time, our conscripting a critter to spy the future
suggests that, for all of our learning (not to mention
satellite data), the future often remains terra
incognita.
So Groundhog Day might be a joke nowadays, but
perhaps the laugh is partly on us - on our human
presumption to know the future now, on our
impatience to see tomorrow unwrapped before today
is wrapped up.
Timothy Chambers teaches philosophy at the
University of Hartford.