THE MOON WAS full two nights ago. I sit now on the first-floor patio of my friend Fazil’s beach house. This is in Marang, just south of Kuala Terengganu. It is 5.30 in the morning.

The regular passing of trucks and cars pulsates at an erratic pace. Unpredictable, but expected. This is unlike the soft waves I hear rolling upon the beach 100m away; those are well-paced. Predictable and much more exact in their rhythm. Expected, and yet, I can discern that the crashes differ slightly from each other.

At 5.43am on this July morning, the mosques begin their call to prayer. The muezzin in each of them recites the azan. I note that while they may have been prompted by the clock, they do not begin in unison, nor do they end together.

Once they begin to fade away, I hear the waves distinctly again. They are louder now because my ears have pricked up, having responded to the louder volume of the azan. A bike rushes by, its loud engine fading away very slowly in the morning air, and is overwhelmed by a truck now passing the house with a much louder roar.

From within the house, I can make out the breathing of my wife.

What else do I hear, this quiet morning as I look east into the retreating darkness? It is too early yet for the sun to appear above the eastern horizon. What I see instead is a row of lights from fishing boats arranged in an irregular line.

Are those insects I hear from the garden? If so, they are being drowned out by the rising noises of human activity. The city is awakening, and another day is upon me.

While my ears are drawn to the sounds of this morning in Marang, my eyes note that the lamps of the fishing boats are now flickering, as if being blown out by the rebirth of the day.

Time is ticking by. Flash by flash, wave by wave, breath by breath. Azan by azan, full moon by full moon, sunrise by sunrise. Repeating, reiterating, reciting.

And yet, this is but half the story of the universe.

No Time Without Change

Not too long ago, there would have been a clock on the wall in the hall, perfecting the repetitiveness of time. Tick-tock, tick-tock. Totally predictably.

But while time is repetitive, it also flows. Changes take place against the ticking, against the flow. The repeats, the beats of time, are however not what is interesting. What weaves around the ticks and the tocks is.

Time is like the drummer in a band, around which the other instruments find meaning. We might say that today follows yesterday, and will be followed by tomorrow. But the content differs despite all things being repeats.

We living beings, like musicians, hear our cue, and then timing ourselves expertly, we perform, we act, we achieve. We mean things. Within the textile of the beats, we insert variations and create our tapestry. Marching music allows for alluring jazz to appear.

I now think of the shells and other strange objects I found by the shore yesterday evening, worn down over decades by the rhythm of the sea, by the rush of the wind, by the passing of the moon. Time has done its job on them, but it is this wearing away that gives them a story to tell, that makes them captivating.

Within the music that sunrises and sunsets perform, with the rising and ebbing of tides, lives are lived.

Most profoundly, these lives are not repeats. Each happens only once. The repetitive nature of the universe is their inspiration. It would seem that this great paradox appears because the repetitions are never perfect. The slight variations I hear in the morning waves, in the irregular passing of vehicles, in my wife’s breathing, are revealing.

Time, as defined by nature’s rhythms and not by human clocks, is syncopated. It is because the repeats are not perfect, and it is because time, in its fullness, entertains endless wavelengths that endless changes appear.

Deaths may be repeats, but they are each endured in isolation. And music is enjoyed as much for its endless variations as for its persistent rhythms.