Why can’t you be “turned on” all the time, so that every moment is a “peak experience”? The simple answer is any special state of excitement can only emerge temporarily from the “ordinary” state, and then return to it for a longer resting period. This is part of the energy economy involved in semiosis.
This principle applies not only psychologically but also biologically, down to the cellular level. For instance, a neuron cannot ‘fire’ continuously; indeed it has to spend much of its time ‘resting’ in order to be ready to fire again. At the neural population scale, inhibition is as necessary as excitation for the propagation of the signal along a nerve. A similar cyclic pattern applies to complex chemical reactions and to the self-organization process in cellular slime molds.
The slime mold is not a real mold at all but a single-cell amoeba that feeds on bacteria. When there is a scarcity of food, the individuals aggregate, forming colonies of thousands of cells. These colonies can migrate as a unit over relatively large distances. Over time, the homogeneous assemblage of cells differentiates in such a way that part of it becomes a base rich in cellulose, while the other part becomes a “fruiting body” rich in polysaccharides. The fruiting body then bursts, scattering spores, which yield mobile cells when food is again available. The cycle thereupon starts over again with the individual amoeba.
— Depew and Weber 1995, 419
The gathering of individual amoebas into a multicellular organism is triggered by a chemical signal which spreads from cell to cell, each being stimulated by the chemical (cAMP) to release a burst of it.
But this is not enough to ensure an effective signal: it must also be destroyed, otherwise the whole dish of amoebas would become a sea of cAMP, and no signals would be visible. The amoebas secrete an enzyme, phosphodiesterase, which destroys cAMP. So the substance has a brief lifetime, and the diffusion profile of the signal from a stimulated amoeba has a steep gradient, generating an effective directional signal that allows other amoebas to use it for chemotaxis (directed movement in response to a chemical). However, there is a problem here: cAMP released from an amoeba diffuses symmetrically in all directions away from the source, so amoebas anywhere within the effective range of the signal could respond. This means that each stimulated amoeba could become the center of the propagating wave. The result would be total chaos. This does not happen … The reason is beautifully simple and natural: after an amoeba has released a burst of cAMP, it cannot immediately respond to another signal and release another burst. It goes into a refractory state during which it is unresponsive, recovering from the previous stimulus and returning to its ‘excitable’ condition. Therefore, the wave cannot travel backward, and the signal travels one way.
— Brian Goodwin (1994, 50)
This sort of thing ‘shows that spatial order arises with temporal order’ (Goodwin 1994, 76). Even at the microscopic level, meaning takes time and moves in cycles.