भूतग्रामः स एवायं भूत्वा भूत्वा प्रलीयते।रात्र्यागमेऽवशः पार्थ प्रभवत्यहरागमे॥
bhūta-grāmaḥ sa evāyaṃ bhūtvā bhūtvā pralīyaterātryāgame ’vaśaḥ pārtha prabhavatyahar-āgame
Word by word
The verse says
This same crowd of beings comes into being again and again, and dissolves, helplessly, when night comes — and comes forth again when day comes.
In plain words
Avaśaḥ — helpless. Without a say in it.
Krishna does not dress this up. The cycle is not something anybody chose or can vote on.
The word sits there in the middle of the line, and the rest of the chapter is about the one thing that is not inside it.
Where you've felt this · in relationships
At every family wedding the same two relatives have the same argument. It is about something that happened in 1994. Nobody plans it and nobody wants it. By the second evening one of them says the thing. The other answers. The whole machine starts up again, word for word.
Going deeper
Being carried along without a say in it is the plainest statement of the problem this book is trying to solve.
The cycle described here is enormous, but the shape of it is recognisable at human scale. Patterns run because they have run before. Nobody in them chose them today. A family argument, a habit, a way of reacting to a particular tone of voice — all of it comes round on schedule, and the people inside it are, in the verse's word, helpless.
What the Gita claims is not that the cycle can be argued with. It claims there is something that is not inside it, and that you have access to that.
The practical version is smaller and still useful. You cannot stop the machine starting. You can sometimes notice it starting, and noticing is not one of the moving parts.