It is coming, I can feel it in the air. The old replacing the new, the process of growth and decline, birth and death. The old is good to many, but as time ticks the many become the few. The few fearing death, annihilation of the system they built from the ashes of the system prior.
I am familiar with crisis. The great disruptor and catalyst for change hidden in the form of great despair and contraction. It is a period of darkness, feeling the old being shredded to pieces while the new is nowhere to be found. There is only what is not, not what is. And the more we try to find the light, the more we are confronted with the absence of it.
As dark as these transitions are, they are just that. Transitions. The death of the old, being replaced by the new. A little chick hatching from its old egg form, the beautiful butterfly erupting from the darkness of its cocoon, the first buds on a tree when spring is in the air after a long and cold winter.
Let us remind ourselves that whatever happens, whatever the universe will throw at us in its cyclical manner towards growth, we are change. Forest fires are necessary to restore balance to the whole, financial crises are necessary to flush the exuberance from the greed hidden in us all. Societies are born out of crises, our solar system is born out of crisis, I am born out of crisis. Your own birth was the definition of contractive crisis. Why then do we fear crisis so much?
The unknown is only dark because we do not experience the light in it. But once we feel the first rays of light touch our skin, we finally know that we can trust this new form as we recognize ourselves to be it. Whether on a personal level, or on the collective, crises are what made us what we now are. And as the world is slowly starting to contract, I trust the force of change in all of us. Knowing that eventually, we will be reborn in a different form.
Interestingly, a book that describes the standing-on-a-cliff feeling that both me and probably you seem to sense came on my path after writing this post. It's called the fourth turning and has a beautiful narrative on the natural cycles of life, leading to (you guessed it) winter aka the fourth turning in which the old collective is replaced, often quite dramatically, by the new. I don't have to tell you which turning we're in according to the book, do I? Perhaps I'll write more on that later, as I'm fascinated by everything cyclical. Or I could write about the many crises haunting the world right now, like the energy-one, the Covid-one, the climate-one, the overindividuality-one, the 2nd Cold/Hot war-one, or the financial one (which is about to be coming). What do you like me to write about? Please do let me know!
But for now, brace yourselves amigos. We're in this together, as one. It's the End Game after all, in which we all have to team up as the Avengers that we are, to destroy Thanos the Inevitable. Or we could just surrender to the inevitable roles we have to play in the inevitable as it is… inevitable?
With love,
Pim