Phase Shift

I find myself in the midst of one of life’s phase shifts, the one into old age. Advise is to embrace any shift as being for the best, and one might as well. It’s inevitable. In spite of that, I still dream of myself as in my late twenties, early thirties. Somewhere down inside, I’m not shifting apparently.

It has been happening for years, this giving up of those things of life such as career, power, money, glory, to follow an inner direction of discovering one’s highest ideals and a reason for being here. I am told that giving up may be a grieving process, and I recognize that process.

This season is Autumn and the Metal Element. The metal element is “paring down” one’s life to focus on what is of ultimate concern. In traditional Chinese medicine, the lungs and colon are the organs of Metal. The lungs breathe in new life and spirit; the colon lets go of waste.

My view is now to determine what was and is possible, and how it might be realized. This is not just for myself, but for others close to me, from family to country to world. Morals and caring, it is said, move from egocentric, to ethnocentric, and finally worldcentric. This is a “line of development” discovered by my civilization, and will receive a great deal of attention in coming posts. It allows peering inside the wisdom traditions from all of history and all corners of the world, to discover their strengths and weaknesses, and thus how individuals and societies might progress. This has become important to me.

I would love to make a Faustian bargain for all knowledge but there seems no one to bargain with, probably because they know now they loss in the end. I shall have to muddle along on my own, and perhaps find someone interested in sharing these ideas. That would be nice. Einstein, I think, made a great mistake in not following up on his promise with his first wife. He won her hand by promising to talk physics with her, allowing her to participate, as she could not otherwise because of her gender. After marriage, he did not, and finally had to promise her his Nobel monetary winnings in exchange for a divorce. To have someone like her to cohabit this world of ideas would be wonderful.

This, then, is what I want in this autumn season my life. We’ll see.