It is not by chance that history truly does repeat itself. For generations you can generally look back a century and find similar issues, concerns, and archetypes driving the day. In people’s lives they go through turnings and seasons that many of their great grandparents went through. For societies you can do more than trace a beginning and end but with each end a new awakening. Civilizations live like people in cycles with one influencing the next and leading back to the beginning.
We live in a world surrounded by cycles. Years have repeating season, months cycle and we celebrate every year as we start the cycle again, our days of the week progress to a weekend only to start over again, and our hours of the day beat to a continuous rhythm with the morning following every night. We have business cycles, cycles in nature and biology, life cycles, electrical cycles, news cycles, emotional cycles, financial cycles, fashion cycles – but history is just unsystematic events?
Unfortunately seeing these cycles or turnings in generations or eras is a paradigm shift in many people’s thinking and instead they are locked in linear thoughts or in random placement of historic events into a chaotic world. While some may look at a cause and effect still they limit it to the history they know and it ends at the day they have arrived. I believe it was Mark Twain who made the comment or observation that nothing is older than our habit of calling everything new.
Fundamentally we need as individuals and as a society to broaden our thinking. We need to look beyond limited reference points and start to understand the rhythms and patterns that naturally exist – and reoccur. We need to start viewing and recognizing cycles and turnings not as much for an explanation for where we are but what is to come.
To do this we need to relearn more than where we came from but where we have been before. For some it is a different way to view your past and future, for others it is unlearning the linear views that have been conditioned.
- IT IS… accepting that you, societies, democracies, America is not exempt. Like a steady ticking clock the hands of time cannot be stopped. Like that clock there is the progress upward of the hands and the systematic decline down the other side. The process is natural and inevitable and for every sun that raises it will set.
- IT IS… looking beyond what you know and what you see. Figuring out what winter has to bring, you would do better looking at the previous winter than to the fall that you are currently in.
- IT IS… understanding that change may not come by our own design but is inevitable. Looking at history we know that change is certain and change can be big. It seems though generations try you can never hold on too long to what you have today or go back to tomorrow. To that point, if you have an instinctive sense that things are not right in America today and that it has unraveled beyond a point of no return; you may be right. Just as brush fires rejuvenate the lands it burns, so to societies must exhaust themselves to rebuild.
