Coming of Aging... for Empire

Questions post election about death, karma and love

Is capitalism aging gracelessly, full of hubris and making trouble for everyone who loves it? Name me an empire that has gone out gracefully.

Can “coming of aging” - acceptance, life review, amends, forgiveness, legacy, service, joy - inform this time of our nation coming apart at the polarized seams? Any chance our empire - the current one between the Renaissance to now - will do kind of the inner work we do individually when we realize we are mortal?

People talk about the Soul of America. Where does our soul reside? In the people? In the founding documents? In how we behave towards one another day in day out? Are we having a dark night of the soul as America? Will we face our demons - or fiddle while our version of Rome burns?

How can we, personally, carry a bit of that load of coming of aging for our nation?

Do civilizations have karma?

Indeed they do, and they pass it on to their offspring.

The unfinished business of one Empire gets repeated with the next one, and the next, until the lessons are learned.

Very few of us want to take on the karma of our nation. It’s enough to review our own lives and set them down graciously. What responsibility do we have for what’s been done in America’s name? We’ve just had a nerve wracking year plus of electioneering, and four years of a candidate contesting the results of the last election. Can’t we just take a break?

In short, yes. We need a break. We need to hang out at the beach together, watch a game, dance. All of this is good for the soul (of America). In fact, community fun is one thing we are really good at. Fun is one way we forgive and forget after long battles where no one, but war itself, wins.

Civilizations rise and fall.

We know this about the Roman Empire, we sense the American Empire is in decline, but what about the eight or so other Empires documented by Sir John Glubb. He noted that Empires last about 250 years. Hmmm. Interesting number. He also identified phases.

• The Age of Pioneers

• The Age of Conquests

• The Age of Commerce

• The Age of Affluence

• The Age of Intellect

• The Age of Decadence

The final phase, to quote the source above, involves:

The empire will suffer because of excessive consumption. Absurdly wealthy elites will emerge where the masses will admire them. People will relate increased consumption to happiness. These values will permeate the public: frivolity, aestheticism, cynicism, narcissism, fanatics, and fatalism —and all negative behaviors affect the population.

Oh dear.

Election Sanctuary Circles

In September a friend and I decided to host post election circles where people could speak from the heart, listen with respect, and solve nothing but the need to be in community with others to digest their shock, fear, grief and dozens of other emotions. We imagined a repeat of 2020, with months of conflict and ambiguity. Instead, the map turned red and within a day we knew who would be president. We really needed to process that.

For the 5 weekdays after the election, over 50 people joined one or more circle. Many spoke of the death of their dream of and for America, and the death of the assumption that we are headed for a more perfect union. For many that’s a coming of age politically.

In those circles, where there is no cross talk or fixing or changing anyone, we seemed to move authentically from shock to grief to contextualizing to a determination to continue to be good enough people doing our best - and resisting the harms that may come.

The 24/7 news cycle overwrites this kind of deliberate, honest reflection. Even so, I’m sure that circles like ours met around the world, where people were giving space to attend to our feelings.

This seems to be a small part of coming of aging as a nation. Can the American Empire accept and feel that it’s the end of our glory days, and begin the work of coming of aging? Death comes to all of us, Empires included. The sun now sets daily on the British Empire.

My dream

Two days after the election I woke from a dream and was able to catch its tail. In it, I am aware that there are burdens I’ve carried that I can now set down. I open a closet and it’s half empty, which seems just right. There’s space now for something else. On the top shelf are two boxes, one small with a lid and one lidless large box. I know this box has costumes in it. I think, these are the costumes I can wear, the identities I can put on. I take the box down and the first costume I pick out is a nurse. I know it’s like a nurse in an infirmary, or at the edge of a battle where the wounded come.

In the following days I understand that my role as warrior is gone and my role, an elder role, is to tend the wounded, and keep a healing hand on whatever situation I’m in.

We must live by the love of what we will never see

Coming of aging seems like such a shift, from being a player, an influencer, a world shaper, to being a spotter the way we used to spot people jumping on a trampoline so they could go wild - safely.

In each circle we read a poem. The last day we read this one:

What is hope?
It is a presentiment that imagination is more real,
and reality less real, than it looks.

It is a hunch that the overwhelming brutality of facts
that oppress and repress is not the last word.

It is a suspicion that reality is more complex
than realism wants us to believe
and that the frontiers of the possible are not determined
by the limits of the actual
and that in a miraculous and unexpected way
life is preparing the creative events
which will open the way to freedom and resurrection . . .

The two, suffering and hope, live from each other.
Suffering without hope produces resentment and despair,
hope without suffering creates illusions, naiveté, and drunkenness . . .

Let us plant dates
even though those who plant them will never eat them.
We must live by the love of what we will never see.
This is the secret discipline.

It is a refusal to let the creative act be dissolved
in immediate sense experience,
and a stubborn commitment to the future of our grandchildren.
Such disciplined love is what has given
prophets, revolutionaries and saints
the courage to die for the future they envisaged.

They make their own bodies the seed of their highest hope.
- Rubem Alves