I had never heard of Stephen Jenkinson before. My dad was dying and things were complicated in the way they get during these times and a mentor suggested that I read Die Wise. The book was profoundly impactful. He spoke explicitly to the experience that I was having in that moment and also to the experience that I had been having in the world from day to day.
We throw the word "culture" around, but he explained how culture is not entertainment and politics and work or even friends. Culture is the inherited set of practices that teaches people how to live, suffer, celebrate, age, and die. We've lost most of that, and it has contributed to the great restlessness that no one can name but everyone feels. He explained that the individualistic nature of western society has lost many of the traditions, obligations, and stories that once connected people to something larger than themselves.
All of a sudden things made sense. I had the language to explain this concept that I had lived in for years without understanding.
So many of the ideas that we need to communicate live in this restless space. People can feel something because they are living it but they don't have the language to ground themselves in the experience. As our society grows in complexity we are accumulating these issues faster than we can learn to incorporate them into our living.
You know what I'm talking about. There's a dozen issues that I could mention right now and depending on how I mentioned them half of you would leave. And the reality is that our humanness is not so different as we've been led to believe.
I'm obviously not the first person to point this out. People say all the time that we're living in different worlds. But the world is the world. It's the culture and everything that comes with it that we no longer share.
The psychologists call it schema. The modelers call it abstraction. As a fan of both sci-fi and mythology, I think of it as the instrument we use to orient ourselves in the energy underlying the totality of things. Whatever it is, the right language at the right time helps us build it. Building a useful mental model of the very real challenges we face is the defining test of our time.
The world is demanding more from us, not less. To meet that challenge we're going to have to find a way to have the same experience of it. And to do that, we'll have to learn how to talk to each other again.