Yearning for a New Direction
This is a short post, exploring something of deep importance for us at this unique point in time, namely, the search for a new direction.
Psychologically speaking, the pandemic, the lockdown, and all the related issues have stirred things up pretty thoroughly for the vast majority of people. From a Jungian or /a-midlife-transition perspective, we can say that most people are dealing with a strong intuition that whatever happens now, the future will not be like the past.
As has been the case since very ancient times, the anxiety of such times stirs up two conflicting archetypally based images or symbols in the minds of those living through them. These symbols have coloured the way humans have looked at change and the future for as long as there have been humans.
One is the archetype of the apocalypse. This is an image that certainly takes the reality of change seriously. If it could speak, it would say to us “Yes, things are changing dramatically! The whole world is going to hell in a handbasket! Everything good we’ve known is going down the toilet—forever!”
As in previous times of crisis or change, we can find that there are people who are gripped by this picture of total meltdown. In social media, we can certainly find the voices that say that we never will get out of the pandemic, or that, if we do, the world will be so hopelessly broken that it won’t be worth inhabiting. Sadly, many of the voices that are saying such things are young. Those of us who are older need to be particularly attuned to the voices of the young in our time, and we need to be prepared to do whatever we can to keep their hope alive.
While these apocalyptic ideas are circulating, it’s important for us to recognize that there’s a second archetypally based symbol that is stirring among us at this time, and that is the archetype of renewal through death and rebirth. There are very many people who recognize that things are not going to go back to exactly the way that they were before the pandemic. There has been change, and something—a certain way in which we lived and understood the world—has died and is gone forever.
Yet this imagery would emphasize that there is going to be rebirth on the other side of the pandemic. Something is dying, but something is also being born, and is bringing renewal and new life. People who discern this archetype are often very curious about the nature of the new direction in which we might be headed. “What is emerging? How will life call upon us to change and renew ourselves?”—these are questions most often associated with major life transitions of various types and forms.
In the coming weeks, I will be doing a series on the theme, “A New Direction”, asking what it looks like, what are the signs of it in our own lives, and how can we begin to respond to it meaningfully and creatively,
Wishing you every good thing on your journey towards wholeness,