Life in Transition
By Lynn Rasmussen in Personal Evolution/Life Transition, Systems Thinking | Comments (2)
I’ve let the Easy Weekly go for a month or so for no good reason except that I’m going through some kind of change in focus. Now that Men Are Easy has been out for over 6 months, and after a weekend with some systems friends in Chicago and after a week immersing myself in the International Conference on Complex Systems in Boston, I’m thinking more about who I am and what I’m doing. Whatever I do has to from now on be important. The Easy Weekly has to be more and more about making a difference.
So what in the world does that mean?
I want to articulate a view of marriage and work based on conscious design, grounded in universal values, and emerging out of creativity and openness.
I want to promote a new view of mental health, ethics, and consciousness, so that we no longer see them as abstract but as processes that can be conveyed and cultivated at every level from the intrapersonal to the global.
I want to outline the normal breakdown, chaos, and reordering of the brain and life and work that happens at times of transition. Just like Lamaze did for childbirth and Kubler-Ross did for death and dying, someone needs to describe and teach the signs, symptoms, and process of normal life transitions. We need to demedicalize normal transitions and stop medicating people at 6, 14, 19, 25, 32, and all the other transitional times. We all need support for those times, and support takes an understanding of what the chaos of transition means, the experience and process of it, and the great news that it is not just breakdown, that it’s a reordering to a next level of awareness and efficiency of thought and action.
I want to completely restructure psychological, philosophical, religious/spiritual, medical/neural/physiological, sociological/anthropological/political science divisions into a whole systems/process view of people. I just want to completely restructure the entire human educational and research enterprise.
That’s all.
I guess the days of simple relationship advice are over.
Or maybe not. Maybe I’ve been right all along. Maybe the way to convey it is to ground it all in the immediate concerns of everyday life.
I don’t know any more. A bit of chaotic transition in action.
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Gee, Lynn, we get you away from the paradise of the tropics for a little bit, and it leads to all of this self-reflection. Maybe it’s the cooler weather that leads to more thinking.
You’ve set a pretty high bar for yourself. Life doesn’t necessarily have to be difficult to be worthwhile.
A high bar, maybe. It’s inspiring to have so much to play with.
Paradise can be a bit sluggish. A trip to the mainland and then the company of wonderful people–you, for one, of course, David–makes life that much richer.
Difficult? Nah.