Say You Want a Revolution
“Revolution” is an interesting word. Often, it’s used to denote a sudden, profound change. But it can also mean the completion of a circle, as in: each year is a revolution of the earth around the sun. That this one word has both meanings gives us some insight into the way humans used to think about change. If we want to embrace the changes that are an inescapable part of our lives, we might want to step back in time and re-examine that point of view.
Most cultures used to view the passage of time, not as a straight line, but as a cycle. The sun and moon rose and set, the planets circled through the starry sky, and we lived the repeating rhythm of the seasons. We plowed and planted, weeded and watered, harvested and stored, and hoped we survived the winter to re-start the cycle in the spring.
Somewhere along the way, we stopped seeing life that way. As the industrial revolution took hold, it replaced the revolution of the heavenly bodies as the clockwork at the center of our universe. Suddenly, life and its inherent changes seemed less a cycle and more a one-way trip. We thought progress only went forward. We built an economy on perpetual growth and endless accumulation: more money, more status, more stuff, more clicks. And now, even as we clamor down that path, we know it has to end. The trajectory of our lives feels like one long race against mortality until it overtakes us, as it always does.
This linear mindset explicitly rejects the cycle of the natural world: birth, growth, death, decay and rebirth. It requires us to separate ourselves from nature, so we can control and exploit it in the name of progress. Our goal is to break the circle, and hammer it into a straight, unending line.
Our modern Western perspective casts indigenous societies as primitive. We dismiss their animist beliefs as childish, anthropomorphic fantasies, but the facts support their reality more than ours. The truth is that we have a literal familial connection to every living thing—a shared family tree filled with common ancestors, and a large pool of shared DNA. But rather than recognize that kinship, we’ve created a human exceptionalism based on the sanctity of our particular brand of consciousness. That act of self-worship may be the end of us yet. For though we have forgotten the cycle of birth, destruction and rebirth, it hasn’t forgotten us. There’s a lot of evidence that, if we stay on this path, our own destruction may not be that far away.
So how do we restore life’s cycles to their rightful place at the center of our lives? If you look around, you’ll see dozens of traditions and rituals that were designed to do exactly that. Anything that slows us down and bumps time off of it’s straight line, even for a moment, reconnects us to the world around us. Prayer, meditation, creativity, celebration--these are all tools that we devised to free us from the tyranny of our striving, grasping, self-interested minds.
But those tools bring only temporary relief. We need to do more than occasionally step out of our current mindset--we need to upend it completely. We need to treat the changes in our lives, not as progress or regression on a linear path, but as part of a continuous cycle of creation, growth, death and rebirth.
What we need is a revolution.
