Looking for Help in Lots of Wrong Places

Old rules for living are always being overturned, ignored, and replaced with newer ones. But in turbulent times like now, “did-I-just-hear-that-right? times,” a large number of rules lose their guiding power simultaneously.

Examples abound, just from the everyday news—it is so easy to find them. I will put some examples below, but let me give you the solution first…

The lessons of history provide some hope in times like ours, even if it is going to take work on our part. As cultures in the past lost their way, and worked to make it back to better times, so it is our time now. We can take inspiration from the past. As my mentor Frederic Hudson (Wiki Link) described a few decades ago, the seminal leaders (in epoch changing times) looked within themselves for inner strength to build new outer networks for reinventing their cultures with both continuity and change. These pivotal leaders turned away from external dependencies on institutions, historical precedents, and prevailing authority systems toward new interpretations of the internal spiritual and relational experiences of people throughout the culture.

Some common strategies, not all good ones, we can use to get through this major turbulence:

• We can cross our fingers.
• We can bury ourselves with distractions abounding (how many TV show binges or Super Bowl pre-game shows can you take in?).
• We can stay in our echo chamber. Complain about the other guys and gals, and get righteous.
• Or we can do what Hudson tells us “turn away from external dependencies… and (turn) toward the new interpretations of the internal.”

This last strategy takes the most work and has the biggest pay-offs, starting with the value-laden, spiritual, and relational reservoirs we have within. This internal turn is the way to de-mediate the media from telling us what we need to believe, in the extreme, and to lessen the power of our favorite well-meaning pundits. We can go talk to our neighbors of all stripes, understand what they are trying to protect, and question our own thinking.

How we do that—more specific ideas may be useful—is the subject of my next post. And this is what a good coach will do with you, by the way, work your internal maps that need some refreshing and reframing.

In the meantime, keep on your own journey of new interpretations. Reflect and hurt your brain a little. It is good for you and all of us. And more specifics on the turn within methods in the next post.

If you are still interested in the examples I mentioned at the start, does the following sound like us? Let’s take one each from our big human institutions—business, education, religion, and government—and one quick look at nature while we are at it, since we depend on nature for absolutely everything human.

• The stock market soars and food insecurity for kids persists (thankfully, declining now for several years—but still at 7.1 percent or 2.7 million households, USDA stat). Economic rules are in question.
• Degrees that may or may not pay for themselves increase in cost and we have systematically closed the trade schools that were once plentiful for our wage-earning skilled craftspeople. Education rules are in question.
• Churches, like the Catholicism of my youth foremost among them but certainly Catholics are not alone, are exposed for criminal cover-ups and bring shame upon themselves.
• We watch our houses of government, the ones we created, split in half, surround themselves with different facts, and stay in their separate universes.

Tree

Source: Clipart

And from the world of Nature: we make the most beautiful documentaries on nature ever seen while plant and animal extinctions increase steadily as we watch.

Let me stop here—no need to get overly bummed out. Many boomers like me look at the world we are handing to our grandkids and even though some broad world indicators on poverty and life expectancy have improved, we apologize for the overall state of affairs we have contributed to.

So as Hudson says, turn within when the outside has much less guidance to offer.