All things die. People. Companies. Countries. Civiliations. Planets. Stars. Yes, even you will die.
Over the past two days, I have been thinking a lot about the “lifecycle” of complex systems.
Much of this thinking has been spurred on my the reading of four books in quick succession:
Another surprising vector for this line of thinking was some dialog from Battlestar Galactica this week:
Children are born to replace their parents. For children to reach their full potential, their parents have to die.
Although I have many thoughts on the subject, the most striking thing for me is our unability to confront the inevitability of decline and fall.
It is most striking because even though I know it intellitectual, I am still very guilty of it every single day.
It can be severe emotional tax to continually remind one’s self that everything you touch, think about, hold dear will be gone; wiped clean by “… all-powerful Time which destroys all things.”
This is the stage where many of you are going to want to stop reading this post. You are compelled to stop; not to face this reality. Truth be told, I feel the same thing writing this.
But this feeling fails to take into account one important fact: things must be born to die. For everything that declines and falls there is a birth and ascendence. Our problem (at least my problem) is that we only identity with our birth, ascendence, decline and fall. As such, the latter of these two stages is very painful to contemplate.
If you take a step back and squint at the issue just right (skillful means), you can see decline and fall as a positive thing. A thing that we herald as the sign of a new birth, a new creation, something beyond, something new.
With this in mind, my thought is that we need some systematic way to deal with decline and fall. We need to confront it head on and not let it surprise us. We need to be adults about it.
Memento mori.
