Time to let go?

My father is dying. Not quite dead yet, but definitely closer than most of us.

Those of us who love him will miss him badly, but we can hardly complain. He’s 90 years and has had a good innings. As a family, we’ve got to the point of acceptance and had hoped he might die a peaceful death at home. This has proved a lot harder to arrange than we expected. The health service has several times stepped in to save him and he is now being kept artificially alive, in hospital on a drip and antibiotics. For whose benefit, we’re not quite sure.

Our society, too, is dying, or at least society as we know it in the west. It has brought a lot of benefits but recently it more and more looks like a fossil fuel-powered extravaganza of consumption, restlessness, false glamour, superficial comfort, and widespread exploitation of people and planet. It’s been fun (for some) and we will miss it when its gone, but it’s time to let go and shift to a new age.

Many of us know this — perhaps, in our hearts, most of us know this. However the system, our established collective net of relationships, resists. It can’t bring itself to permit the dying of the old certainties, the old entrenched patterns, the old order. So it continues to pour energy into artificially maintaining the hollow pretence of life and health. For whose benefit, we’re not quite sure.