We are the Ancestors of an Age to come.
Carolyn Buck Luce
Managing Partner @ Imaginal Labs | Strategic Thinking - Inventor of The Decade Game?
?Another summer has whizzed by. ?I am capping it off with a ten-day “Magical Mystery Nana Tour” to visit my grandchildren in New York, Boston, and New Orleans. This of course includes bearing gifts from my recent travels to Egypt, the Amazon rain forest, and sacred lands in New Mexico.
Since our trip to Egypt in May, I have been ruminating on time.? Our understanding of the past is filtered in three major ways – each of which leaves a lot of room for interpretation. The first is through the work of archeologists.??Archaeology is?the study of the human past using material remains.?Archeologists of the past search diligently for artifacts that allow them to interpret what life was like, the practices, habits, and customs of inhabitants of yesteryear.?
In Egypt, guided by Egyptologists, we travelled back in time 5000 –7000 years to make some sense as to the motivations, beliefs, and conditions of life then.? However, it was only 200 years ago, with the discovery of the Rosetta Stone (which gave us the ability to decipher hieroglyphics), that ancient life from 200 BC came into focus for the archeologists.
The second way we understand the past is through the writings of historians. It is important to keep in mind that most history that is widely accepted as truth was written by the victors.? This dramatically imperfect and biased method was evident to me in my travels into the Amazon Rain Forest this summer.
As part of the coaching program I co-lead with Lynne Twist and Sara Vetter, The Remarkable Women’s Journey , we visited with communities of the Sapara and Achuar nations. The interpreters of time in these communities are their elders and Shamans. History has been passed down through their dreams, oral prophecies, and the spirits of the ancestors.? Time is measured in cycles of 500 years, called “pachakuti”.?? According to their understanding, we are just completing a 500-year cycle that the shamans called the era of chaos.? Not surprisingly, this era coincided with the arrival of the Spaniards to the North and South American continents.? Much of their cultural heritage, language, and knowledge of the forest did not make it into history books of the conquistadors and missionaries.
The third way is more personal to each of us.? We view the past through the filter of the stories we tell ourselves – or are told to us about us – which we believe.? The stories of “I am not enough” or “I am too much”.? Or the stories of what we each decided it meant to be a “good boy” or “good girl”.? Or the stories of what is necessary to be loved, liked, approved of and safe. ?However, as I have explained in a previous EPIC! rule, these stories are just fiction.?They are the (his)story we made up to make sense of the world.?? The past is just the story we decided to tell ourselves.
History is important.? It informs how we got here. ?It is a form of time travel. So why not travel to the future and choose the best possible story we can imagine?
Time for another EPIC! rule of the game.
EPIC! Rule #15: Become an Archeologist of the Future – the treasures are waiting to be found. ?
Let’s time travel together into the future. Imagine the most EPIC! day in the year 2033. It epitomizes all that you have worked for as a contribution to your world, your vocation, your family, your self.? You feel an incredible sense of satisfaction and accomplishment for all the experiences, knowledge and relationships that you have intentionally built. ? You are amazed at the transformation that has happened in you and around you. ?This transformation would have been unthinkable in 2023.
How could you describe this day?? What happened? Who are you with? Who reached out to you? How do you feel? How are you showing up differently with the people you love? How are they showing up differently with you? What impacts are you celebrating? How has the world changed? ?What were the critical milestones along the way that dictated how you chose to invest your time, trust, treasures and talents? How many of them were unplanned, unforeseen, unpredictable in 2023?
Now - time to practice becoming the archeologist of the future. ?Choose 5 artifacts from 2033 to bring back to our time. Each artifact should carry an implicit story of turning the impossible into the possible. ?Each artifact should correspond to one of these areas of your life: ?
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These artifacts can serve as powerful totems and constant reminders for what is possible when you commit to your dreams. This is the essence of The Decade Game. ?Not only do we have the power to write and live into the best possible story. When we do, we can rewrite history.
Let me close with this reminder from the great mythologist Joseph Campbell who exhorted us to be “The ancestors of an age to come”:
“People say that what we’re all seeking is a meaning for life. I don’t think that’s what we’re really seeking. I think that what we’re seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances with our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.”? …This is a very interesting time: there are no models for anything that is going on. Everything is changing, even the law of the masculine jungle. It is a period of free fall into the future, and each has to make his or her own way. The old models are not working; the new have not yet appeared. In fact, it is we who are even now shaping the new in the shaping of our interesting lives. And that is the whole sense (in mythological terms) of the present challenge:?we are the “ancestors” of an age to come, the unwitting generators of its supporting myths, the mythic models that will inspire its lives.”?Joseph Campbell – “The Power of Myth” and “Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine”
Sending love and light,
Carolyn
P.S. ?Flying out of the Amazon jungle in a 3 passenger bush plane, I was amused to see this instruction for the pilot, “The Life Engine Depends on the Pilot’s Operations”. I couldn’t have said it better myself!
PSS. Since the New Year, I have been sharing my EPIC! Rules ?to play the game of life, your way. I have them now posted on the website if you have missed a newsletter or would like to review them. Click below and scroll down to the Rules. (And you can always buy the book!)
If you have any questions or would like to talk to me directly, please email me at [email protected] and we will set up a time.