"Natural life is the nourishing soil of the soul, anyone who fails to go along with life remains suspended, stiff and rigid in mid air. That is why so many people get wooden in old age; they look back and cling to the past, with a secret fear of death in their hearts. They withdraw from the life process, at least psychologically, and consequently remain fixed like nostalgic pillars of salt, with vivid recollections of youth but no living relation to the present."
- Carl Jung, Collected Works
Jung would consider it an episode of synchronicity, I believe, that I should pick up his book and read this paragraph first - a paragraph that seems to address my current and ongoing disillusionment directly and speaks to the core of what I feel and what I find myself going around about, again and again.
For my part, I believe in the phenomenon of synchronicity only to the degree that the world is emphatically not random; even seemingly unrelated things will rarely exhibit no correlation, and so, it should not be surprising that more things coincide, and more things rhyme, than we might perceptively expect to find.
That is not the same phenomenon that Jung was describing, but for my part, I cannot judge what happened today when I picked up his book as a case of his or mine, or something else. Or neither.
It is also possible the paragraph means less to me than I may suspect.
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