After witnessing the devastation of society following World War I, W. B. Yeats lamented that “things fall apart; the center cannot hold.” It’s a famous line of poetry that social commentators invoke a lot these days.
But the world was always falling apart, as even the most cursory reading of history reveals. Sometimes a society’s demise came at the hands of an invading empire that wiped out government, commerce, worship, and culture. At other times, a deadly plague destroyed the known world. Or a devastating economic depression stripped people of their farms, jobs, and hopes for a future. Over the last few generations we learned to live with nuclear threats and terrorism. If we’re paying attention, we have to realize that the world as we know it is always a thread away from unraveling.
Even when we succeed in ignoring these global realities, we’re forced daily to defend ourselves against the demise of our personal worlds. We’re surrounded by marriages that crumble, companies that downsize, and diseases that rob us of loved ones. So we spend the precious few discretionary dollars and hours we have going to the gym, shopping at Whole Foods, seeing a therapist, or trying to be a monk for a day at a monastery—all in the hopes of keeping our little world together. Yet despite our best efforts to be healthy, things still fall apart.
