Two signs that we are unarguably old: our Medicare card arrived in the mail on Friday and we finally succeeded in setting up our Social Security account online. No matter how much we try to convince ourselves otherwise, all evidence proves that we're old.
So the stage is now set and on Tuesday (Monday's a holiday) we're going to tell our employer that we will be retiring effective July 1. One month notice seems more than fair. Frankly, our announcement shouldn't be a surprise to them - we haven't been secretive about our Social Security and Medicare enrollment efforts - but we still don't expect the news to go over very well. Management is narcissistic and will likely look at our decision not as a personal milestone for us, but as a betrayal and attack against them. We expect hostility and we don't anticipate being treated very kindly for the next month.
So we've been chilling out and enjoying a mellow, meditative three-day weekend to prepare ourselves for the anticipated tempest. As part of that meditative preparation, we consulted the I Ching today for some oracular advice on how to proceed.
Before getting to that, though, let us remind you that we are rational, scientific-thinking people here, and we don't believe that there's anything "magical" about the I Ching, or that some divine force or other agency guides the I Ching to provide the "right" advice to the seeker. Rather, we feel that the I Ching is a good and wise compendium of ancient wisdom and thinking, and that any one of the 64 hexagrams will provide useful advice at any time if one's mind is open. There's nothing supernatural or mystical about the text or the various methods used to select a hexagram, from yarrow sticks to tossing coins (we prefer to use online random-line generators to select the hexagram), but allowing a random process to select one out of the 64 available hexagrams encourages one to concentrate on that one specific bit of wisdom. To us, the "magic" of the I Ching is not in the text or in the action of selecting a hexagram, but actually occurs when one applies the advice of any given hexagram to one's own situation. In other words, the "sage" is not the text or the ancient author of the text - you are the sage when you apply the ancient wisdom to your modern life.
So no spooky magic here. We simply used the line-by-line hexagram generator at Eclectic Energies to draw our hexagram, and the first three lines of the lower trigram were all open, the trigram for Earth, fitting for us geologists. The upper three lines were open, closed, and open - the trigram for Water. Water above, Earth below - the hexagram Bĭ, variously translated as "seeking union," "joining," and "unity."
Well, that hardly seems appropriate, as we're looking to end a union and dissolve an association, not enlist or join anything. But that's why we like using random selection methods to derive a hexagram - if we were scouring the book for advice, our mind would certainly have skipped past Bĭ and we would not have considered its advice.
The texts on Bĭ talk about how water pools together over the earth and therefore how joining together and uniting in an effort should be a natural goal for a society and its people. But there are warnings - the two lower lines of our hexagram are moving lines, the yin becoming yang. The first (bottom) line urges the seeker to associate with those who can be trusted, and our experience has taught us that our employer is not a person who can be trusted to keep our best interests in mind. The second line goes so far as to suggest associating with one's own inner self. We've talked about ourselves in the first-person plural for awhile now and consider ourselves to be a number of different people depending on the situation and from whose perspective we are being perceived (we are legion). And our move toward retirement is nothing if not depending upon ourselves for our own care and wellbeing.
But the topmost sixth line is also a moving line and carries the strongest warning of all - associating with someone out of confusion doesn't go well. If a person cannot be relied upon to stay until things are finished, one cannot expect good things from the relationship. Joining without a leader results in misfortune, and one text goes so far as to saying that seeking union and attachment without trust will lead to evil.
Life is always changing and conditions are always transitory. This is as true of the I Ching's hexagrams as of anything else. All those moving lines indicate that Bĭ is in the process of changing, and by substituting the moving open lines to closed lines produces a new hexagram, Zhōng Fú, sincerity, or inner trust in oneself. The hexagram indicates that with self-confidence things will go well, and that this is a good moment for big undertakings. It advises us to keep going on.
So basically, our interpretation of the I Ching's advice is that we should transition away from a mistaken association with those that we do cannot trust, and that this is an auspicious time for a move toward self-determination and self-reliance. Further, considering Bĭ's imagery of pooling water as an analogue for cooperation and enjoining, by leaving the dog-eat-dog rat race of competitive corporate employment, where it's every man (or woman) for him (her) self, and relying instead on our own savings and what passes for the social safety net in American life, we will be joining the pool of other retirees and Medicare and Social Security beneficiaries.
In the movie The Matrix, Neo is told that what The Oracle tells you is not necessarily true or not, but is exactly what you need to hear at that moment to do what is necessary. Similarly, whether our interpretation of the I Ching, Bĭ and Zhōng Fú are "correct" or not is irrelevant - it is what we need to tell ourselves to prepare us for the next transition in our life.
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