You Carry the Future
Jung, Rilke, and a Goodbye to 2024
Join me and
—brilliant woman and author of The New York Times Bestseller, On Our Best Behavior—for a ritual to close out 2024 and welcome in 2025. We’ll journal, we’ll consult The I Ching, we’ll contemplate the year past and the year ahead, and, yes… we’ll commiserate. What a year. Again. Next Sunday, December 29th, 10am PST | Register here.I will announce the first workshops and gatherings for 2025 in the new year—much more to come!
There is no way to wrap up a year, no way to summarize the heights, descents, and transformations we’re experiencing together and individually. I only know that in the midst of collective tumult and personal shifts, I very much feel at the confluence of last year and the one to come. Perhaps it’s anticipation, but I feel the tension of the future just under my skin.
I’ve been reflecting on Jung’s Red Book yet again, a text that I’ve turned to repeatedly when the social fabric seems to be testing us, pushing us towards greater creativity and consciousness alongside a profound sense of social urgency.
(Would you be interested in studying The Red Book with me in 2025? Drop a comment below.)
I searched for the exact lines of one favorite section in which Jung contemplates our relationship to “what is to come.” This is what he wrote:
Protect the riddles, bear them in your heart, warm them, be pregnant with them. Thus you carry the future. The tension of the future is unbearable in us. It must break through narrow cracks, it must force new ways. You want to cast off the burden, you want to escape the inescapable. Running away is deception and detour. Shut your eyes so that you do not see the manifold, the outwardly plural, the tearing away and the tempting. There is only one way and that is your way.1
These lines have always moved me and struck me as uncannily similar to something Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in the same era in correspondence, as captured in Letters to a Young Poet.
I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.2
As the future simmers and I mull the riddles and questions—without yet knowing how to summarize a thing—I’ve looked through my writing over the course of 2024. I was glad to review what I’ve explored in this space, and selected a piece from each month to share again as an homage to the year.
What questions are you holding, personally or collectively, for the coming year?
January:
“How do you both feel about becoming an adult someday?” I asked them, together. “Great!” my tiny 10-year-old nephew responded. He elaborated easily that adulthood would give him the freedom he craved. My younger nephew, meanwhile, had groaned and made a grossed-out face. He may have even said “Gross.” I asked him a few more questions too and it was clear that for him, adulthood did not indicate freedom but, quite the contrary, it seems to be a place where freedom shrivels and dies, a kind of hell you never want to approach if it can be avoided.
Honestly, I think they both have a point.
February:
The #metoo movement helped to spread a sorely needed understanding that some women who might be easily dismissed as “not-quite-right” are the canaries in the coal mine for publicly wonderful, but privately dangerous men. What looks to originate in the woman may not, in fact, be her character on display but his, or ours, collectively.
March:
I wrote in my book about the occasional need to deconstruct a former life to make space for the new. I wanted to normalize descents for people in their 20s and 30s in a time of life when everyone is expecting you to be on the ascent. What are you looking forward to? What are your goals? What’s next?
But often, to clarify our paths and make sure we’re on track, we need to take a step backward. We need to take a survey of where we’re at and make sure we’re bringing all of our skills and self to bear. We need to confirm that we’re headed in the direction that feels right for us, and not just right for other people. We might need to stumble over and over to find our footing.
April:
I know many people feel squeamish when a friend says, “I had the weirdest dream last night…”. Others likely pressed delete the second they saw “dream” in the subject line above. This aspect of our lives—something that most of us experience every night—is often viewed with about as much respect as a “Live, Laugh, Love” refrigerator magnet. Rather than being understood as providing insight into our psychological anatomy, dreams are casually tossed aside as banal nonsense that no self-respecting, intelligent person could believe has value.
May:
No person is yet a psychological adult or can be truly engaged in an ethical life by imitating someone else’s existence, by spending it casting judgment on others, or by living in perpetual shame for the life they hope to live. While not always righteously expressed, living without a genuine sense of inner authority means that one is always seeking approval or celebration from the outside.
June:
When I first opened my private practice, I repeated that line over and over to myself: If you build it, they will come. I needed to believe that the leap of faith I was taking was going to pay off. A bit of synchronicity had delivered me an ideal, inexpensive office before I’d even begun looking. It felt like the right container in which to grow as a clinician and support my clients. That word “container” is one we use a lot in the world of psychotherapy or psychoanalysis. The vulnerable work of therapeutic intimacy struggles to take root without the right conditions. Safety and security. Quiet. A clear sense of privacy.
July:
Early in my research, I noted a crucial line in a relatively obscure series of lectures—The Vision Seminars—that Jung delivered in the early 1930s. He declared that a brilliant patient of his, a twenty-eight-year-old woman, had a benevolent fate because she was experiencing a crisis of individuation far earlier in life than typically observed.
August:
As a purported defender of women, author and co-host of the This Jungian Life podcast, Lisa Marchiano, has remarkably regressive views about what it means to be a woman, and about gender in general. She has a long track record of inflammatory statements with which the trans community is painfully familiar, and this article is no exception. Full of casual statements and a bandied-about “just saying” tone, the piece overall serves to gaslight readers. She’s not saying that women must have children, she’s merely implying it over and over again. Taken as a whole, the article paints an antiquated picture of womanhood: to be on one’s true path as a woman is to bear children in one’s womb.
September:
Therapy is not a privilege. Nor is it an inherently scarce resource. In a capitalist, white supremacist, patriarchal culture, mental health is painted with the same brush that deems anything good for us as indulgent. But mental and physical healthcare is part of any sane, healthy society, like food, housing, clean water, access to nature, freedom from violence, and connection with others. Today, in America, mental healthcare is out of reach for most people because of a fractured healthcare system and persistent, shady corporate practices that are against federal law.
October:
How tragic for men to imagine that when they come home, the "right” response from their family is to cower in fear, for the announcement of “Daddy’s home” to evoke not smiles and celebration but abject terror instead.
How truly miserable it must be for a man to imagine that his presence within his own home, among his own family, does not inspire love and respect but hatred and loathing.
November:
Know who you are.
Know who you are.
Know who you are.
This is the drum I’ve been beating for many years now, trying to convey how critical genuine self-knowledge is for a healthy society. Before we can be citizens, we have to become individuals.
Coming up:
Register here for a special two-hour end-of-year ritual on Sunday, December 29th, at 10 am PST | 1pm EST | 6pm GMT
I’m Satya Doyle Byock, psychotherapist, author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood, director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies, and co-host of a podcast on Jung’s Red Book. My work has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Oprah Daily, NPR, The BBC, Literary Hub, The Tamron Hall Show, and on podcasts such as Apple News in Conversation and The Joseph Campbell Foundation Podcast. All links can be found here.
Carl Jung, The Red Book Reader, p. 384
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
I’d like to continue making space for the aspects within myself that I’ve othered, hopefully reducing the impulse to other people with whom I don’t agree. Studying The Red Book in conjunction with more active imagination experiences would be lovely!
I was just given a copy of the Red Book, by the son of a dear friend, who recently died, and wanted her copy to go to me. I would appreciate the opportunity of studying it. Thank you.