English Social Sciences Other

Dear colleagues,
I was wondering about the meaning of “truly parallel to” in the context below. It’s in the last section of the passage….
Thank you so much for your help!
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At home and during our early years of education, we build the foundation for a shared mental construction of reality as our brains are molded by the messages we receive about the nature of the world. This “home life” may also be a metaphorical business as usual (BAU) developmental phase for our current state of cultural evolution. BAU is home base for both children and adults. Adolescence may be that window of opportunity for letting go of the familiarity of home, for us individually, and of the familiarity of BAU, for us collectively. In our first dozen or so years of life, we learn how the world is and what knowledge and skills we need to survive. Adolescence, in preparing us to leave the familiarity of home, offers us a chance to rethink what has meaning in life and to imagine how the world can be and how we think it should be.

Then we leave home. This moment in life – leaving home – presents us with a deep challenge: to try to survive based on skills learned from home life, yet on our own, away from home base, but with our peers – a world that may require much more than our homegrown learnings. For humanity, the metaphoric notion of leaving home might require a similar set of skills beyond BAU, a new way to perceive that may invite us both to unlearn our home-base learnings of BAU and to learn anew with a wider lens on reality.

If this proposal of seeing the transformation of adolescence *** as truly parallel to *** what is now challenging us as a species is useful, what can we do to remodel our selves to handle these contemporary challenges well and cultivate not only resilience but also a regenerative way of living? Can we harness the ESSENCE – as a developing human family – to have the emotional spark and passion, the social engagement and connection, the novelty-seeking and courage, and the creative exploration and imagination to move beyond BAU and create the world our intuition and wisdom deeply know we need?