First off: I do not think of myself, or call myself an elder.
In my experience, most real elders don’t – at least not for a long while.
I’m 48 & still bleeding regularly.
I am certainly older than some & younger than others.
I imagine these are some of the years that, god willing, I will meet well & allow to temper me into someone who can be a good elder.
When I was young I was often considered precocious.
The curse of being called precocious is that at some point you will no longer be the youngest person (in the room, doing xyz, etc…) & if you have learned to rely on that as a badge of honor, it will hurt one day to have it no longer bestowed.
There is a point when one becomes too old to be called precocious.
Back in February I was at a gathering with childhood friends & people from the community I grew up in; some people I have known since we were babies together – now all of us are pushing 50. And one of my friends commented that we’re all too old now to be considered young for anything. He paused for a beat, reflecting, and then said, “Well, except dying. We’d still be considered young to die.” I nearly fell off my chair laughing, because it’s so true – and also that’s exactly the same dark humor as his dad.
After I wrote the piece about elders last week I realized I am almost as old as Tim was when I met him. Tim turned 70 this past December & I met him 20 years ago, which would have made him 50 at the time. I turned 48 in February.
Maybe he didn’t consider himself to be an elder then, but I did.
And relating to him in that way changed my life.
At this point in my life I consider darn near every bit of wisdom I have to be a gift bestowed.
This is not false humility in the sense that I’m pretending I didn’t do anything to ‘earn’ my wisdom. I know that the manner in which I have met my life, choices I’ve made, paths I have both taken & created for myself matter.
But, the older I get, the wider my view.
I can see now things I thought were my choices spiraled from myriad causes & conditions, known & unknown. I have planted seeds, waters, pruned, tended & harvested – but forces greater than me have grown the plants. The most consequential aspects of who I am come from the people & places that have shaped me. And most of those are a series of gifts, opportunities offered, spirals of connections that blow my mind & break my heart when I am really present to the magic of it all. Grace.
My mother is a highly social person & a real talker. It used to drive me crazy & embarrass me to no end when I was a child – how we couldn’t go anywhere without her ending up in several conversations with people she knew (we also lived in a small town), but also strangers (I wanted to crawl in a hole & die). The other day I ended up talking to an older woman who has lived in my tiny town for over 50 years. She stopped to appreciate my garden & I started asking her questions about how the town has changed in the time she’s lived here. We probably chatted for 10-15 minutes – me still in my PJs – on the sidewalk in front of my house. And as I went back inside, I thought, “I am so my mother’s daughter.”
Maybe some part of becoming an elder is no longer rejecting the parts of our parents we spent our childhood trying to outrun.
With Love,
Kendra
