Not Age but Eldering
Boomers, Millennials, Gen X, Gen Z – I pay no attention to it, recoiling from it all. Born on the “cusp” between generational divisions, I don’t identify with either cluster on either side of the divide. It all seems to me a silly game of generational phrenology.
But I am curious about the tensions around our maturational phases, stages, and responsibilities. I am confounded by the paradoxes of ageism and gerontocracy. I watch people, especially women over fifty erased as beings of agency and sexuality. I see older people hanging on, almost manically, to youthfulness and longevity. I watch as people of all ages attempt to defy and deny the natural realities of aging, disability, and mortality. Seventy is the new fifty. And the weekly pandemic reports made sure to state what percentage of dead were already sick or old, so that no one that mattered would worry that they might be next.
The pendulum swings wildly, passing through a healthy center so briefly as to be completely imperceptible.
As I have grown older, I am less interested in generational generalizations, the biomedical implications of age, or the forestalling of these markers – and increasingly curious about eldering, - as a verb, as an action, as an essential function in healthy cultures and communities.
I don’t have many answers. Just a lot of questions:
Eldering, as I start to sketch it out in my imagination – is less a function of age, than it is a role, a position of responsibility, vulnerability, and service – simultaneously. A fifteen-year-old overseeing young siblings is serving as an elder. A person with thirty years’ experience is an elder to those with five years in the field no matter their biological age. But of course, as we age, we are increasingly likely to become the oldest, or among the oldest, in any given room.
I wonder – what would healthy eldering look like? Have I seen it? Been in its presence? Do the archetypes of age: Crones in their woodland huts, rosy-cheeked twinkly-eyed grandmothers, grand old wizards, silly old fools, addled rulers raging against the diffusion of their powers, selfish retirees wilding on cruises spending all their children’s inheritance, ancient medicine people, keepers of powerful secrets long ago dismissed or forgotten… Do these offer us guidance, warnings, pathways forward that could serve both our communities and ourselves as we age?
Can I even imagine the role I hope to inhabit for myself and those I care for?
What role does mastery and authority place in the process?
How might eldering unfold if those engaged in it didn’t have to contend with veneration or devaluation?
What if age and experience were granted an appropriate role – neither wielding too much power, nor hoarding resources on one hand, or ignored, erased, abandoned, treated as a burden on the other?
Where do I look to find the examples I am yearning to live-up to?
What experiences of eldering have I received that have demonstrated grace, dignity, vulnerability, generosity, humor and humility?
How to be patient when the young have erased, forgotten, or never heard of the traumas we have negotiated? How to take deep breaths when emerging cultural norms and evolving definitions of justice are applied to histories we lived through retroactively without names for the wounding that the young have created for us?
How do we let our music, our stories, our milestones fade away from collective memory when they feel like they just happened a moment ago?
How do we remember what we are encouraged to forget? To remember what it was like when men ruled the world so categorically, a time before words like “sexual harassment” or when “rape” meant only a violent assault by a stranger in a dark alley while wearing a too short skirt and nothing else?
How do we remember the high fever and the mysterious flu that we nursed our gay friends through with cold compresses well before anyone could be tested or declared HIV positive?
Will anyone recall what it was like in the before times, when neurodivergent kids were only bad and disruptive or bullied, or failing - and no way to name their way of being? To remember when desegregated spaces were surprising. Before internet, laptops, blogs, cellphones and before the records of our lives and terrors, traumas and celebrations could be digitized, huge aspects of daily living entirely un-googleable?
How do we remember and make good use of those memories without over-inflating them, aware that they have some pertinence to the crises we face now, but are in no way a unilateral template for the crises those younger than us are living through, and will continue to live through when we are long gone?
We have absolutely negotiated the “unprecedented” before, world changing events, and there is some value in knowing that – while remaining cognizant that they were not these unprecedented events.
Eldering, as I imagine it, knows when to keep its trap shut, knows when to speak up, knows when to assert and value itself, knows when to stop tolerating nonsense, and knows when to be patient with youngers who will learn their own hard and different lessons in their own hard and different ways.
What if we were able to feel valuable and humbled simultaneously? To tolerate the discomfort that comes with the evolution of technology, language, and justice? To allow ourselves to stumble and even fall and fail as we are exposed to new frames, new perspectives, new inventions, new discoveries – and to still do our best to embrace whatever we can begin to comprehend?
How do we offer ourselves grace, patience, time, and forgiveness when we are surrounded by young and impatient brains that can reorganize and assimilate so much faster than we can?
How do we remain confident that we can be of service, and are necessary to our communities when it can feel as though all we have seen has been dismissed as nothing to an era that sees itself as more knowing, as the champions of history?
Do we know how and when to stay silent? When to tolerate feeling distorted or mischaracterized? Or when to speak up and reign in youngers who are confidently galloping full speed toward a dangerous folly? Are we tender to their failures, remembering so many of our own?
Can we allow ourselves to be dethroned, supplanted, uprooted, and surpassed without feeling inadequate or ashamed?
Can we celebrate emerging inventions, even if we can’t understand them entirely, or don’t know if they will work better than our own?
Do we consider that healthy eldering is a fluid process, and not a fixed one – that will require us to step forward, back, and to the side all at once or at any moment?
How do we manage being fearful of becoming obsolete, left behind, and generous all at once? How do we face decline, vanishing incomes, and still share all we have to share? How do we elicit support, patience, tenderness when we can’t see, hear, remember, or manage our bodies as well as we used to without shame or terror that we will become a burden, especially when abandonment is such a legitimate threat for so many?
How do we name our current needs to those who have yet to experience them, and cannot yet imagine our experience?
How do we begin to see our role as modeling for those coming up behind us, living as examples of how to give and receive, step up and step back, speak up and shut up, learn, and teach, remember, and forget?
How do we explain to those who are excitedly developing and exerting expertise that the longer we live the less we know? How do we tolerate all that we can never understand, all that we will never know, ourselves?
I hope there are spaces between the dualities of age and eldering. I hope these archetypes exist along a continuum that we might slide back and forth along rather than fixing answers to these questions definitively.
I try to simply sit with these questions as I send adult children out into the world, as I mentor friends and colleagues significantly younger than myself, as I reach an age I spent almost a decade unsure that I would ever reach.
I try to support those older and younger than me. I try to appreciate the knowledge and wisdom of the past and the creative possibilities of the future, while negotiating the mind-boggling challenges that lie ahead of us. I dream of a re-formed community that both supports and is supported by healthy eldering.
