WE NEED TO CULTIVATE WISE ELDERS

"Cultivating Wise Elders

 

Written by John Welshons | |

 

 

Once when I was at a lecture, a woman approached me during the break and said, "One of our problems is we don't cultivate wise elders in this culture. When people are surrounded all their lives by the belief that old age is a time of misery, defeat, irrelevance and meaninglessness, they don't become wise as they age, they become anxious, fearful, and embittered."

 

She was absolutely right! We sometimes lose sight of the fact that our experience of life is a manifestation of the cumulative effects of culturally generated self-fulfilling prophecies. We hang on to youth because so many people have told us that youth is the best part of our life!

 

We shun aging because our lives feel so unfulfilled. We approach middle age in a panic, fearful that we have already missed the best years of our lives. We don't want to get old without ever having experienced the happiness, fulfillment, passion, and connection we expected, that were all supposed to have been a part of our youth.

 

Dr. Robert Kastenbaum, the great gerontologist, clearly understood many of the problems inherent in our culture's delusions about how to achieve happiness and fulfillment. In a 1978 article in the Gerontologist, Kastenbaum said that the "limitations and distortions of our core vision of what it means to be a person become starkly evident in old age... if to be an old person is to suffer abandonment, disappointment, and humiliation. This is not a ‘geriatric problem.' It is the disproof of our whole shaky-pudding technology, science and all. If our old people are empty, our vision of life is empty."

 

I don't know about you, but I can honestly say that my youth, especially my teenage years, was the worst time of my life. I didn't really even begin to be happy until I was in my late twenties.

 

I can also honestly say that throughout my life, some of the most interesting and delightful people I have ever known -- many of whom I have regarded as my most treasured companions, friends, and teachers -- have been people in their seventies, eighties, and nineties. They are the rare ones, the ones who haven't been seduced by our culture into thinking that they are useless or problematical simply because they are "old." "