In Praise of Our Elders

In most cultures around the world, the elderly are revered as sacred, valuable, wise, and even essential to a healthy society. They have lived longer than the rest of us, and therefore, have learned things we have not learned yet. Our elders have developed a special wisdom of living and by virtue of their days on earth, deserve respect for surviving the rigors of everyday life in this world. After all, we suspect they may know something we don’t, not having traveled that road yet. Fortunately for me, I grew up with my great grandparents. I remember studying my great grandmother’s hands. They were wrinkled with very thin skin, so much so that her veins stuck out. They were beautiful! My hands didn’t look like that at all. Even at such an early age, on some level I marveled at how long my grandma had to live to have hands like those! They were very special hands. They were the hands of a very old lady who had lived a long and full life. “If I’m lucky someday my hands will look like that,” I thought, holding one of her hands in mine. My great grandmother had a wrinkled face and I’m told she was about five foot three inches tall, although I remember her as a giant! She had an ancient calmness about her that cast a magical spell over whatever she was doing. I watched those hands put bread in the toaster and then spread butter on the toast and open the jam and put just right amount of jam on each piece. She always knew how to do that! I so grateful I got to spend my first five years of life with seventy-somethings! Maybe that’s why I love the elderly so much. I don’t see them as old. I see them as regular. There is something to be learned spending time with our elders as they go about their daily business of dressing, fixing meals, and taking time to sit quietly to watch the sun come up or to listen to the birds in the trees. Fixing a nice simple lunch and taking a short nap afterwards is an absolutely beautiful way to prepare oneself for an afternoon to do nothing except enjoy being alive. For seventy-somethings and little boys, it seemed like the good life! None of us do that anymore. Who has the time? We’re all too busy with important stuff. We can’t be sitting around wasting time doing nothing! Now we have to take classes to learn how to let go and do nothing. A lot of my friends now are seventy, eighty, or even ninety-somethings! Far from being old, they have more life in them than I do. I can only hope to have that kind of energy if by some chance I manage to make it to their age. I’ve studied these folks and find they all have one thing in common: on some level they’ve come to realize that their best days are ahead of them! They are just now starting to deliver on the gifts they are intended to give to the world and they give them with joy. They aren’t getting older at all-they’re all getting better at living and they have so much experience. Being a sixty something is kind of an in-betweener-not young anymore and not really old either. Not to take anything at all away from the young, but being twenty, thirty, forty, or even fifty isn’t that hard when you see it in the rearview mirror. Like my friend Bob told me once, “You’re not a real stud until you turn seventy!” That was ten years ago. I’m starting to understand what he was talking about. I hope I can measure up someday and can’t wait for those hands like my great grandma’s!