Elders
Many of you know that I have living grandparents, Irish-descended lifetime citizens of New York City, who for reasons both chance and choice never entered the space of computers, smartphones or the internet. Eileen and Tom, the pitch of whose life, the jewel of their presence, love for one another and devotion to family, city and culture, has quenched in me, all my life, something for which I have no name. Through them I have never known thirst.
Mary Oliver wrote of the phrase “inherited responsibility” in Winter Hours - spoken by Gloria Vanderbilt Whitney’s granddaughter in a speech she attended, which upon hearing, Mary ‘slipped this phrase from the air and put it in her own pocket!’.
For my grandparents example, I feel similar “responsibility”. We who have inherited not measurable wealth but, (we all do who notice), the immeasurable fund of tendernesses, traditions, and feelings which we wish to pay forward bear the great gift of sewing splendor into the world. The great ones (for me, feelings, but you no doubt have your own impulse of the important) have shown me the praise inside a glance, how to think (less), and why to exist (mostly only) to care for the good.
From my grandparents’ example I hope to be inseparable, and forever very, very grateful. I go nowhere and arrive nowhere without them. With them I live my life, enter the event, pray the prayer, and keep the hour as it slips away. I do not accomplish this by myself, by worried effort, but with this innumerable, fortifying company; bright and everlasting stars in the heaven of my heart.
At the threshold of their nonagenarian mantle, they are, individually and together translucent, absolute mass.
It is this quality of presence I hope shall anchor this piece of writing as it anchors all the roots of my life. This is written in its honor.
Whenever a mind is simple, and receives a divine wisdom, old things pass away, —means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into present hour. All things are made sacred by relation to it, —one as much as another. All things are dissolved to their center by their cause, and, in the universal miracle, petty and particular miracles, disappear. If, therefore a man claims to know and speak of God, and carries you backward to the phraseology of some old moldered nation in another country, in another world, believe him not. Is the acorn better than the oak which is its fullness and completion?
This was Ralph Waldo Emerson in his essay, Self Reliance. His prolific sanity has held me steady to truth for a long time now. I return to him for anchor and orientation almost every day. Sharing his wisdom, another elder of this piece, guides us as the accrual of a mountain peak. I sprinkle him throughout in hope of imbuing our climb with the wonder of a high place.
I. Stabilization Through Exquisite Presence
Imagine our world returns to sacred rhythm and relational primacy, rather simply?
We know how. We have done this before, and for a long, long time. The why is intrinsic in our recognition of ease, goodness and its familiarity that is far truer than the world we know today. We have only for a moment forgotten. And, we are already remembering.
Our economies are returned to increase on elegance and service to place, and to one another.
Success means unity of personal character. The results look like community beauty, shared and celebrated as both cause and effect.
Relational literacy and presence replaces medicine and therapy. This is the choreography of unity, and it is practiced on the dance floor of life which looks like morning walks with kin and Saturday evening socials where the band plays and a wooden square at the center of the grass beckons you to wiggle and twirl, because this is where you belong.
Mutual recognition and interdependence upon one another’s gifts obviates the impulse for wealth accumulation or any stockpiling at all. Just as it does now, and always has, we recognize with bright lights the reality that the world runs on anonymous acts of generosity, goodwill, attraction and know-how.
A man on a bench, at any age, and for good reason, is recognized for reading The Treasure Seekers to a group of children. The heresy of what we used to call a TED Talk is as alien as a UFO.
Is this old or new? The oak or the acorn?
II. Recalling Elderhood
“Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement.” -J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring
In this glistening consonant line, Gandalf begins to assist Frodo’s crucial embodiment of mercy, seen as all who play hold a role for fate’s great end.
Elderhood as I have experienced it through my grandparents, and the many elders who have befriended me in my adopted home on Maui, seems to bear the same trademark: it is the magic of metabolized life experience which is embodied and shared generously through storytelling and perfected presence. All of them are merciful people as they have been beneficiaries of its grace.
These high expressions seem universally to bear also these trademarks:
· transmission (just being near them has an “effect”)
· humility,
· humor,
· serenity,
and
· a strong impulse to assist with a marked absence of control (much like a midwife, but unlike an obstetrician).
Noticeably absent from my grandparents and most of the Hawaiian elder community, are these lower expressions which persist in my professional life:
· being remembered means more than just remembering
· control is not imbued with meaning
· there is moralistic or self-referential authority at the expense of cultural or community renewal
· the amassing of power, status and wealth occurs to the exclusion of others, especially the weak and the young
· there is refusal (fear) of moving beyond former identities into deeper selfhood and service
My sense is that if we can learn, really learn, to honor the higher qualities, and build into our systems subversions to our impulse of the lower, we’ll naturally reveal the true technology of human life: that which permits the stabilization of the old new world we’d all rather live in and are beginning to remember.
III. Incorruptibility
Momentarily, we live in an age where we equate experience, or worse - success, with only algorithmically acceptable content.
This means that “successful” elders now become speakers or brands rather than stabilizing presences. These “successful” modern elders are not bad people - but they are coaxed to follow bad rules. The rules themselves deny true eldership because they deny presence.
This means we live in a time without elders. And a culture without elders becomes a culture without time.
So bereft do we feel without this quality, remaining perpetually adolescent and future-obsessed without sharing generously and folding in articles of the past, we corrupt our roots.
Elderhood cannot exist under the pressure of performance. It must be a consciousness act - an ability chiefly to hold the arc of memory with honor, spaciousness, and uncontrived choice.
Such an arc holds what was, and what may still be, what must be buried, what can born anew, and implicit instruction for how to raise novelty in the dignity of the gifts it bears, while pressing firmly into its character its irresistible duty to the greater good.
“We carry in memory important anecdotes, and have lost all clue to the author from whom we had them. We have a heroic speech from Rome or Greece, but cannot fix it on the man who said it. We have an admirable line worthy of Horace, ever and anon resounding in our mind’s ear, but have searched all probable and improbable books for it in vain. We consult the reading men: but, strangely enough, they who know everything know not this. But especially we have a certain insulated thought, which haunts us, but remains insulated and barren. Well, there is nothing for all this but patience and time. Time, yes, that is the finder, the unweariable explorer, not subject to causalities, omniscient at last.”
This was Mr. Emerson in an essay on Old Age written in 1862.
IV: Case Study: Elders as Brands & Elders as Bridges
Coach K and the Slip of Elderhood
I am the grateful member of numerous professional alumni associations. One such alumni association, newly born, a few weeks ago announced its first marquee community event: a speaker. Michael William Krzyzewski, affectionately and well-known as “Coach K” of the celebrated Duke Blue Devils.
At his best, Coach K embodies elderhood through his marked presence, threads woven through long years in the colors of precision and skill. His coaching of the 2008 US Olympic “Redeem Team” displayed him brilliantly supersede the tradition of authoritarian control into a flight of elegant cohesion-by-trust. He created of this team a vessel. A vessel sturdy enough to cull and contain all the star power that included even Kobe and LeBron, never obscuring their individual radiance but launching them collectively to orbit a greater and more powerful whole and luminous space.
In this context, Coach K is a magical producer of music. His players often speak of his eyes - steady, directed and filled to the brim with belief. This kind of embodiment, particularly in one’s gaze, is how a person with deep embodiment and cultivated intention holds the balance of a whole room: they conduct it in the key of reverence.
Coach K as Diagnostic
But, Coach K in all his well-woven glory still casts a wide shadow, as too many notable elders of our past have been condemned to do.
This shadow is not their own but an outline of an institutional culture which rewards legacy (being remembered) more than lineage (remembering). Once an elder’s success is measured by trophies, book deals and speaking fees, the currency of their wisdom is diluted by its very measurability. He is denied his presence as bridge and forced to dance on a stage as brand.
Being a good elder, he does as he is asked. Coach K, and elders like him, are not un-wise. But these elders are without a container through which their wisdom may breathe with grace back into life.
The asymmetry of a brand relative to a bridge is severe. Fortunately, its presence is a magic all its own - he stands as the mortar of identification. When an elder’s presence loses the quality of kinship for those in their reach, what occurs is extraction at the glamorous Capote-esque masquerade ball of inspiration for hire. Here time stands frozen, unrenewed, casting a dim but usable light.
Aspirational Worship ≠ Community Cultivation
The nature of glamour is distraction. In the context of magic, its etymology of Norse origin refers to scholarship of the occult. Glamour is a spell, not generous, which creates an illusion, altering how something or someone is perceived by others. ‘Sage on a Stage’ phenomena are the psychological equivalent of touching the hem of Madonna’s dress at a concert expecting some of the magic to rub off. Such illusions, at scale, produce intellects estranged from their own inherent capabilities. These frozen, cleft minds learn to rent power from avatars of perceived status divorcing themselves by rote from a Gandalf-sized sphere of fate.
This sentiment was wrapped in care and expressed to the leaders of my alumni association and met with polite disregard. It is a challenging task indeed for which to take collective responsibility, because we thirst so. And for this great thirst, in spite of its honor, we have learned shame.
Because the soul is progressive, it never quite repeats itself, but in every act attempts the production of a new and fairer whole. This appears in works both of the useful and the fine arts, if we employ the popular distinction of works according to their aim either at use or beauty. Thus in our fine arts, not imitation but creation is the aim. In landscapes the painter should give the suggestion of a fairer creation that we know. The details, the prose of nature he should omit and give us only the spirit and splendor.
This is our broad, steadying Emerson speaking to us through a piece simply entitled Art honoring pure and infinite wholeness.
Gandalf and The Elder as Bridge Through Time
The antidote to shame, many of us are remembering, is belonging. Another name, wholeness.
One of the great literary gifts of my year has been the gift of entry into the world of J.R.R. Tolkien. His is an immense world of complexity, anchored in encompassing meaning and interspecies belonging.
Tolkien gifted us one of the most beloved elder characters in literary memory: Gandalf. And he is beloved to me.
Gandalf does not have best and worst expressions, of course. He is a character of fantasy fiction, thus perfected.
But in his perfection, he serves the great duty of illustration. For me, (what is he to you, gentle reader?) he illustrates possibility. Gandalf’s essence, for me, is revelation. He arrives as the plot thickens and all of his power and magic rest in spare and repeated gestures:
· He refuses glory by virtue of existing before the fall of man, betwixt the elves and the dwarves, as friend to hobbits, before the dawn of veneration.
· He inspires through humility, with his staff, which faithfully sustains his vulnerability, which tunes. Placidly.
· His presence is a portal as his company folds time into potential with and through him body and soul.
When Gandalf the Gray falls in Moria and later returns in Fangorn Forest as the White, he embodies the great alchemy of elderhood: his willingness to die into a more capacious self for the purpose of continuance.
With such mythic literacy gifted to us by another great elder, Tolkien himself, we are sunk into our ancient memories of liberation. We remember Gandalf even more than we love him. Gandalf does not retire, he resurrects. His was an act of generosity and choice to the mission.
Gandalf’s power is the child of epochs of apprenticeship to uncertainty, loss, and the intelligence of time itself. Gandalf walks as and beside the vulnerable, in trust. Gandalf entrusts the fate of all Middle Earth to three small, frightened beings who do not yet know their power, whose odds are stacked against, but are stewarded with no less reverence and indispensable commitment. The task is the greater.
“When virtue is in presence, all subordinate powers sleep”.
This is Mr. Emerson in his essay, Experience, with a lightning bolt which has served me equally as engine and candle in moments of darkness and light.
A Picture of Resurrection: Coach K Spans to Gandalf
Where Coach K’s legacy is relegated a pink slip of performance, whose memory is curated within a closed loop of elite selection, sponsor money accompanied by two beggars named metric and fee, Gandalf the everlasting was made so inseparable from nothing other than his service to life.
In a stroke of redemption from the lower to the higher, here is a prayer:
May Coach K be passed through the crucibles of dominance, strategy, and the refinement of technique in simulated spaces. May his experience be resurrected whole, into a field of rough proximity, to the relief of only two chores: awakening the latent possibility of the small weak, and a chosen, artful disappearance once this small thing shines; ovation be that being only.
May the rules, and clocks, and contracts perish into consequences of shadow with the endurance of hope shined through prolonged and unimaginable darkness. May the translucence of presence be generated through bearing alone; bent toward wholeness through fellowship.
May the glory of elderhood be his resurrection from initiate to initiator.
As elder, now all of him whole, be moved with honor by his people from stage to road, or his own dining table with the leaves added. May his walks and meals be taken in reverence to vulnerability, his own and ours together, both the possibility and necessity they command exalted.
We acknowledge solemnly in grace that wisdom cannot be performed by any of us; its only path is through us, renewed, that it be delivered back to itself. Its truer name is life.
“If we look into the eyes of the youngest person we sometimes discover that here is one who knows already what you would go about with much pains to teach him; there is that in him which is the ancestor of all around him: which fact the Indian Vedas express when they say, “He that can discriminate is the father of his father.” And in our old British legends of Arthur and the Round Table, his friend and counsellor, Merlin the Wise, is a babe found exposed in a basket by the river-side, and, though an infant of only a few days, speaks articulately to those who discover him, tells his name and history, and presently foretells the fate of the by-standers. Wherever there is power, there is age. Don’t be deceived by dimples and curls. I tell you that babe is a thousand years old. Time is indeed the theatre and seat of illusion: nothing is so ductile and elastic.” says Emerson, again in Old Age.
V. The Essence of Age
I dedicated this piece to my grandparents, true Elders by every meaningful measure. But my dedication would be incomplete if not extended to the wisdom of the young people - the many, many of you gentle readers - who teach me every day, who inspire me with your courageous acts, your clever expressions, and your will to continuance.
Especially in this time, but for a long time now (maybe for always) youth has been made suspect. While it is indeed raw, I have always felt that signals its proximity to the root.
I am young to be a coach, having begun this work at only 34 years old, mostly lacking in gray hair, though I have acquired more, and having been, at different times, by myself and the world, celebrated and refuted. But very slowly, and indeed variably, my forsakenness lifts to reveal, as Gerald Manley Hopkins wrote “a very, very violet sweet” God who has made me who I am. In these moments, I ask then who am I to deny perhaps not what I know, (because, really, who could possibly Know?) but at least what I sense, what I feel.
Elderhood, I am learning, is less a demographic and greater a state of fine organization, available at any age and perhaps all the more readily to the young.
Emerson describes the soul of a poet as “has come to ripeness of thought, she detaches and sends away from it its poems or songs —a fearless, sleepless, deathless progeny, which is not exposed to the accidents of the weary kingdom of time: a fearless, vivacious offspring, clad with wings (such was the virtue of the soul out of which they came) which carry them fast and far, and infix them irrecoverably into the hearts of men.” She who, much like a child, possesses a quality of existence outside of time, sits in the parlor of truth.
I would say that there exist a thousand unbreakable links between each of us and all existence, and that our dignity and our chances, young and old, are one. The farthest star and the reefs at the bottom of our oceans encircle us; a family. Fire, the wheel, the book, speech itself are our oldest and best technologies - nothing yet has superseded their utility; new things have only troubled our ability to see this.
The iatrogenics of the soul, the effects of over-invention and under-eldered witness: depression, isolation, autoimmune, etc. are feedback from disconnection.
Their medicine, offered to us through every ever baby born is touch, rhythm, crying, sharing, storytelling, wonder at nature, and sleep. Holding. And being held. These are, all at once, celebration and technology for the gift of existence.
Our future does not rest in the hands of the fastest or the most liked, who are rarely the oldest, or the youngest, but is perennially promised to any who remember how to keep time with what permits more life. In nature the universal hours are counted by succeeding tribes of animals and plants, and by growth of joy on joy, said Emerson in 1844. As true today as it ever was.
There is little new to be built, but many eyes to be brightened, and one thing to remember: we are each other’s destiny.
