SENIOR LIVING: Providing a Legacy-- Path of the Sage Part Two
By FRANK KENNEY Director,
In their search to lead meaningful lives, many seniors practice ‘productive aging,’ which involves continuing to focus on remaining youthful, vigor= ous, and economically competitive with younger people.
“While productive aging propagates the image of = elders as active, engaged, and vital, ultimately it presents a rather weak and incomplete vision of life,” says author Harry Moody. “By insist= ing on the productivity of the old, we put the last stage of life on the same l= evel as the other stages. This set= s up a power struggle over who can be the most productive, a competition that the = old are doomed to lose.”
By celebrating productivity and efficiency we abandon the moral and spiritual= value of life’s last stage, stripping old age of real meaning. What we need is a wider vision of late-life productivity that includes values such as altruism, citizenship, stewardship, creativity, and the search for faith. In short, we need a spiritual vision that recognizes the value of elders’ non-economic contributions to society.
Elders provide wisdom, balanced judgment, and enduring values to a society whose moral and spiritual foundations have eroded over = the past several centuries. They serve as models for our own aging Self, enabli= ng us to embrace the movements of our own life cycle with deepening hope and faith, rather than paralyzing fear.
There are many paths that elders can take to share their wis= dom and desire to serve community= . In this week’s column we will discuss four:
v&nb= sp; Mentoring
v&nb= sp; Family Reintegration
v&nb= sp; Local Government
v&nb= sp; Land Stewardship
MENTORING: Mentoring is an ancient traditional practic=
e, and
involves imparting the wisdom of a lifetime—including the personal
attitudes, moral and ethical values, and aesthetic appreciations that
characterized them, through the development of a unique relationship, the
give-and-take of a living dialogue with a younger student or apprentice.
Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, author of “From Age-ing to Sage-ing” observes that “mentoring begins when a nat= ural unfolding takes place in the psyche when the accumulated wisdom of a lifetime reaches a state of overflow. Awakening to elderhood we pour the distillate of our lives into ot= her vessels, an act that not only sees the future, but that crowns our lives wi= th worth and nobility.”
From the dawn of human history until the modern era, e= lders passed down to succeeding generations the essential knowledge needed to rai= se children, earn a living, preserve culture, and carry on spiritual traditions. But beginni= ng with the industrial revolution, mentoring became institutionalized and bureaucratized as factory-like schools began teaching young people the specialized skills needed in an industrial society.
As the transmission of culture in every field became t= he province of schools, factories and professional elites, one on one or small group mentoring disappeared from the cultural landscape, depriving us of a source of wisdom that sustained human civilization for thousands of years.<= /p>
The restoration of mentoring as a cultural force could= go a long way in humanizing our institutions and providing the intergenerational glue to combat social problems, such as family dysfunction, drug addiction = and sexual abuse.
FAMILY INTEGRATION: By reintegrating elders into the f= amily we receive a deeper education into the meaning of the life cycle. Under our current arrangement, which banishes older people to nursing homes and retirement villages, we perpetuate the illusion that old age and death are not a part = of life. In this regard, we are = miseducating our children, cutting them off from orga= nic processes that are fundamental to the human condition. We rarely see firsthand how elders mobilize their inner resources to deal with the losses and fears that accom= pany the inevitable diminishments of the physical body. But, this is precisely the modelin= g we need in order to become fully human ourselves.
By continuing to deny this mortality, we lose our abil= ity to feel compassion for all human suffering.
LOCAL GOVERNMENT: Elders can reactivate the ancient fo=
rm of
tribal government known as the ‘council of elders.’ Functioning=
in
an advisory capacity to local governmental entities, religious congregation=
s, and
educational institutions, elders meet in council, weigh and consider issues
from the larger perspective, then make recommendations to aid legislators,
spiritual leaders, and educators in making decisions. “In these settings, elders
don’t have the last word but the deep word,” says author Jean
Houston. “Given back
ENVIRONMENTAL ADVOCACY: According to the scholar and a= uthor Thomas Berry, elders carry within themselves both the blessing and the burd= ens of the twentieth century’s love affair with technology that unwitting= ly created most of our environmental problems.
“The current generation of Elders—my
generation—needs to reflect on how our unconscious attitudes and beha=
vior
have contributed to the ecological crisis,”
“As we age, our responsibilities should not less= en but increase,” author Marty Knowlton says. “In many ways, elders are the dominant force in society. Th= ey control 75 percent of the wealth, and because they typically vote in greater numbers than younger people, they wield enormous political clout. Elders have the potential of influencing the political, economic, and cultural agendas of the future.”
It is up to us.
How involved do you want to be?&nbs=
p;
Please consider joinin=
g us
as we continue to develop the Silver City&=
nbsp;
Conscious Aging Network, also known as “