This article, "On Becoming an Elder," was originally published in Meridians, Vol.2, Number 2, Winter 1994; this version was reprinted in the Tenth Anniversary Issue of Meridians, Meridians, Vol. 10, Winter/Spring 2003, pp. 54-57. [I here pay tribute to Meridian editor and my longtime friend, Mary Ellen Zorbaugh. JGS]

     A good friend, Fritz Smith, was turning 60. "How are you feeling about this?" I asked.  "Well," he replied, "At first, I thought of myself becoming old.  Then I remembered that, as an elder, I am just a beginner."

         "As an elder, I am just a beginner."  What a wonderful sentiment!  And a sign of hope to all of us who have entered the second half of our lives.  Yet there is more.  Our culture itself is only a beginner at the task of understanding and living the possibilities of elderhood.  We are a young culture, a youth culture, a future-oriented culture.  We are offered many maps to find success in the first half of life.  We face a void when it comes to envisioning and navigating the second half of life.  The advice we get often says: "Repeat the first half of life once again.  Play the same music from the top.  Da capo.  One more time."

         What are the lyrics of this melody?   Become physically fit.  Take a lover.  Find a new spouse (perhaps a "trophy wife or husband.")  Start a new career or business.  Seek adventure.  Stay young.  Begin again.

         Sound good?  Some of it does. And advertising does its share to keep the dream alive.  What we do not notice is this:  we are assuming that the task of the second half of life is simply to repeat the task of the first half.  But wait: doesn't the second half of life have a life and task of its own?   I believe that it does.  And so do most of the wisdom traditions of humankind.

     For some hints about that task, let's look at the stages of life as they appeared in ancient India.

     First, one is a student.  This is a time of preparation -- a time to receive the teachings, to learn what one's society requires, to apprentice and gain competencies, to dicover how to take one's place in society and make a contribution.

    Then, one becomes a householder.  In the traditional sense, the householder was engaged in the task of raising children.  Yet I see the term "householder" in a wider sense.  One can be a householder whether owning a house or not, whether relating to the same or opposite sex, whether choosing to have biological children or not.  The Householder phase calls adults to take their place in society and nurture the circle given to their care.  Becoming a householder implies an awareness of standing between generations -- honoring "the ancestors" and caring for "the children."

    The next stage is to become a forest-dweller. According to the traditional ideal, when one's own children were grown, one could go into the forest and focus on spiritual development.  This ascetic tradition is, I think, but one response to a deep and universal urge -- a call to return to fundamental realities, to simplify one's life, to retouch the earth, to let go of restrictive dualisms and gain a new freedom.

    In the final stage, most rare of all, we are offered the image of the sage. The sage is one who knows with compassion what is truly real, who lives the interdependency of all things, and who exhibits loving-kindness, compassion, sympathetic joy and peace in endlessly unpredictable ways.

    Notice that four tasks are presented.  Two of these tasks focus on the first half of life: student and householder.  Two tasks focus the second half: forest dweller and sage.  What might this mean for our time?  The chart below shows how I see it  from a five element perspective.(1)

                                                     YOUTH                                                     ELDER
                                                         Spring                                                   Late Summer
 

                                                           CHILD                                             SAGE
                                                               Winter                                            Autumn
 
 

            In the first half of life, we seek to be "somebody," to take our place in the world.  Freud remarked that maturity  (fulfillment of the "householder" phase) consists in the ability to love and to work.  Love emphasizes openness and intimacy. Work emphasizes persistence and production. These are the focus of the householder phase.

         The first initiation is from youth (student, vision quester) to adult (householder).  It is moving "apart from" family of origin and becoming "a part of" the larger community, often represented by becoming responsive to and responsible for one's own "family" (however that family may be defined). (2)

         The first initiation -- to take one's place in society -- is a work of the daytime of life.  Mythically, adulthood is imaged as the summer sun.  So the first initation can be thought of as an initation through fire.

         In the second half of life, we seek to be "nobody/everybody" -- to become a part of a much greater mosaic --and to enter into the phases of forest dweller and sage.  As Jung recognized, the deepest issues of the second half of life are "spiritual" in nature.  Here again, as in earlier transitions, there's a sense in which we move "apart from" the conventions of society.  A wonderful older English women, Charity James, once told me she had learned that "one still has to snap one's garter from time to time." A wonderful older man, Robert Bly, has his own earthy ways to poke fun at conventions in order to liberate folks for a deeper life.  I feel that, in the second initation, one moves "apart from" society as a conventionally defined "game" in order to become "a part of" something much larger  -- one develops a much larger sense of self, a much deeper sense of solidarity with all humans and indeed with the entire web of life.

        Because this is the work of the evening and moves toward the deep waters, the second initiation can be thought of as the "night journey" or "sea journey."  Here, we move by moonlight.

         Allan Chinen, in his work on fairy tales, captures some of the differences between these two passages.  He writes: "The first journey is that of youth when [heroes and heroines] voluntarily embark upon a quest for fame and fortune through adventure and action.  The second journey is involuntary, full of suffering and ultimately leads to wisdom rather than glory or wealth."(3)

         I believe, however, that the second journey can also be voluntary.  We can undertake the second part of life with eyes and heart open.  In fact, there are compelling reasons to embark on such a journey.

The Pressing Need for Elders

         We need mature adults to mentor the young through the first initation.  Let us call this type of mentoring: "parently mentoring" (whether it takes place in the family or the school or the workplace).  The point of such mentoring is to help the young prepare to enter the householder phase, to learn "how it goes in this society," to discover what it take to be successful, how to "play the game" with zest and humor, fairness and effectiveness, to uncover the satisfactions of making a contribution to life.  Such a mentor often practices "tough love."  A friend who had just retired from a successful career in business used to tell his employees: "I will never do anything to you.  I will never do anything for you.  I will be glad to work in a committed way with you."  Here speaks the mentor of the first half of life -- one who holds us to the task in its highest standards.  We need such "parently elders."

         But we also desperately need elders to do other work: to help youth "play the game" well, but also to help them gain a wide and free perspective.  And we need elders to mentor adults in the second transition.  This work I will call  "grandparently mentoring."  Such mentoring has a different purpose.  Its goal is not to help people "fit in" to the world of love and work as society defines the rules.  Rather, it serves by reminding everyone that human beings are more than any definition.

    Often the grandparently mentor will appear to love unconditionally.  Such love speaks the truth, however, and as the old Zen Masters demonstrate, will have little truck with sentimentality or phoniness.
 

Hints on the Voluntary Pursuit of Elderhood

     Becoming an elder involvesboth a nonconformity (taking the conventional societal game with a grain of salt) and a new conformity (identifying with something more universal -- the deeply human, all our kin, life as mystery).  Let me sketch some steps for living as an elder:
 

•   Moving Round the Medicine Wheel

         The American Plains Indians think of wholeness under the image of a medicine wheel.(4)   The wheel shows four directions and four animals:  In the east, the Eagle who sees far and wide.  In the south, the Mouse who notices detail and touches the heart.  In the west, the Bear who looks inward.  In the north, the Buffalo who has the eye of wisdom.

         Each of us is born at one place on the wheel, it is said, and prefer the gift of that place.  Yet we each have latent in us all four powers.  Becoming whole means moving round the wheel, learning to understand in each of the four ways.

         Does not this prefigure what Jung says about reclaiming our shadow side?(5) In elderhood we can claim those gifts hidden in our shadow.  Perhaps we were shamed about a behavior.  We put it in our shadow and forgot that this too was a part of us.  I know a teenage boy shamed by his football friends for liking poetry.  So poetry went into his shadow.  I know a young girl shamed for wanting to play football.  So football went into her shadow.  These are "bright" shadows, not destructive.  But even when we are shamed for is destructive, wonderous impulses still may be found in the very behavior that has gone awry.  When healthy impulses are confused with unhealthy ways of acting them out, all is swept into the shadow and disowned.  To become a forest-dweller is, then, in part, to reclaim one's shadow, and with it other capacities that are in us, but at which we are not yet skilled. (6) Let the intuitive person work with clay; let the thinker learn to dance.

    From our shadow and from those parts of ourselves we ignored or denied in the first half of life, we gain new possibilities for the second half.  The Roman poet, Terrence, wrote: "I am a human being and nothing human is alien to me." Acupuncturist, Dianne Connelly says to patients: "So you show up like that too.  How wonderful!"  The initiate to elderhood can afford to loosen the bounds of society's conventions. The initiate to elderhood may even be liberated to play the fool!
 

•   Learning to let go of "being in control"

         To become a forest-dweller is to touch earth, to bring mind and body into a unity.  Practically, this means learning to let go.  Not to have to fix things -- whether ourselves or others.  The practice is one of mindfulness: simply notice life within and without, neither repressing it nor responding compulsively. All of life is there where we are.  We are always more than any identification we try on.  As the Zen tradition teaches:  "The wild geese do not intend to cast their reflection.  The water has no mind to receive their image."
 

•  Discovering the wisdom level and becoming a storyteller

         In every society, there is the surface level of life -- the level where we're "practical," where we worry about how things look, where we compare ourselves to others.   Learning to turn these surface currents to good account is part of learning to be an adult.  The elder, however, has other concerns and lives at another level.  The elder recovers the wisdom level of the culture and transmits that wisdom through myth and metaphor, song and silence, parable and teaching story.  In our kitchen hangs these cross-stitched words:

     We are simply asked to make gentle our bruised world.
      To tame its savageness; to be compassionate to all,
      including oneself.  Then, in the time left over from
      from these ministries of justice and care, to repeat
      the ancient tales and go the way of God's foolish ones.

• Discovering our kinship with all life forms and becoming a forest-dweller:

         Learning to live simply on the earth involves simplicity and  generosity, compassion and loving-kindness, humor and peace.  All of the mystics remind us: Everything is interconnected and each of us is that whole -- the whole reflected from the unique and unrepeatable person we are.  Thich Nhat Hahn is a master of bringing peace to our crazy world.  "Breathing in, I breath peace to this world; breathing out, I smile."

         All these are but hints, a finger pointing to the moon.  The Zen master Ikkyu wrote:

  We have one moon
  clear and unclouded.
  Yet we are lost
  In the darkness of the world.

 Shall we walk out into the garden -- to watch the moon, to have some tea, and to be beginners together?

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Endnotes:

(1) My thinking is also marked by work in transpersonal psychology/philosophy.  See Ken Wilber's work, especially The Atman Project (Wheaton, Ill.: Quest, 1980),  No Boundary (Boulder, Col.: Shambhala, 1981) and Up from Eden (Boulder, Co.: Ahambhala, 1983).

 (2) Much feminist literature has stressed differences, seeing separation as a male theme while empahasizing that connection and affiliation cushion the passage to adulthood for young women.  My experience with young women of college age convinces me that, though there may be differences of modality, this "apart from" to "a part of" structure applies to both genders.

 (3) See Allan Chinen, Once Upon a Midlife (Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tacher, 1992), p. 82)

 (4) See Hyemeyohst Storm, Seven Arrows (New York: Ballantine Books, 1972)

 (5) See Robert Bly, A Little Book on the Human Shadow, ed. by William Booth (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988) and Robert A. Johnson, Owning Your Own Shadow( San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1991).

 (6) Beside the shadow, Jung also speaks of the inferior function.  Reclaiming of this is another way of moving about the medicne wheel.  For Jung on the inferior function, see Marie-Louise Von Franz and James Hillman, Jung's Typology (Irving, Texas: Spring Publications, 1979).

 (7) See Frederick Franck, The Book of Angelus Selesius (New York: Random House, 1976), p. 58.

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