ELDER EVOLUTION: CRISIS OR AWAKENING
by Rabon Saip

Elder Evolution is defined here as “conscious evolution,” an affirmation that our road ahead can be guided by a mature lust for sanity. If we accept and understand the emerging opportunities - otherwise known as crises - we can, as never before imagined, determine the world of our future. Sound too good to be true? Perhaps. But at some point soon we will most likely find ourselves in an overcrowded crucible where radical changes are no longer a matter of choice, but of desperate necessity.

In biological terms human evolution has changed little since we hunted and gathered in small, tribal groups. But, in terms of cultural evolution, we have evolved through many adaptations, many experiments, with roughly the same proportional mix of generations. The number of elders in a given society has been determined by a variety of conditions, but most important is simply the fact of their existence. “We do not have elders because we have a human gift and modern capacity for keeping the weak alive; instead, we are human because we have elders.” (1)

For countless centuries the traditional role of elder was as repository and transmitter of culture. Then, for a complex of reasons (linear time, written language, centralized governance, commerce, religious and military power) the living presence and recognition of elder value faded into the past. Although strong and effective individual elders have continued to thrive, old people in general have gradually come to be seen as more of a liability than an asset; a generalization based on visible, but incomplete, evidence. And now, with more of us successfully living longer than ever before, the social demography to which we have become so accustomed is radically changing. And we have no roadmap for this rapidly developing new territory.

One of our great challenges in this new century will be to overcome the automatic influence of habitual mind-sets that no longer apply. As Winston Churchill so clearly stated it many years ago: “We are shaping the world faster than we can change ourselves, and we are applying to the present the habits of the past.” This could never have been more true than it is today.

Common knowledge predicts the oncoming “age wave” will be a tragedy, an overwhelming financial burden on our current retirement and health care systems. And yes, based upon current institutions and past modes of thinking, this is probably true; that is, unless serious effort is put into evolving radically new and creative ways of incorporating and empowering elders as part of the solution.

Although there will obviously be a continuing percentage of frail and otherwise incapacitated elders for whom we must provide, the number of reasonably able bodied elders is increasing. And, more important, the number of able minded elders is also increasing. Consider the work of Dr Gene Cohen, founding chief of the Center on Aging at the National Institute of Mental Health. His research debunks the myth of aging as an inevitable decline of body and mind - the traditional medical model of aging. Dr Cohen introduces the concept of developmental intelligence, a "maturing synergy of cognition, emotional intelligence, judgment, social skills, life experience, and consciousness." His latest book, “The Mature Mind,” explores his research into these and other themes.

The evolution of a “new and necessary” elder intelligence, as it is referred to by James Hillman (2), is different from “the brightness of youth,” or “the judicious pragmatics of middle age,” it is “complex because it is imaginative – metaphoric, multileveled, suggestive.” This new and necessary intelligence posits the institution of a new and more integrated role for elders.

Certainly, one sure way to turn the upcoming elder flood to advantage would be to focus on ways in which this population actually is an asset. They are still the repositories of lived experience, survivors of their own decisions; witness to succeeding generations of trial and error; bearers of the capacity to think with a combination of both the head and the heart – otherwise known as wisdom.

The real tragedy is living in a society where staying alive for a long time is perceived as such a problem, an unwelcome burden. What a paradox. Everyone wants to live to become old, but no one wants to BE old. Consider the priorities of a world where we no longer look upon this stage of life as a problem.

Human beings, unlike other species, live far beyond the age of procreation. Carl Jung made the comment that “human beings would not live to be seventy or eighty years of age if it had no meaning for the species.” As earlier indicated, elders were the teachers and advisors, the repositories of accumulated knowledge, the embodiment of culture without whom human beings might have dwelt in their primeval, animalistic survival mode indefinitely. It was grandmothers whose generative help preceded civilization.

So here we are again, thirty thousand or so years later, witness to the risk of a differently dangerous world. Now the predators have wheels, and so the children must have wheels. And all are in a hurry to get somewhere fast so they can come back just as fast as they went. Rolling, rolling, rolling, further and further away, on the fat back deposits of ancient animals upon which we have created purgatory, a world of scarcity where the only sin is not having enough, and there is never, ever enough.

Our children and grandchildren are grabbed by the scruffs of their pleasure seeking necks and herded like hungry pets to the altar of plenty. They are so consumed with their daily struggle for more, they cannot see that more is still less when there is never enough. Those who have nothing are willing to kill for more and those who have everything are willing to kill to keep it.

Regardless of its apparent advantages, this system of creating and then catering to endless materialistic desires is clearly not sustainable. We are using up resources at an alarming rate, and our very survival is threatened by our abuse of Earth’s ecosystems. And yet, in spite of all the evidence, the general response is often either helpless acceptance or complete denial.

What Can Elders Do?

From a hopeful, spiritual point-of-view, some would say the timing of this world in crisis and the relatively sudden increase in elder population is not at all coincidental.

Still, no one can know for sure what the effect of so many more active older citizens will be. The self indulgent retirement rewards model is only possible for those who can afford it, and, all things considered, may not prove to be so rewarding after all. The elder education industry has grown tremendously over the past decade, with nearly every community college and university in the country hosting some form of extended education program for elders. Whether or not this movement will coalesce into a greater awareness of elder potential for creative social change remains to be seen.

Although elders are the ones who have extensive knowledge of this paradoxical, troubled world, through decades of lived experience, it is due to the lack of acceptable roles for their input that so many of them don’t even know the value of their wisdom. It is critical to understand that just as there is no individual identity without community, there is no elder identity without community. Elders alone can do nothing. It is only through their recognition and constructive integration into balance with all other generations that we will know the scope and value of their contribution. Perhaps it is, after all, “to complete the architecture of the human life course.” (3)

As a truly unique species, having come through centuries of bestial survival, centuries of struggle for control over one another, centuries of making the same old mistakes based on the same old greed and fear, centuries of making the same old excuses, repeated and repeated; perhaps now, after all our blessed failures, we are finally ready to see what can happen if we learn to embody and apply our truly grown up potential.

© Copyright Rabon Saip 2006

(1) David Gutmann, Reclaimed Powers, Basic Books: New York (1987)

(2) James Hillman, The Force of Character
(1999)

(3) P. Baltes & M. Baltes, Successful Aging, Cambridge University Press, 1990.

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Elder Potential

Aside from the parade of statistics announcing our increasing numbers and increasing longevity, there is growing evidence that some of the most negative assumptions about old age are simply not true. Dementia and disease are not necessarily an inevitable result of living for a long time. And yet, old age is still generally perceived as a dreaded conclusion rather than as an acceptable and natural stage of life. The assumption that mental and physical decline are all that await us in our “twilight” years feeds into an interesting dilemma - practically everyone wants to live to become old, but hardly anyone wants to BE old.

Certainly, there is a degree of slowing down as we grow older, and, depending on how well we have taken care of ourselves over the years, some fairly normal physical changes can be uncomfortable to painful. However, with increasing awareness and health care, and with the gain of an additional 30 plus years of life expectancy in just the past few generations, we are now dealing with the development of a whole new stage of life in the making; a stage about which little is actually known because we’ve never been here before on such a scale.

Psychological thought about human development in the 20th century was mostly directed toward childhood and adolescent development, toward the formation of our permanent “selves” through early life transitions. Influential theorists like Freud and Piaget reported that developmental stages of human psychology basically ended by the late teens or early twenties. Adulthood was considered a final stage that lasted for the rest of one’s life.

Erik Erickson, one of the great theorists of the 20th century, laid out a life course of developmental tasks in eight stages. Six of these led to “adulthood,” the seventh, while only the final one, insightfully labeled “integrity vs. despair,” was designated to encompass all our remaining years.

This is not to say there is anything amiss with these stages, as far as they go, but to imagine that human development ends with the attainment of so-called adulthood is to abandon our species in mid-stream. Our true potential, which is just now becoming attainable, lies in the ever changing development of elder life stages. As one author put it - “We have not yet completed the architecture of the human life course.” For those of us with a while yet to go, I think it might be our responsibility to find out just what this means.

In her book, The Coming Of Age, Simone de Beauvoir made this point: “Until the moment it is upon us, old age is something that only affects other people. So it is understandable that society should manage to prevent us from seeing our own kind, our fellow-humans, when we look at the old.” Think about it. Until we ourselves become old, we look upon old people as not us, but as “Other,” a separated group just biding their time in Death’s waiting room. And there is this well known maxim of social psychology:

What we think about people influences how we will perceive them; how we perceive them influences how we will behave towards them; and how we behave towards them ultimately shapes who they are. In other words, society’s attitudes toward elders becomes elder’s attitudes toward themselves.

Senescence, the fact that organisms deteriorate with age, is an obvious biological reality. But how we deal with this reality can be a matter of personal choice. It was my pleasure recently to have the following exchange with an elderly gentleman in the locker room at the YMCA. He was noticing himself in the mirror and said, to no one in particular.

“When I was young, I used to have a great body. Now look at me.”

“But,” I responded. “I’ll bet you didn’t have the great mind you have now.” He turned and smiled his approval at my comment.

“If we had it all at the same time,” I continued. “There would be nothing left for us to attain.”

© Rabon Saip 2007

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The Right To Ride

What if you were to wake up tomorrow morning with the realization you could no longer drive? How would you conduct the business of your day? Until it happens to you, when driving is no longer an option, there is no way you can know the dreadful impact of losing the freedom you have enjoyed for so long.

How else will you do food shopping, get to medical appointments, or enjoy the social, civic, and entertainment activities that have become an essential part of your life? Have you ever tried to manage these needs via public transit, or para-transit?

Older adults, who are most likely to suffer this life changing loss, do not automatically stop having the same needs simply because they have become older adults. In fact, their need for mobility may even increase. Nevertheless, the options for those who are forced to stop driving are painfully limited.

Para-transit programs, the backup for elder transportation, are limited to service within 3/4 of a mile of fixed transit routes and also to the hours of public service. These alternatives, in compliance with federal regulations, do the best job they can, but are fraught with limitations.

When the dignity and independence of private car ownership, which so many of us take for granted, gives way to dependence and public exposure (especially at such a vulnerable stage of life), many elders simply withdraw into the dangers of isolation.

How can we best help our elder friends and relatives at this most difficult time? Consider the possibility of a “transition program." Rather than having to face the harsh reality of no longer being in control of their own mobility, elders would be gradually exposed to alternatives, even before they quit driving. Essential to such a program would be a large group of volunteer drivers who are supported by the gratitude of a caring community.

I have been talking with a few others about the idea of such a transition (volunteer driven) program, possibly named OATS (Older Adults Transportation Services). This would not be an effort to replace public transportation, but rather to raise awareness, to fill in the gaps, and help relieve pressure upon limited public funding.

We are looking ahead to an ever increasing number of retired elders whose sudden loss of mobility and subsequent isolation can lead to a complex of serious problems; withdrawal, depression, substance misuse, poor health, and even suicide. It is our determination to bring awareness to this issue and to the possibilities of providing the kinds of care we will all need sooner or later. This is purely a grass roots effort and will depend upon the interest and involvement of people like you.

Rabon
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When You Write
By Rabon Saip

We all tell stories, every day, without thinking about plot or dialogue or correct grammar. We easily recount all kinds of information about the world, and about ourselves, in the form of story. The flow of unfolding story, in the jokes we tell, in the personal experiences we share, is as natural to us as breathing. Story is as old as humankind itself, and has always been the means by which our species has shared learning from generation to generation. In short, we are “storying animals.”

But, in the midst of a lifetime of communicating our stories, when it comes to writing them down, most of us will freeze and fall into a maze of academic complexity. All those years of confusing education about written language emerges to stand over us with the whip of its pen in hand. We stare at the blank page, or monitor screen, and blink with amazement that something so natural and close inside us, our story, is now set apart at a distance seemingly insurmountable. Suddenly, we haven’t the slightest idea how to begin.

I have been fortunate in my lack of education about writing. During those years as a visually impaired student pretending to see the blackboard, all I got was some incoherent noise about what I should or shouldn’t do if only I could understand what the teacher was talking about - subject, object, predicate and participle, verb and adverb, Pete and repeat - it all sounded like an arrogant, academic straightjacket.

It wasn’t until 1991, when I first used a keyboard and TV screen, that I became concerned about how to structure and punctuate sentences. I fretted and worried about the damned rules until I had a massive stroke - a stroke of insight. Why did the rules exist in the first place? Who made the rules? What for? I was determined to find an answer, not from a teacher, or a book; but from the experience of writing itself.

So, I set out to let the words flow, to write as freely as I could, and then to find out why I should care about rules. It was a process of discovery, of seeing the need for rules from the inside out. To blindly follow dictates without understanding the need for them is really putting the proverbial cart before the ox. It was only through challenging myself to keep writing, to wrestle with the words until they became transparent to the meaning behind them, that I learned anything about writing. Only in the midst of sorting out my thoughts and writing them down did the logic of punctuation and syntax make itself known.

The struggle between the spoken word (oral tradition) and written language is not just a personal story, it is the story of many cultures throughout history. Somewhere in the course of my scattered education, I became fascinated with that period in ancient Greek history when their culture was transformed by a gradual shift from oral tradition to literacy, from the epic poems of Homer to the writings of Plato. And, although Plato admonished the poets for just parroting the words without really understanding the concepts behind them, he also had some reservations about the use of writing as opposed to the spoken word, especially about certain “Mysteries” that should never be written down.

According to the scholars I have read, this transition in Greek history was a long, slow and painful process that went on for more than a century. The resistence to writing was profound. Prior to the introduction of the Greek alphabet, the foundations of culture were entirely embodied in the people, in their stories and in their poetry, in the rhyme, meter and repetition of the spoken word. Such poetry was not what we think of as poetry today. The rhyme and meter were actually devices created simply to hold the words in place, to aid in memorization and resist any changes in the words as they were passed down from generation to generation. Such was the way of epic poems like The Iliad and The Odyssey.

How does this resistence to literacy in the ancient world compare to what we go through in our struggle to write down our story? Does some instinctive, ancient part of us fear that the commitment of story to the written word will somehow take the life out of it? The oral tradition in ancient Greek theater (which was far different from theater as we now know it) often involved the audience in ‘call and answer’ routines, even in dramatic body poses, in cries of grief or shouts of triumph, as a means of acting out and memorizing the stories of their culture. The ancient Greeks understood that we best remember those things that are anchored in strong emotion. Our word “catharsis” comes directly from this dramatic practice in ancient Greek theater.

So yes, its easy to see how invested these people were in their oral history. Written language would probably have seemed like a threat, a woefully inadequate method for holding the dynamic energy of the stories that were carried around in the hearts and minds of average citizens. If you were to stop such a citizen on a street corner in Athens twenty-five hundred years ago and ask, you might well be treated to hours of memorized history.

In every culture that went through this oral tradition to literacy transition, and there have been many, the first use of written language was simply to accurately trans-cribe the spoken word, including repetition and speech patterns, into writing. It was soon realized, however, that writing it down necessarily created a different language than the one which had been spoken. In fact, and this is a continuing fascination for me, the use of written language significantly changed the way people thought. The rendering of mental image into written characters must have created a whole new level of internal interaction, an abstract involvement in the reciprocal process between the abstract mental image and the visibly written word.

I believe one must learn to enjoy the freedom of a give and take relationship with words, an alliance of exploration rather than some grammatical struggle to “get it right.” Only you can be the judge of what you have to say. Only you are the expert on your life, on the mishaps, adventures and lessons of your own experience. If you get stuck when trying to write your story, pay attention to the way you would verbalize it. Let the words flow. Write them down. Never mind the challenge of making sense on paper, there will be time enough for that later. Do not worry that your “dramatic poses, or cries of grief or shouts of triumph” are difficult to put into words. Keep going. For the moment you are only doing as the ancient Greeks once did, transcribing your speech into writing. Let the words flow - “There was this time in Chicago when I was working in a factory” and so forth. That is your individual voice. Do not stop to judge if you are doing anything right or wrong, just write.

It may also be important for you to avoid a strictly linear process, committed to beginning, middle and end. Start your story at the center of its most powerful image, freely written. Beginning and ending will be along shortly. Rest assured the essential language you need to tell your story is already inside you, just waiting to be called out. Concentrate on creating your own unique story in your own uniquely written voice.

Every writer I’ve had the pleasure to converse with, or listen to in interviews on the radio, says the same thing. They all re-write and re-write before a piece is done. The poet, Vladislav Hilos, reminds us “how difficult it is to remain just one person - for our house is open, there are no keys to the doors and invisible guests come in and go out at will.” These invisible guests are the different moods and frames of mind we all go through during the course of any given day. Our writing will not look the same every time we review it, and each time one of us checks in and makes changes, the work becomes more complete.

Whether in ancient Greece or in Santa Rosa, transcribing our stories into written language carries with it the challenge of having to think about it. And much like the story tellers Plato reprimanded for repeating the words without really understanding their meaning, our life stories are held in seamless memories that do not appear to change over time; but the fact is they do. We never tell the same story exactly the same way twice, we just don’t think about it. As Freud pointed out almost a century ago, we are always looking at the past through the lens of the present.

One of the great advantages of living for a long time is that we get to make sense of our lives as never before possible, if we so choose. As elders, when we take on the challenge of writing, or re-thinking, our life stories, we review our past experiences from the perspective of an older and wiser person, one who has learned to think with both the head and the heart. Rather than suffer the limitations of long ago stressors, ignorance, shame or confusion, we are now able to focus on compassion, forgiveness, and a greater understanding of our past mistakes. We get to admit and own the fallibility we once denied, a final and fitting opportunity for self acceptance.

As one famous psychologist framed it, we engage in a process of “Integrity versus Despair.” And, if this work is taken to a fairly deep level of honest introspection, we will find within our own writing the healing power of story, not only for ourselves, but as legacy for those we leave behind.

 

Elder Messenger

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