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I started exploring elderhood a few years back (two pieces of writing on elderhood from 2022 are here and here) and then stopped, for some reason. It’s back on my radar again.

Maybe because I turned 60 in the summer. Maybe because I spent the summer doing some end-of-life care training with Living Well, Dying Well. Perhaps it’s the ripples of the extraordinary week I spent in August on an Apprenticing to Grief workshop with Sophy Banks and Sarah Pletts.  And maybe because I find I’m craving something (read on …) that I can’t quite give myself.

Back then, I framed my interest in elderhood as:

A focus on the process of maturing, alongside the process of ageing – and making a conscious effort to cultivate wisdom as part of growing older – recognising that personal growth doesn’t automatically come with growing older but is something we can choose if we are interested in trying to grow wiser.

Wanting to pick up the threads again, I started with a conversation with Simon Villette, who’s in his late 70’s.  I’ve come to know him as he often comes to my Acts of Love for Tough Times workshops.

(This conversation is the first of several, with Simon, and with others too, who have moved more towards elderhood in one way or another.   I’ll write about them in my Newsletter, so if you’re interested, you can subscribe here.)

Talk to me about elderhood, I invited Simon. He did. A couple of interesting threads came through – one in particular about how and why we might actively divest ourselves of commitments and activities in older years. Other themes too – a challenge to the idea of trying to cultivate wisdom as we age, such a common trope for elderhood; a recognition that the work of elderhood could be just for us than in any pull to be ‘of use’ to or for the world.

(If you’re not ‘older’ keep reading. I think some of that conversation is valuable  for all ages and stages)

It’s not unusual for me to be left with more questions than anything else. Here’s some of what my conversation with Simon stimulated:

• If elderhood has as much to do with an intentional divesting ourselves of things, as it does with coming to terms with our life becoming smaller, dealing with diminishment or loss then there are some big decisions about what we sever connection with. What do we let drop away naturally and simply not renew – and what do we do intentionally.?
  • What have we outgrown that no longer serves us? What do we actively dislike doing and can’t wait to be rid of? What do we love doing but probably should stop? Where have we passed our sell by date? Where do we need to create space for younger people to come through? What would be the gift in bowing out of something? How is divesting a creative act – for me or for someone else?
  • ‘What matters most – and who do I need to be to align to that?’ (thanks Pete, for that one, in a separate conversation)
  • What am we doing it for? To create space to take on new things – or to simply create space, maybe. But space for what? Does it have to be for doing other useful or productive things? And while we’re at it, what’s this compulsion we have with being useful to others, of having to be in service? It’s so seductive. And to step away from it an feel like oblivion. Who AM I without all my doing?
  • So what if the stripping away that goes with ageing isn’t for other people – at all – but just for ourselves? Just for our own nourishment. Which feels a bit of a bold move, to me.
  • What’s our relationship with space? How comfortable are we with nothing, emptiness, not doing?
  • What conflicts do we need to manage as we try and divest from certain things? Are we slowing down enough to even track what we’re feeling or thinking?
  • What pressures are we noticing to fill the space created with useful things? What’s our relationship with being rather than doing?
  • What metaphor(s) are helpful as we think about divesting? Using a pair of secateurs to sever a branch that still has buds and green shoots? Using a oar to gently push a boat away from the shore? Going to live at the edge of the village?
  • Isn’t this later period of life the time we want to be turning inwards, turning towards ourselves? Might we feel called to connect with God (or however you want to call it), sit with transcendence, the divine?
  • If not transcendence or God, then what is that might give our lives meaning and purpose as we age. At a time beyond providing for a family, or carrying out an organisational role?
  • What about this connection between elderhood and wisdom. Does that apply to us in the west, outside of the native American wisdom traditions from that culture? What wisdom traditions do we have in our own culture?  Is ‘wisdom as a a quality of elderhood’ just another way of putting us pressure to improve, grow, perform

And as I was writing this two poems came to mind. Well, one complete one, and a few scraps.

The scraps come from David Whyte who says in What To Remember When Waking:

‘What you can plan is too small for you to live’

and asks:

‘What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and shape its branches 
against a future sky?’

And in Sweet Darkness:

‘Anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you’.

and :

‘You must learn one thing.
The world was meant to be free in’

The full poem is Martha Postlethwaite’s Clearing:

Do not try to save
the whole world
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create
a clearing
in the dense forest
of your life
and wait there
patiently,
until the song
that is your life
falls into your own cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know
how to give yourself to this world
so worthy of rescue.

Both said something important for me right now.  At an inflexion point in my life, at a Great Turning in the world towards some very difficult times, and as I age and get curious about what that might mean for me.

Over recent years, time alone, in quiet and silence, has become increasingly important to me. Whatever the psychic equivalent is of wearing ear defenders, that’s what I’m craving.  Yet I find it so difficult to protect my boundaries for that.  I give away my time so easily.  Sure, to things that matter – but that don’t matter as much to me as much as creating that clearing in the dense forest of my life, and waiting there.

I’m hoping these conversations with people a decade or two ahead of me might help guide me.

H x