Are elders entitled when they ask for respect given they are seniors? I think we don’t, in contemporary culture, consider seniors as “experts” as much as we should. You’d look at a tradesperson who spent 40 years honing their craft and think of them as an absolute expert in their trade, but why do we look at 40 year olds and not give them credit for having lived for 40 years?
Perhaps because not everyone truly lives everyday. Some people wake up to hide away from their problems, shy away from difficult conversations, stay quiet to not hurt others. So you are alive but at the sidelines, not in the arena. In the arena, you get grime and cuts, and scabs form and skin heals. It must be more exciting to be in the arena, although the part we often focus on is the pain that comes.
Anyways. Elders have, we assume, been in the arena for their entire lives. If not their entire lives, at least a good portion of it. So they have expertise about how to live, having accumulated regrets and grievances and embarrassment. A certain distance from it all also creates a sort of fondness, like rose-tinted glasses. You forget the strength of the bad emotions and so all that remains is the good ones. Given that distance, they could have a lot of good advice to give. Why does every young person not have an elderly mentor as their career or life coach?
Why do young people, too, overlook the expertise of those older than them? Are we so obsessed with being in the arena ourselves, that we don’t want to pause to consult with someone more experienced? Do we maybe not want to endure exactly what others have endured, do we think ourselves so special that we can choose what battles we face? Why do we disregard, scrutinize, test every idea fed to us and grow up to trace some pain back to those ideas? Why doesn’t every elderly person have a microphone and a podcast, they’d probably have more organic content ideas that many self-help podcasters do today.
My point is (really, my grievance) that it can take for someone to grow up in some respect to realize that they have a lot to say on a topic, and recognize that what they have can help others. That they, in some respect, are no longer needing to be the student waiting for the teacher. Yes teachers should still learn new things, but they are teachers now. They now have responsibilities, ethical ones of course, to share ideas and concerns and knowledge. And they can only hope that someone will be there in the auditorium to listen, that the seats won’t all be empty because every young person is too obsessed with getting hurt on their own terms to forgo wisdom.
We’ll never know all of the pain that people in the world hold. Adults, you get hurt too. You trip and fall, scrap your knees. When you were a kid, you looked for the arms of your parents. Do you remember how you used to do that when you trip and fall these days, and does that memory sting? Does it make you feel mournful? Do you reminisce the days where you didn’t have to make decisions all the time? Parents, you are full-time in the arena. There is simply no other way to be a parent.
I’ve wondered what happens to mothers to make them so intuitive after they become mothers. My mummy can read me in ways that make me feel like I’m an unlocked laptop will all my files on my Desktop, just a double click away. But I’m particularly fascinated by a mothers’ toughness and resilience. Could it be that having endured so much change during pregnancy and having to process bringing another human into the world creates this resilience? So that it illustrates that the harder the task, the more hardened the person?
Inculcate: repeated efforts to embed a piece of knowledge into one’s mind. This describes the way I learn practically everything aside from things needing to be memorized: there needs to be a constant reminder of the thing, otherwise the thought slips between my hands like water. Every time I try to grip that memory or thought harder, it gets catapulted even further away. It’s like putting a nail into thin chalk. Everything crumbles if the load is too much.
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