What can I do as……an Individual?
Talk about it.
Ask people questions about their experience of eldership. Use the questions on the home page as starters. Explore their answers. just start the conversation, you don’t need to be an expert, just curious.
Crystallise your experience
Begin to actively crystallise your experience. Take an area of your experience and begin to journal or discuss with someone everything that you learned from that expeornce. The good, the bad, the successes, the failures, the lessons….the wisdom. Then take another area of your experience and do the same……this is how elders crystallise wisdom out of experience.
Make a list
Make a list of everyone you recognise in your life as an elder - people you personally knew, people who you observed, people you’ve read about. What made the qualify as elders in your mind? What was their back story that made them the people they became?
Find a elder
Find someone who you would like to be an elder in your life (They may respond to the word ‘elder’, or ‘mentor’ or spiritual director’) Get to know them a little and if you think they have experience, particularly of the mid-life transition, then ask them if they would talk with you for an hour a month, or whatever works best for you both.
Offer yourself
Reflect on your personal networks - where could you offer yourself as a mentor to individual youths, youth groups, youth organisations, organisations, as an advisor, as a Non Executive Director, as a Trustee
Connect
Connect with elder networks on Linked-In
Run or attend a retreat
In January 2023 we piloted a weekend retreat for people who were interested in eldership and over the weekend explored ‘what is an elder?”, ‘who are the elders we know - their qualities’, ‘what does it mean to aspire to eldership?’, ‘what is work we need to do on ourselves first?’, ‘how do we offer eldership?’
Read
Read about eldership. People like Michael Meade, Arthur Brooks, David Brooks Brooks, Bruce Feiler, Kathleen Dowling Singh. But also read anything that depends your wisdom around your own experiences, your own transitions, what is happening in the world right now, history etc. (see below)
Attend events
linked- In advertise events that are directly or indirectly related to eldership. Events like talks, Vision Quests, Rites of passage, Constellation work to look at intergenerational influences.