Here are 21 qualities of an elder.
Elders are:
1. People of wisdom
Everyone gets daily experience. That happens by just being alive. But experience is not the same as wisdom. Wisdom is experience that has been processed, thought through, lessons learned from, changes made as a result of.
2. People with perspective
They have enough wisdom to be able to look backwards to where an issue has come from and forwards to where it could be going. They ask themselves ‘have we ever been in a situation like this in recent or distant history?’ They can draw the lessons and the principles from the past and extrapolate them to where they might be useful in the future. They access their right hemisphere of their brains to look at the broader picture in order to get a more accurate view of the current issue. While every situation in new, wisdom can bring a way of looking at it that being caught up in the ‘now’ prevents us from seeing.
3. People with a holistic view of truth
There are four ways in which the brain establishes what is true[1]. Together the right hemisphere and the left hemisphere of the brain establish truth through logic, through reasoning, through intuition and through imagination. In a world that has become increasingly fixed on the left hemisphere of the brain we have lost connection with the whole establishment of truth. Elders pay attention and weight to all four avenues.
4. Guides through life
Elders are people who have made the journey of life and can offer support, guidance and wisdom to those who come after them about the routes, the pitfalls, the options, and the perspectives on life’s challenges. Among life’s challenges are the continual series of thresholds across the life-span. Elders can provide guidance through these thresholds and help shape rites of passage.
5. Lyricists
Elders tell stories to convey wisdom. They value myths, metaphors, poems, movement and music to help us understand the depths and the richness of the life journey that we are on.
6. People with moral imagination
William Macaskill[2] speaks compellingly about the need to take a very long term view of the future in order to make good decisions today. Moral imagination is looking into the future as to how we want to be with ourselves, each other, and our environment in a thousand years from now. Only with this perspective can we take steps today that will ensure we and our grandchildren and their grandchildren become the kind of people we hope for. The current awareness of the dangers of AI are exactly this kind of discussion, but we have now become aware that decisions we may take today about such technology may well have irreversible consequences for future generations. First Nation American Indians held to the principle that decisions should be made to day in the light of the wisdom gained from the ancestors along with the impact your decision will have on people seven generations from now.
7. They see the genius in youth
The ancients long believed that when each child is born, they have what the Greeks called their daemon and the Romans called their genius. We are all born with a life force. It is what propels us into and through life, but the ancients saw the uniqueness of that life force and the unique contribution they could make to the world. Elders see the unique of the young person in front of them and this liberates the young person to see and have the confidence to become their unique selves. To be seen by another is crucial to seeing ourselves and liberating the potential of that self. The stories of people whose whole future rested on being seen by a teacher, a parent, a religious leader, an uncle or auntie, is limitless. The reason why an elder can see the genius in other youth is because they have taken the time to discover the genius in themselves.
8. They are not frightened by failure
Elders are not perfect people, but they are whole people. To be whole means to accept the light and shadow sides of our personalities, the successes and the failures. It is often the failures, the descents, that if processed well become the very strengths of the elders life. Because of their own failures an elder is not afraid to hear the story of others failures and to bring hope to them. An old African Proverb says ‘you can’t shock the elders’.
9. They are intergenerational
Elders see themselves as bridges across the generations. They have gathered wisdom from their own ancestors and they see it as their responsibility to invest wisdom into the upcoming generations. The late British politician Betty Boothroyd, was always focussed on decisions that would invest in the upcoming youth of the nation.
10. They have suffered
A consistent theme in the shaping of an elder is that they have suffered in their lives. They have suffered more than one meaningful descent into their own inner darkness and survived the experience. They have touched despair but found a way back to hope and the ability to take the next step. Suffering physically, emotionally, relationally, mentally, spiritually – are all potential ways that an elder has experienced the loss of their own ego on one or more occasions on their lives.
Suffering is the forge and furnace that creates character which is central to being an elder. It creates and strengthens the courage that an elder displays and it offer hope to those who themselves need guiding to the fruits that come through this fire.
11. They are black-belt question askers
Elders primary mode of influence is often through the questions they ask. The depth of their questions opens up new ways of thinking about almost anything. They change the conversation that seems to be stuck on one level of perspective by changing the question that is being asked so that people see things in new ways. They ask higher order questions about motives and meaning, they ask questions that explore the seen realities to the mystery and wonder and transcendence of a deeper reality. They ask challenging questions that explore how we are dealing with the dominance of our own ego.
12. They have an awakened sense of their true self
The self we develop in the first half of life is largely an adaptive self, built to give us a sense of ourselves in the world. But beneath or within this provisional self is our true self, our foundational self, the core self that good forms of religion always sought to encourage as the source of love and contribution in the world. Knowing our true self is a vital anchor through every stage of life as it provides a more secure basis of our identity, rather than relying on what we do or achieve or accumulate.
13. They have navigated the second half of life transition
Karl Jung wrote that ‘the great potential for growth and self-realisation exists in the second half of life’. Often our view of life is one where the middle years are years of success, achievements and accumulation in personal land professional life. More traditional views see the second half of life where we really make friends with our true self, become friends with the shadowy parts of ourselves and develop a much greater sense of meaning and contribution to life. For this to happen we need to transition from the first to the second half of life. This transition is challenging and often resisted by many people. Elders have made this journey and are able to guide others through their own growth.
14. They embrace meaning and purpose
In a generation characterised by many as having a crisis of meaning elders are people who have deeply invested in the ongoing discovery of not just why they are here but who are the here for? Discovering one’s purpose is not a fixed destination, but an ongoing search. It connects us with our original essence, or daemon, or genius, as the ancients call it and it provides us with an overarching sense of who we are and who we are becoming that enables us to navigate to losses of identity, o status, or achievements that come from our working years. Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl saw the discovery of meaning as the most important investment we can make because of its ability to provide a secure base to navigate through the most challenging aspects of life. A good example is that Mandela overarching purpose was justice for all. He worked that out through his political career and once he retired from Government his meaning continued to be worked out in a new way in his work of peace building and reconciliation and HIV awareness work.
15. They name things
Naming what is going on in our lives has always been crucial in finding a solid place from which to move forwards. When we are in transitions or challenging circumstances, both personal and wider-life, we often experience what is happening as confusing, in the dark, unknown. It is easy to feel like we have or are losing our way. Elders have the ability to name what is going on. In naming it they help us to suddenly locate ourselves where we had previously felt dislocated. Just having someone say to you ‘you are in a transition right now’, or ‘you are in that place of breaking down and building up’, or ‘that sounds like that job no longer has any joy for you’, helps us to regroup and continue on our journey in life.
16. They offer an invitation to the youth
Elders feel both a responsibility and a joy to invest wisdom into young people. They value the energy and optimism and courage of youth and want to foster it, help to shape their energy with wisdom and support, not ignore, control, or be cynical against. Elders seek mentoring opportunities with young people whatever their situation. Their view is summed up by a few lines in Dawna Markova’s poem I Will Not Die An Unlived Life.
To live
so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom
and that which came to me
as blossom
goes on as fruit.
17. They offer a living view of the world
The opposite to a living view of the world is a mechanistic view of the world. Elders embrace the reality that they are part of a vast ecosystem that stretches way beyond our imagination and grasp as well as microscopically miraculous. We are a part of the living world and all our decisions affect and are affected by this living world. They therefore look at decisions within those larger frameworks rather that local, or selfish interests. They resist the idea that everything is like a part of a machine and embrace the organic, creative, interrelationship of everything. Everything and everyone belongs and is a part of everything else.
18. They speak truth to power
Al Gore[3] once said it’s hard to disagree with someone when you are paid by them to agree with them. Power of position, or power of money, create a dynamic that often feels hard to challenge. Whether you are challenging the government, your boss at work, or your family dynamics speaking truth to people in positions of power always demands courage and wisdom. Elders speak truth to power because they maintain a neutrality where they cannot be ‘owned’ and therefore cannot lose their job or their income, but they may suffer reputational damage for their courage. Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela were openly critical of the invasion of Iraq. An elder maintaining their independence is the essential quality that allows them to speak truth to power.
19. They are plural not hierarchical
Eldership has traditionally been seen as plural, not singular or hierarchical. The Wisdom literature says ‘where there is no guidance a people falls, but in the abundance of counselors’ there is safety[4]’ and ‘without counsel plans fail, but with many advisers they succeed[5]’. Traditional communities talked of elders, not just elder. The wisdom of a plurality of elders is that is breaks away from hierarchical power
20. They sustain hope
Elders understand the larger cycles of life. That even when there is a period of darkness, whether personally or globally, that ‘death’ or winter is what comes before something new is born. They have witnessed this in their own inner and outer experience and therefore will always bring a perspective of hope. Without hope the heart gets sick, people lose motivation, the key characteristics of courage and perseverance and our life-force get diminished. Thinkers such as Jeremy Bendell and Michael Meade talk of the breaking down, the collapse, of systems of relationships through to ecology, but they see a new, a larger story emerging through the breaking down. It is the courage, strength and hope and guidance of such elders that gives others hope in their own lives.
21. They grasp the macro and the micro
‘Everything is a situation’ is the famous wisdom of TV series NYPD Blue’s Detective Andy Sipowicz. Meaning that every single thing in life - people, politics, leadership, behaviours, organisms, eco systems - sits within a larger context. The micro, the here-and-now, always sits within the macro, the system that surrounds. Elders have their heads up for the larger context and head down to grasp the detail. They don’t just judge what they see, they look to the surrounding context of what has created what they see. They don’t just look at individual traumas, they have an eye to how the individual’s behaviour is reflecting the wider traumas in society. The reason why we have lost so many elders in our generation is that society no longer values eldership. It’s hard to recognise one’s own potential in society when that society disregards the qualities of your potential. Through the power of instant media we are being constantly channelled to pay attention to some things and ignore others. The elders look above and beyond the noise of the ‘now’, to see what the larger story is that is being created.
[1] The Matter With Things Vol I & II Iain McGilchrist
[2] What We Owe The Future – A million year view William Macaskill Oneworld Books2022
[3] An Inconvenient Truth Al Gore
[4] Proverbs 11.14 (ESV)
[5] Provers 15.22
