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If I had to do describe what I want to do with the rest of my time as an educator it would be to awaken a longing for what Rowan Williams (echoing TS Eliot) called the gifts reserved for age; a desire to search for and develop the virtues for what it means to live-and-age-well
The voices I’m drawn toward are men and women who acquired, even in small measure, the richness of these gifts. Age does not magically render wisdom (see Cephalus’ back and forth with Socrates in The Republic). Yet there’s something to be said ab deferring to those ahead of you.
I don’t think “age well” is just a throw in to what it means to “live well.” A society that develops concepts for “living well” without the attendant application to what it means to “age well” misses the full meaning of the former.
Friendship, love, justice and societal bonds, dignity, promise keeping and forgiveness, happiness, charity, who better to teach us the wonders of these than those that have feasted on them for generations?
I’m not pretending like this is a novel concept. A casual glance through history will show a deep respect for those before us. What might it look like, for example, if Gen-Z befriended the aging Boomers instead of placing endless blame on them for a myriad of social ills?
What would it look like if Boomers stopped haranguing Gen-Z and millennials for what they wished we had become? What would it look like for those that have lived-and-aged-well to come alongside those that want to live-and-age well?
I don’t know but I can’t imagine it would look like the “warehousing” of nursing homes and independent living communities that are springing up around the US faster than crabgrass. COVID demonstrates the well-meaning but collosal miscalculation these complexes are in society.
I’m not against them per se but their sprawling presence seems like an opportunity for reflection. Entire generations of wisdom to retrieve in one place. It might be like Cephalus (who was ‘wise’ in a certain way); It might be a wise retired minister I visited often before COVID
I’m 35. I don’t have much to say that carries a kind of weight that really settles on the soul. I have zero issue with that. I hope I can live to 85 in order to let what small perspective and insight I may have now germinate into wisdom.
All I’m saying is the elderly are fragile, hard to love at times, and some of the best among us. I want to live in a society that sees them as gifts and their life as testimonies to what it means to live-and-age-well.
I’ll let Rowan Williams have the last word: “A person who has been released from the obligation to justify their existence is one who can give a perspective on life for those of us who are still in the middle of the struggle; their presence ought to be seen as a gift.”
