I can tell by the way the trees beat,
after
so many dull days, on my worried
windowpanes
that a storm is coming…
Two weeks ago, I was invited to facilitate a conversation. It was between a group of fifteen teenagers, five from each of the nearby high schools, and forty-five or so adult service providers. These ranged from the Superintendent of Schools, three high school principals, school psychologists, therapists, directors of various youth service organizations, and community members.
The purpose of the conversation was to help service providers understand the experiences and concerns of teens in our community.
There is an unspoken division in our society. It positions the youth at odds with those that are older, of adult age but not often of adult character. In a society that sees life on a linear timeline, we have cut off the elderly, those at the end of life, from the children and the youth.
There is a middle-ground that takes up the majority of our social imagination. It is from about 25 to 40 or so. These are the ages that are brought to the forefront of our social awareness, of our collective attention. What comes before is easily disregarded. What comes after, in my experience working with hundreds of people at this point, is either a scrambling tooth and nail battle to get back to what once was in the “glory years” or a slow meaningless drift into a resigned and often medicated “old age.”
…and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can’t bear without a friend,
I can’t love without a sister…
The task was to create a bridge. One that linked those that are younger, accustomed to being overlooked, some of them marginalized, others more privileged but still somewhat unseen, to the older people that, in many cases, experience the same phenomenon of being overlooked and unseen. These service providers usually start their careers with the best intentions. Often, they are derailed by an administrative system that increasingly pressures them: to dig themselves out of avalanches of paperwork, attend unproductive meetings about meetings, and be limited by language that makes interaction more mechanical than human.
How do we, as human beings, drop the layers upon layers of social expectations, agendas, judgments, and fears so that we can genuinely see one another? How do we set aside the cleverly packaged ways of speaking that, in the name of political correctness, stifle our ability to express what we are truly feeling, or fearing?
The storm, the shifter of shapes,
drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no
age…
The challenge we face is that our intellectual ideas take precedence over emotional intelligence. We have procedures in place. These procedures say that we have to act a certain way, speak a certain way, dress a certain way, believe a certain way. They are the remnants of a social project catalyzed by the industrial revolution, a project that goes much further back, but that became the wholesale social program then: assembly-line living. With the advent of the assembly line came the patterning and mass production of education and identity. As our current institutions continue to live out the repercussions of this, they are underscored by the drive to make people, ideas, and products uniform.
The system that trains many of the service providers I was sitting with on this day trains them to turn teens into profiles, checked boxes, and numbers that reflect their degree of conforming to the system of uniformity. All the while, telling them about how loved they are for their individuality.
To many, if not all, the young people I have worked with this reeks to high heaven of bullshit. Can you see why? Even when they can’t quite put their finger on it, when they don’t have the social or psychological awareness to see it, they feel it. There is an unspoken, underlying agenda that says, “show us how great you are, but keep it close to or within the confines of these boxes.”
The thing is that many of the service providers, if not most or all, have a somewhat unsettling feeling that creeps up for them as well. Rooted in the same place. And, for their part, causing an awkward mixed sense of revulsion and shame at being the executors of this socializing contradiction.
What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great.
So, how to create this bridge. In intact cultures, those that have an understanding of their inter-connectedness with all things, seen and unseen, the elders are those that guide the adolescents into adulthood. They are the ones that are charged with sharing their life experience, their wisdom, their blessing upon the young so they may make the transition into adulthood. This is absent in our society. We have few adults. We have even fewer elders.
To be an adult is to understand that your death is imminent. Not in a morbid, dramatic or victimizing way. But as an inherent truth that the days you are given are a blessing and not a right. And so, it is upon you and me to spend these days in service of the world that will remain after we die. Here’s the secret, that’s not so secret: you and I are going to die. To be an adult for the remainder of our days is to awaken each day and take it for the miracle that it is, then devote what we have of our unique gifts, talents, and experiences to serving what will remain after we’ve died.
In an intact culture, if we are blessed with many days and we live up to this blessing by dedicating our days to serve the life that will continue beyond us, we may be given our elderhood by the community. Stephen Jenkinson, of the Orphan Wisdom school, teaches that it is the job of the young to create elders. By seeking their council, by seeking their stories, their wisdom, their experience.
This takes assembly-line living and turns it from a linear, mechanical process, into a life-weaving hoop.
When we win its with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
After explaining this a man in his 70s, a community member that regularly attends these meetings says, eyes downcast, “I can’t remember the last time I was asked a question by a teenager.”
I asked the room, “Which of you young ones has a question for this man?” To which the older man attempted to say that wasn’t what he meant. I insisted.
Then one of our teenagers, a generally quite young man, leans over and says, “I have a question. What do you want from coming here?”
Then older man thinks for a minute, a subtle teary shine wraps his eyes, and he says, “I come here because I care about what happens to you. I’m at the end of my days, and I’ve learned a thing or two. I want to share it. And I come here to learn from you.”
Silence fell across the room. It lasted more than a moment.
And so, for one minute on one fall day in Northern California, we get a glimpse of that hoop being woven together again. We get a glimpse of how it was, and how it could be again.
Poem excerpts from The Man Watching, by Rainer Maria Rilke
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Photo: Getty Images