Written by Carole Christopher, SPEC President
The SPEC Elders Circle is a new initiative within SPEC that’s rooted in the belief that elders and society have much to gain by elders embracing their wisdom role and offering insight and knowledge to younger generations drawn from life experience and accumulated learning.
When I was about 55, (I’m now 75) I began to notice that the major topic of conversation with retired friends was travel. I was uneasy about the carbon intensity of air travel. But I was in denial and shy to raise embarrassing questions, so I quietly brooded on my own questions. We all agreed that we’re living in a great place and raved about how good it was to get home. So why were we traveling so much? Were we too narrowly focused on the next adventure and not on the legacy we’re leaving behind? Were we modeling an ennobling role as elders or the more dubious freedom of no longer having a meaningful role?
Travel, while enjoyable, didn’t resonate with the deeper dimension that I was pondering as I pushed past the retirement age. As a kid, I was taught to respect my elders and the words “elder” and “wisdom” have always communicated something about older age that was attractive to me. To be a senior is not necessarily to be wise. On the other hand, it’s the tradition of every culture that elders carry knowledge of a life lived, that they have passed through the fires of individuation and self-preoccupation to a greater perspective on what really matters, that they have gathered, sifted, and have something of substance to share.
The great psychologist, CG Jung describes the 2nd half of life as the period when we make significant and discriminating insights about meaning, spirituality, and wisdom. While it’s not true for everyone, the elder years are those in which we’re most likely to harvest the fruits of wisdom. David Suzuki calls it the most important time in his life and a time to speak from the heart.
I was 65 when I began to use the phrase, “reclaiming elder wisdom.” I started a blog by that name with the strong intention of sharing my view that this is a dignified role which we should neither squander nor surrender to the notion it’s no longer needed. I never wrote that first blog entry and never carried on that conversation. It took the interest of a younger woman to draw out of me this wish for a dialogue around our elder legacy and to help me secure a grant to start an Elders Circle in SPEC. It is becoming a reality and our first meeting with interested elders will happen on June 23.
— Carole, SPEC President