Elders

Your heart is revealed in the way you treat the elders.
Like children, the elders are sometimes a burden. But unlike
children, they offer no hope or promise. They are a weight and
an enucmbrance and a mirror of our own mortality.It takes a person
of great heart to see past this fact and to see the wisdom elders
have to offer, and to serve them out the gratitude for the life
they have passed on us.

I hope you will be such a person.

It is not easy in this culture.We have lost a feel for our elders.
They are a sad, gray presence, hidden behind clumsy phrases like
"elderly", "senior citizens", "retired persons". They are tolerated
out of guilt, feared for the burden they represent, or shunted aside
into irrelevance.They are not loved and honored and sought out for the
wisdom that their ears have given them.

Chances are you will find yourself of two minds about elders.Some will
fascinate you, especially the ones who seem to carry their youth with
them into old age.Others will be frightening to you because of their
ugliness or nearness to death. Still others will bring you great pleasure
because they want so much to please you and demand so little of you.
But no matter how they make you feel, you should always watch them carefully.
They were you and you will be them.You carry the seeds of your old age in you
at this very moment, and they hear the echoes of their childhood each time
they see you.

You will find that many old people are not pleasant.They are as filled with them-
selves and their own concerns as the very young are.They ask you to think about
them and their feelings with little or no concern for yours.

When you meet such elders you must not take them in the wrong way.Like young children,
old people are dependent on the world around them and they very often fear their own
loss of importance. They face the uncertainity of death and are often embittered that the
world they worked so hard to create is being discarded by the generations now in power.

Their bodies are giving out on them.They increasingly find themselves surrounded only by
people their own age, because they know that the young would rather be apart from them.
They often live in memories.

When you meet such elders you must not be blinded by their unpleasantness. When you are tired
or ill or full of anger and pain, you, too, may not be pleasant.For many elders, these are
the conditions of their lives. But beneath the surface of their actions is the a wisdom you
can gain nowhere else.

Even if theirs was the simplest, most limited, most ordinary of lives, they saw the world into
which you have come. No other past generation is as close to yours;no other life near so near in
time. Their stories have the blood of your life running through them.You will never be so close
to the world that gave birth to you as you are when speaking to them.For that and that alone you
should honor and revere them and give them your ear. You are bonded in time.

It is important that you avoid the pitfall of pity when dealing with elders.Too many people, under
the guise of caring , patronize and demean the very old by treating them like children.They speak
to them loudly, or as if they were simpletons. They intrepret the elder's concern for the minutiae
of life as a return to the infantile.In actions and manner they strip the elders of the very respect
they claim to be giving them.

These people are, in their own way, causing as much harm as those who ignore the elders.They are, through
their actions, holding up mirrors in which the elders must see their infirmity, not mirrors in which they
can see their humanity.True caring and respect serve the weakness, but mirror only the human and the
strength.Caring and respect listen, laugh and even challenge.They assume that words and actions of elders
are to be taken seriously.

You must remember that, even in their infirmity, elders seek and value their dignity.They want, above all
else, to feel that their lives are valued and that their life on earth has not been wasted. If you
can go to them with a pure heart, unblinded by notions of false reverence and unaffected by self-serving
feelings of pity, if you can value them and allow them to share the fruits of their experience, however,
simple those fruits might be, you will be performing the greatest act a heart can perform.

You will be loving them not serving them.