Clinging to relevance

Musings on identity on my way to 80

“If I am not making stuff happen, who am I?”

That fear runs through “coming of aging” for many of us - especially if we thought we were someone… back then.

What if it ends up as coming of irrelevance and invisibility? Coming of uncertainty when you don’t have a role that gives you the right to participate?

What happens to our sense of self if we become unseen, or seen as just one more little old woman who is driving too slowly?

Ninja Warrior of Social Change

I’ve wrestled with this in my own way. I used to be like a ninja warrior of social change. I had, or thought I had, x-ray eyes. I could see into stuck points and intervene, perhaps with a few words or long walk or a lecture… or even a book. I might also invent. Conversation Cafes came out of such a moment - the conviction we might lower “othering,” post 9/11, by inviting people with different views into conversations using our method. Soon, Conversation Cafes spread to dozens of cities in the US and beyond.

The pandemic short circuited that old 6th sense; could the alchemy happen it I’m not in the room where it’s happening. I started a podcast, What Could Possibly Go Right? to keep that flow of insight rolling, and I loved it. But three years in, my capacity to see patterns, to be a “cultural scout” began to sputter out. It is hard now to “read the room” - as in trends - and know where to intervene. Maybe just for me. Maybe for all of us. The unraveling of old systems and certainties is well underway. The signal to noise ratio, of chatter to wisdom, is such that my discernment is jammed.

Coming of aging, I guess, is one way I am making sense of things now that too many things seem out of control to this old warhorse.

Elder in a community

I don’t know whether becoming a grandma, then a great-grandmother, with the many offspring of your one life arrayed in a photo behind you, lessens the anxiety of irrelevance.

Imagine a society where elders had a place of honor rather than horror.

In fact, 25 years ago, at a mere 53, I spent a year with an inipi (sweat lodge) man from Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. A nature-based education center welcomed him, and he poured sweat lodges every Sunday, which I attended faithfully for the year after my partner died.

As I write, my heart recalls that year with a sweet longing. I recall the intensity of the hot rocks and steam that billowed from as each ladle of water flung on them. The sequence of Lakota songs, the melodies still with me. The sincerity of our prayers in the anonymity of that dark lodge, the outpouring of grief and regret, the prayers for those in need, prayers to the ancestors, the humility that comes with the intensity of heat.

We’d bring potluck dishes for feasting after the sweat. I was the oldest person there, and the young men would fill a plate of food for me before anyone ate. So different from the other world, the one I was in 6 days a week, where I’d jostle into the potluck line with everyone. If I dallied, I’d be last.

How would it be if we were honored for our years?

Would we wear our girth with ease, and our wrinkles, and our slowing pace - rather than doing everything to keep aging and death at bay? Might we die in peace, maybe a decade sooner than we now die in anxiety thanks to the countless interventions that keep us alive? Would I trade my extra years for those years of belonging?

Every loss a liberation

Decades ago, I felt surprisingly and even guiltily free when someone close to me died, someone who’d had firm ideas about who I was and what I should do. The shape they’d held me in was no longer enforced, and a more natural shape (identity and beliefs) was available.

It seemed disrespectful of the dead to delight in this, but I did. I felt like wings sprouted from my shoulder blades, and that I could spread them and rise.

That’s when this truth hit me: every loss a liberation. The empty space left by loss can be a long ache, a lassitude, a confusion, a sorrow. It can also be, and perhaps always is, a relief of pressure as that person no longer limits your options.

Whether we take up this “every loss a liberation” freedom is another question. Who might I be now? Will I be disloyal if I change in ways they’d judge? Will the people “we” socialized with include me if I change? Who will I be, if I’m not what I was with them?

A little fish in a big pond to… just a little fish?

This image from Monty Dolack captures some of the delights of smallness.

Self-concept is both a fiction and a necessity. A human loss can be a loss of the stories that give our lives meaning. It can be a discovery of what we could not see with that person or assumption in the way.

I lived as a “world changer”. I was as big a fish as I could be - to make the change I believed in. That identity is like a “golden handcuff” as I age. What if I am just a see-though jelly fish no one wants to swim with? Hmmm, but maybe there’s jelly fish wisdom I couldn’t see…

I’ve projected irrelevance onto “old people”. Now that I’m arriving, these projections are here to greet me. Every loss a liberation. What liberations are in store as I, as we, age out of old identities?

We are all in relationship with our older age, our final stage. For most, that’s in the future or in other people. For me and lots of others, it’s now here. What stories can you tell, to help us all see more clearly?