Thresholds – From older to elder

Last week I visited my skin consultant. I was successfully treated for skin cancer in 2013, but I still see him once a year for a check-over, for my own peace of mind. A few weeks before the appointment my wife noticed a decent sized spot on the sole of my foot. Bob Marley (supposedly) and my thirty-year-old friend Al, both died of undetected malignant moles on their foot. So, to say I was anxious when I arrived at my appointment was an understatement. He took one look at the sole of my foot and said, “what spot?” It turned out to be a blood blister that had turned black. It’s hard not to feel like you’ve just dodged a bullet, but the bullet is actually the most common threshold in a person’s life – death.

There are many, many thresholds across the life span. My friend just tells me he’s had a serious health scare. My children are all wrestling with the shift from independent adults to full-on parenting, my grandchildren are trying to come to terms with the shift from endless play at home, to daily attendance at school. (One of them was mortified, after attending school for this hyped-up first day and loving it, to discover that she had to do it again tomorrow and again the next day and actually five days a week!!) One of my friends is retiring and another is vigorously avoiding retiring. One friend is trying to find her way after the death of her husband. Another friend is finally going to change career.

But in this article, I want to take a deeper dive into one particular threshold. The crossing over from getting older to being an elder. Hopefully some of the insights from this one threshold will also illuminate other thresholds for you. Being an elder, or eldering, (it’s more of a verb than a title or role) isn’t the same thing as getting older. There is a serious journey to be made first!

In traditional cultures eldership was hard wired into the community and was an embedded stage of life for many. It is the period of life when you crystallise all of that experience you’ve accumulated into wisdom. A wisdom that you can invest in the generations that follow you, for the benefit of the generations yet to come. (First Nation Indians insisted that every decision made today, was done so in the conscious awareness of its impact seven generations from now).  The elders would be calling to those in mid-life, saying ‘it’s time’. It’s time to separate your ego identity from all you’ve accumulated and succeeded at. It’s time to crystallise that experience into wisdom. It’s time to consider your life’s legacy. It’s time to invest all of this into the upcoming generations to fuel their visions and passions with a wisdom that will enable them to sustainably and positively influence their world for the better. I believe that it is no accident that Nelson Mandela, unlike many African leaders, was able to keep his commitment to serve just one term as President. From birth Mandela was nurtured by his elders. From youth, through rites of passage, he was awake to the fact that there was something beyond leadership – he knew he would become an elder. He knew there was more for him, so it was easier for him to let go of a leadership identity and all the ego-affirmation that went with it, and move across that threshold from older and leader to elder.

But much of our Western culture has long since abandoned eldership. Older people don’t talk about it and young people don’t know about it, or aspire to it. We don’t embody it consciously, it isn’t discussed, it isn’t a final module on any Business Schools MBA programmes, or any organisations pre-retirement preparation programmes. Our fixation over the past century on accumulation, consumerism, individualism, atheism and ‘performance’, has displaced, in the aspiration of the youth or the aging, the idea that the most important work of your life is in front of you, not behind you. Eldering is a threshold you can start preparing for whether you are 25[1] or 55.

And so, in this article I’d like to offer you an invitation to cross this threshold, from older to elder. 

One well known image for this journey is the butterfly.  Interestingly one of the Greek words for our soul, or psyche, is ‘butterfly’. The ancients must have recognised the wisdom in this natural phenomenon.

Just like us, the butterfly wasn’t always a butterfly, it started out as a caterpillar. Caterpillars, just like us, devote their energy to consumption. They just devour whatever is in front of them. For us we spend decades accumulating and succeeding, accumulating and succeeding, eating up whatever in life make us feel good about ourselves, in our own and other people’s eyes. And it generally works just fine for these few decades. Until it doesn’t. By mid-life we know we are getting older.  Our bodies tell us this quite plainly. Our friends begin to retire, get sick and die. Reality bites. This consumption phase isn’t going to go on forever. So we hide our heads under the duvet and work harder, longer, faster, to establish our accumulation and our ego’s search for what it thinks it needs. More of what it’s been pursuing up until now. Some people see the road ahead and retire. Retire from what, for what? Some just live with a nagging feeling in their guts that asks, ‘is this it?’

In times gone by this is when the elders would be gently putting their hands on your shoulder and whispering into your ear, ‘it is time’.

It’s time to begin the journey across that threshold from older to elder. With the wisdom, role-modelling, patience and encouragement, the elder would walk with you on the journey. It is hard to overestimate the loss of abandoning elders, to our Western culture. Ancient rites of passage for young people was a stark awakening to their latent sage or elder within. The rites of passage gave youth a taste of their mortality in the presence of wise elders, who held out a positive vision for what was ahead for them as they aged.

The next phase of the butterfly story is when the caterpillar stops its old strategy of consumption and hangs off its leaf, develops a hardened skin around itself, in order to go on the next phase of its painful, magical journey. To the outsider this phase looks dull, redundant and dead.

“So, what are you doing with yourself these days?” people ask you.

To which the chrysalis/emerging elder would reply,

“I’m doing the inner work I’ve long neglected”

Basically, within the dead-looking shell the caterpillar has begun the process of digesting itself and some of what it was, will go and something more amazing will be distilled and remain.

The inner work can feel like a death, certainly a breaking down, an ending. To outsiders it can look a little preoccupied, self-absorbed, or like someone who has lost their way. What does it feel like to the person going through this metamorphosis in their life?

“I feel like I’m going round and round a never ending maze”

“I feel invisible”

“I feel a nobody”

“I don’t know who I am or where I am anymore”

“I feel a little lost”

“I feel useless”

“No one wants what I had to offer anymore”

“I feel terrified”

“I feel my confidence has taken a battering”

“Who am I now and what do I want?”

It is the fearful hunch of the 55+ year old that this is exactly what awaits them when they retire, so they avoid the real work of this threshold in their life, hoping to distract or avoid the Chrysalis stage of personal transformation. But this breaking down phase is because much of what we have spent our first half of life building our ego-identity around, has to die. To die simply means it has no life in it anymore. So much of the ego, our ego-identity, is not shaped by our own unique story at all, but rather by our parents stories, trauma stories, adaptive stories, peer group stories, societal stories, cultural stories – all of which are fine for developing a provisional sense of yourself with which to take on the challenges of the first half of life. But it is neither the complete, nor true story of who your really are. The second half of life is where your real-life work begins. There is a deeper, richer connection to yourself to be uncovered, a soul, the butterfly, a coming home.

So, this deep inner work is the necessary liminal space of this threshold. It is the betwixt and between, as Michael Meade calls it. It is the ‘way wherein there is no ecstasy’ as poet T S Eliot[2] describes it. It is the death before the resurrection, as the spiritual giants call it.  In this breaking down what is left is something very original. The original you. In the butterfly/chrysalis scenario what are left are called imaginal Discs or Imaginal Cells. These unique cells become the future butterflies’ eyes, its wings, its legs etc. These cells, distilled through the painful stage, literally imagine who they could actually become. They come from the caterpillar, but they re-imagine the future based on their genuine blue print that they always carried deep within them. The utterly original and beautiful butterfly emerges out of this ‘gloop’ of Imaginal Cells, inside the chrysalis. We ourselves can hardly imagine who we could become through this hidden process of transformation. The Greeks spoke of your daemon. This daemon, this essential life-force within each of us, was the ancients’ word for imaginal cells. Who we truly are in our own uniqueness, before the clutter and pretensions and protections of all the other stories we accumulated growing up. Imagination is so essential to our life, as it is one of the four ways the brain establishes what it true. What I have personally experienced is that when one is in the depths of the chrysalis phase of your life it is tempting to think about the future in terms of re-hashing the past. ‘I used to work with youth in Africa, so maybe there will be a new way to work with youth in Africa’;  ‘I used to be a business coach and so maybe I will find a new way to recover my coaching business’. We think of the future in terms of what we did, or who we were or the identity that used to work for us, ‘I’m the guy who gets things done’; ‘I’m an entrepreneur and innovator’.  But this deep, inner imagination is looking to create something new – who could ever imagine a butterfly, when your only life experience up to this point is being a caterpillar? The something new is original. More you. It may not be about what you do next, it may well be much more about who you are, your heart and character.

Transformation is the stock in trade of thresholds. Transformation isn’t just an improvement, or an upgrade, or an incremental change on the old, it literally means to change its form – I was a caterpillar and now I am a butterfly. Who would have guessed! And yet we arrive at a place within ourselves that in some ways feels more familiar, more me, more ‘home’, than we’d previously experienced.  But it takes time and patience and courage and support. Mostly people want McTransformation. The fast food variety. A day course. A few sessions of therapy. The gain without the pain. The resurrection without the death. The sober reality is that a significant threshold can easily take four years[3], not four minutes. Patience is what produces character. We don’t expect a good wine one week after the grapes have been picked. But who can argue that the butterfly’s beauty isn’t worth working and waiting for? The world is enriched by it. Just as the world is enriched by its elders.

[1] www.youthcompassproject.com

[2] T S Eliot The Four Quartets East Coker

[3] Bruce Feiler      Life is In The Transitions   2021    Penguin