One Life. Two doors. Older or Elder?

In early 1999 when my friend Peter Hawkins, who had been working with Mandela’s government, was flying back to the UK, he found himself sitting next to South Africa’s new Foreign Minister, Alfred Baphethuxolo Nzo. As he proudly showed Peter photos of his children and grandchildren, he told him that he would be stepping down from government at the next election. Peter said to him, “well, once you are retired you will have more time to spend with your grandchildren”[1].  The Minister looked sternly at Peter and said, “Life is different in our culture; we do not retire. Once you step down as a leader you become and Elder. An Elder has their own responsibilities. One of which is to hold the Leadership to account. The leaders have to answer to the Elders for what they do and we must support and nurture them”. Fellow South African Reuel Khoza said “leaders are formed in the cradle of elders[2]”. From my wider travels I have seen that life in a healthy society depends on this seamless transition to eldership.

As I enter into 2023 I am reminded of Michael Meade’s words.

“When a society abandons its elders, the elders abandon themselves”.

I realised that over the past couple of years I have been such a person in societies lost and found box.

Travelling back from Zambia to the UK recently and feeling a restlessness in not wanting to watch films, yet having a total of 16 hours in the air to kill, I eventually settled to a documentary called Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, A Journey, A Song[3]. I am a fan of both Cohen and this iconic anthem that he had crafted over many years. One line in the film caught me off guard when Cohen said in his middle years, “I guess I want to become an elder”.

As someone who has spent the last twenty years thinking and writing about eldership, it literally took my breath away that he would be so bold, so confident, so presumptuous to speak those words out loud. In speaking so clearly and succinctly, he held up a mirror to my own struggle. I felt what he felt as early as 24 years old, I had exactly the same desire, but I had never had the courage to say it in public so clearly.  On returning to the UK I shared my reaction to Cohen comment with a trusted mentor and he just laughed at me, (not in a shaming way). He said “everything you do and write about and think about revolves around eldership, so I am surprised Cohen’s honesty challenged you this way”. But it did. 

On a walk with another friend a few weeks later it fell into place. I’d spent the last two decades on a leadership journey and a thought-leadership journey, that had aspired and headed towards eldership, but I hadn’t linked it with my job, or societies journey. On the eve of the first COVID lockdown, when I handed over the leadership of the NGO I’d founded, I assumed another job, or role, would quickly emerge, but I hadn’t given it much thought.  But it didn’t. I thought it was just the universal backlash of COVID on all our lives. What did emerge was a journey to make. Some call it the shift from the Hero’s Journey to the Heroines Journey, some call it Alchemy, some call it the journey from Hero to Elder. In my mind the crossing over from the previous job into the unknown was like entering a long dark tunnel which would eventually spit me out the other end into a new world. I would have arrived, ‘fixed’. Life would then make simple, certain, sense again.  

I’ve only just realised that life did deliver me immediately on that day into ‘there’, the place of eldership.

The thing is that the place of eldership is a qualitatively different from the previous side of the threshold. The previous side had a title, it had status, it had results, it had numbers and spreadsheets and donors and accounts. You could see it and you could touch it and put a well understood name to it. People recognised you and had some mild respect. Society recognised all of these descriptors. They had currency.

The other side of the threshold, this side, had none of these things and so for two and a half years I assumed I was in a no-man’s land, a long dark tunnel, a desert, whereas in fact it was the place called eldership. And because it is qualitatively different than the place I’d left in early 2020 I didn’t recognise it. In place of ‘knowns’ it was a place full of uncertainties and paradoxes, in place of heroes it had vulnerabilities, in place of external tangibles it had deep inner work.

What I recently realised is the reason I hadn’t seen where I already was, was the very issue that has had my attention for years now. Our societies, our culture, in the west doesn’t recognise elders in its lexicon, it doesn’t inspire you to aspire to become one, it doesn’t identify or honour them, it doesn’t offer them to people who need them and it doesn’t point the youth towards them.  For other non-western cultures that I have worked in, young people know of elders, their societies honour them, middle aged people aspire to be and expect to become elders in their communities. Like Hawkins colleague, retirement isn’t an end for them, but simply a doorway to eldership, down a well-trodden threshold, navigated by countless generations before them. Whilst getting older in no way makes someone an elder, in other cultures it at least points towards it, offers it, creates an aspiration for it.

I realised I couldn’t see eldership in myself, even though I’d long aspired to it, because no one was standing at the threshold of me ending my leadership role in 2020 and giving me a name for what was happening next. They only knew ‘work’ or ‘retire’. There was no recognised rite of passage being spoken of, no celebration of crossing a threshold, no one describing what this new place was going to look like in my experience.

Eldership has a whole new set of definers, as I’m calling them. We grow up talking about work and roles and jobs, whereas eldership is about who you are, the wisdom you’ve accumulated, where your feet are in the world, what you offer to your peers and especially the next generation.  We grow up focussed on a continuum of educate-work-retire-die, whereas eldership is based on educate-work-wisdom-contribution-legacy-being. We grow up with a journey model of life where you go through trials and challenges and arrive at your place of reward, whereas eldership is embracing the fact that you are both at the party and in a dark night of unknowing all at same the time. As a good friend of mine put it, we need to “make peace with the fact that we are being unravelled and built up simultaneously” as we embrace the breaking down the old learned ways of how we defined ourselves and in the same moment finding new life; death and resurrection are all part of the everyday soup of an elder’s life, rather than the destination. See it more like a circle than the end of a straight line. It is from this paradoxical place that elders contribute to the world and leave a legacy.  One of the problems of death is when we view it as the end of hero-journey continuum, rather than it being part of the circle of a very complex messiness of experiences that we call eldership.

Of course, it’s a choice. At the end of our working life there are two doors. One marked retirement and aging, the other marked eldership and legacy. The first door offers many distractions from security, successes, to golf, that it has perfected to help massage us along the journey. The second door requires that we rediscover the elder in ourselves, find a way of naming it, recognising it, celebrating it, creating rites of passage for it, inviting this and the upcoming generation to aspire to it.  

Remember Meade’s sentence at the start of this article where he said When a society abandons it elders, the elders abandon themselves.  In such a place no one knows if they are an elder or not.

No one has named it.

No one has flagged it up.

No one knows that elders exist

There are no rites of passage or graduations or celebrations of it. If we cannot see our place as elders in the culture, then we cannot see the possibilities for ourselves. I can see why I hadn’t got the confidence of Leonard Cohen to voice my aspirations. The culture has abandoned elders and I had abandoned myself.

So I’m reframing Meade’s words to look something like,

When a society rediscovers its elders, the elders start to discover themselves.

It becomes a new virtuous cycle for the generations ahead.

[1] The story is told by Peter himself in the foreword to my book Becoming Mandela 2021

[2] Let Africa Lead Reuel Khoza   Johannesburg: Vezubuntu 2006

[3] Sony 2022