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The most broken part of mainstream Western culture may be elderhood. While new families are far more enlightened these days about how to raise healthy children, and folks of grandparenting age have a lot of information about how to stay younger and healthier, not much attention is paid to the roles of elders in our lives. We need elders when we're young, and we are needed as elders when we're old.
It's probably been an issue for all generations, but as we baby boomers grow old enough to be called "old," we may be surprised to find ourselves face to face with the excruciating and uncharted challenge of leaving many of our deeply ingrained patterns behind. These are patterns we developed intentionally or as a matter of course while "growing up," then used to help stabilize ourselves while "maturing" into people the species hopefully would depend upon to guide it in sustainable directions. (Don't laugh.) Joining or turning into elders in intentional communities provides opportunities galore for this transformational experience.
For many boomers, taking on the mantle of eldership means setting aside the sometimes rambunctious, in-your-face, empowerment-obsessed energy we worked so hard to sustain. Or better yet, focusing it inside, where we can feed it with intention and wisdom until it becomes capable of motivating others. Isn't that the potential of eldership? Of course, not all boomers were practiced revolutionaries, but as a generation "the '60s" produced a group image for us that many identify with, even if we never sat in, dropped out, or turned on.
Life weathers us, too, and even revolutionaries become parents, business owners, and community leaders people depend upon to help hold the social fabric together. Robert Wright, in his book The Evolution of God, makes an incisive point about how far people will go (and have gone) in order to sustain a cohesive social fabric. We became hard-wired to belong through many, many millennia in which group context and group identity were fine-tuned for survival. Although some people seem to be pure recluses, for most of us our souls, if you will, long to be related, to know we are with our kin, with extended family, with our tribe.
Toss all that into the salad of modern life and...