"Few things in America are less forgivable than getting older."

Is life an explosion of youth, then you reach your peak relevance, importance, and connectivity, and from there things taper off and then you get older and then you die?

I've been thinking about this a lot lately.

I love Thai food and every week after yoga practice I eat dinner at a favorite Thai restaurant. All the servers know me, but there is one server that I enjoy seeing the most. I think she likes me too, not just because I tip her well, but I think she also enjoys the conversation. I recently learned that she plays in a band. She creates original material, but she also loves to interpret old songs in her own unique style.

There is a sense where something can be new in relation to time, but still be stale. And there is also a sense where something can be old in relation to time and still be new—like old songs sung in a new way. But it seems in our society that if something is new it is relevant, but if it is old it is irrelevant.

The line goes something like this: You are young. Then you do something, hopefully something unique. You reach your peak, and then you taper off. For a moment, it seems, you have your glory, and then at some point it's over and then you die. You die because there is something new that has replaced what was once new—there is a new way to go, a new style, a new theory—the next new thing.

There are reasons why older does not necessarily mean wiser, however. I think George Packer's <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/02/youth-age-music-news.html?mobify=0">comments</a> in the New Yorker are spot on:
<blockquote>Something unusual stopped me in these sentences from a Times article about a state-by-state study of flaws in the American electoral system: “A main goal of the exercise, which grew out of Professor Gerken’s 2009 book, ‘The Democracy Index,’ was to shame poor performers into doing better, she said. ‘Peer pressure produces horrible things like Britney Spears and Justin Bieber and tongue rings,’ Professor Gerken said. ‘But it also produces professional peer pressure.’” It almost took my breath away: Professor Heather Gerken, who is in her early forties, felt free to tell a reporter that Britney Spears and Justin Bieber, not to mention tongue rings, are horrible. Gerken broke one of the unwritten rules of being middle-aged: don’t go after the young and what they love. Not in print, anyway. Don’t open yourself up to the charge of curmudgeonliness, because the inevitable retort—“You just don’t get it, Professor! You sound like your parents!”—is probably accurate, certainly unanswerable, and absolutely devastating. Few things in America are less forgivable than getting older.</blockquote>
If there is an unwritten rule not to go after the young and what they love, there is also an implicit question that asks, "I am old, what do I have to say to the young?" The answer, paradoxically, is that when you have the most amount of time, the most amount of wisdom, and sometimes the most amount of resources, you go to a place that guarantees you will not have influence on future generations—you retire. You leave us. And this is the problem: you can't leave us when we need you the most.

In 1978, Soviet geologists discovered a <a href="http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/For-40-Years-This-Russian-Family-Was-Cut-Off-From-Human-Contact-Unaware-of-World-War-II-188843001.html?device=iphone&amp;device=ipad">family</a> of six lost in the Siberian taiga. Cut off from all human contact for 40 years, this Russian family lived on the side of a mountain 150 miles from the nearest settlement. It was an astonishing discovery because the Soviets had no records of anyone living in this area. Karp Lykov was an Old Believer, a member of a fundamentalist Russian Orthodox sect whose worship style has not changed since the 17th century. During Stalin's Great Purge of the 1930's, the Soviets killed Lykov's brother, and in 1936, Lykov fled to Siberia escaping religious persecution, retreating further from civilization deep in the Siberian taiga. Living in isolation from the rest of the world, Lykov and his family were unaware of World War II and lived on the edge of famine making survival next to impossible. Two of his children had never seen a human being that was not a member of their family. Perhaps the saddest aspect of the Lykovs' strange story was the rapidity with which the family went into decline after they re-established contact with the outside world. Only Lykov's daughter, Agafia remains, and she will not leave her home in the Siberian taiga.

Most people believe they are on the inevitable slide into irrelevance. I can see why: art, movies, culture, and even business reinforce this idea. When am I going to lose it? Can I keep up? There is some wisdom that you only get through having lived it and through years. There is an authority that comes from being older, but there is also a potential newness that is fresh as ever—a sifting and sorting of all I have experienced—creating a non-anxious, non-judgemental presence because I am older, and my roots run deep and I have seen it all.

We live the <a href="http://storylineblog.com/2013/01/28/when-you-fail-to-live-a-great-story/">stories</a> we keep telling ourselves, and telling meaningful stories overlaps with living a meaningful life. There was a time when humans intuitively grappled with aging rooted in the divine redemptive activity of God. But unfortunately we are telling a different story—a story about how religion has skewed our perception of aging.

Religion is new to humanity. It's been around about 5% of humanity's spiritual journey, which, on a conservative timescale, began to unfold about seventy thousand years ago. Yet most of us have grown up with a religious legacy. Unfortunately, these religious legacies have nurtured the belief that when one group checks out, the other says, "we don’t need you," and everything falls apart. In many cultures you find the older need the idealism, energy and enthusiasm of the youth and the youth need the wisdom of the older.

And when we embrace this, that's when the adventure begins.

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Photo by gugusba

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