AHSS The Gift of Years: Agelessness (Lesson 29)

Only children understand the impulsive, impetuous, impelling urge to throw snowballs. Only wise adults realize that unless we throw them, it is unlikely we will ever manage to escape the traces that hold us down, hold us back, at any and every age. But that can only be learned from the young. And they can only learn from us when not to do it. Doug Larson wrote, “the aging process has you firmly in tis grasp if you never get the urge to throw snowballs.”

Getting in touch with the young again is what keeps us in touch with the world. An old tire store sits on the corner of a block of rental homes. Its walls are painted with colorful silhouettes of children, playing piano, dancing, and on a stage. It is a living playhouse called “The Neighborhood Art House,” written in large purple letters above the door. Children can play the drums or practice ballet or read their poems or write their puppet shows or do oil painting and it is all for free, thanks to the people of the city. Impressive.

But just as impressive is to pass that corner in the summertime and see those children sitting bot stark still on chairs on the patio, chin in hands, eyes wide open as well-dressed men and women, all professionals of the city, past and present – lawyers, nurses, corporate types, retirees – sit in the sun and read to them aloud. The patio is filled with almost a hundred children while the parking lot is filled with almost a hundred cars as adults scurry in and out, books under their arms. Each child has a private reader who comes every day to do what no one does for the children making animal sounds or changing voices from one character to another as they go.

They bridge the difference between childhood and parenthood for these children, between freedom and authority, the way grandparents were wont to do in decades past when children and grandparents lived in the same block, same city, the same state. They fill the children with a trust of adults. They open them to adult conversation, to adult influence. They give them refuge from all the rules. They become friends, this child and that adult.

Intergenerational friendships between and older generation and a younger one are as important to the elder as they are to the child. Children give us a lifeline to the present and the future that is denied to us if we sit alone in an independent-living unit. Children release the child in us before it completely withers up and blows away. They connect us to the children of later generations in our own families, the ones we only see once a year or struggle to talk to on the phone. We are meant to be society’s wisdom center its sign of a better life to come, its storehouse of the kind of lore no books talk about.

Once a society divides the human family as a matter of course, there is no family at all anymore. Child daycare, senior living facilities, a totally segregated and fractured society emerge. We lose the connection between the generations and the lessons learned and taught through those connections. We are out of touch with the fulness of the self. Relating to a child who is not theirs enables elders to reach out beyond themselves and the confines of their own private lives to become fully human again. Having elders who are not their parents take an interest in them, showing them things their parents do not have time to do, enables the child to be anchored by an adult who is also not a disciplinarian.

Sister Joan Says: A burden of these years is allowing ourselves to become isolated from the world around us. A blessing of these years is finding a child who will help us to step out of all the old roles and become a human being again.

1. “Intergenerational friendships between an older generation and a younger one are as important to the elder as they are to the child [or young adult].” Send a card to a young person in your life with whom you have become a friend. Tell them why your friendship is so important to you.