This blog is written by Lee Gale Gruen to help baby boomers, seniors, retirees, and those soon to retire find joy, excitement, and satisfaction in life after retirement. Her public lecture on this subject is titled: “Reinventing Yourself in Your Retirement.” Her memoir, Adventures with Dad: A Father and Daughter’s Journey Through a Senior Acting Class, is available by clicking here Amazon.com. Click here for her website: http://AdventuresWithDadTheBook.com
Now, on to my blog:
What does it mean to be a tribal elder? Today, we call them senior citizens. However, they are the same block of people–the long-lived inhabitants of a society. If we examine primitive tribes from civilizations past, and even those still existing, we see that it was the older members who were revered and sought after for advice and words of wisdom as to how to comport oneself and thrive. Why is that?
The answer is simple yet complex. As we age, we amass more and more life experiences. Human beings use their resultant skills to inform future behavior. Insight and judgment are part of the stew: if we burn our hand on the stove, we learn not to put it there again.
Once folks have accumulated enough general proficiency, most become wise. Wisdom, of course, takes many forms and passes through the filter of the individual and their unique life experiences. Nevertheless, on certain basic issues, those paths often lead to similar endings.
Seniors are all tribal elders. We are cast into that role by the passage of time, whether we like it or not. We have a responsibility to generations that come after us to hold our role sacred and fulfill it to the best of our ability. Petty things like personal interest or bias may blemish the advice of some tribal elders, and their consensus may skew in the direction of one extreme or another at any given time. However, the group dynamic in most cases functions to hold those members at bay, discouraging their views from being adopted as the long-term norm.
It is the group function that seems to be the most successful at arriving at the best decision. We see this concept in court trials, corporate board meetings, the U.S. Congress, and throughout all walks of life, big and small. The group process is the best hope for how to proceed wisely, and tribal elders are the repository of experience to direct that process. So, if you are a senescent society member, tread carefully. Your words and actions are not just for your benefit, but also for those who follow.
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Photo credit: Ethan Prater on Visual hunt / CC BY
It was only supposed to be a fun gathering at my place. I had recently moved to a new condo four hundred miles from my longtime home to live closer to family members. I decided to have them over for dinner to show off my new digs.
We all strive to survive and thrive. We depend on others to help us toward that end; we cannot do it alone. So, we too, must help others, and “others” includes the animals of the world.
Here’s a short primer on the kangaroo joey: when born at about 33 days, it is like an embryo: blind, hairless, and a few centimeters long–the size of a jelly bean. It makes it way from the birth canal to the mother’s pouch by wiggling through her fur. It remains inside the pouch suckling one of four teats which becomes enlarged to hold the joey in place. In about six months, the baby roo starts to make forays outside for short periods of time. It leaves Mom’s comfy digs permanently between eight and eleven months.
Is it me, or has the noise level in our environment risen sharply? To my mind, noise has reached pollution levels, like being enveloped in a constant foghorn. I can’t seem to walk into any establishment these days where I’m not hit broadside by the noise level inside.
This time of year, I usually receive a plethora of holiday letters via email or snail mail from various family members, friends, or even acquaintances. The contents usually follow a formula: recapping the sender’s year with snippets of what they and their loved ones have done during that time. I don’t know how or when this practice started, but I don’t remember it in the first half of my life.
Some events make an immediate and abrupt change in our lives. When you have a baby, one moment you’re not the parent of (insert the long pondered name you gave your adorable offspring), and the next moment you are, and your life is never the same. When you’re involved in a major accident, one moment you don’t have four broken limbs and a fractured skull, and the next moment you do, and your life is never the same.
