Richard Wagamese

I never imagined myself being fifty six. I turned that age recently and frankly, it amazes me. Back a handful of decades I couldn’t see myself being thirty or heaven forbid, a crusty old dinosaur of forty. But here I am. I can get a senior’s discount in some places now and lawn bowling is starting to look really appealing. There’s a touch of arthritis in one of my fingers, I don’t run as fast as I used to and the term, old-timer’s league, has a romantic resonance and alluring cachet.

Elders, they say, are holders of wisdom. What they generally mean by that is that the people we bestow that title on are recognized for the wealth of knowledge they hold about life, the world, and the spiritual life of our people. They are also role models and fit examples of lives lived according to principle.
It confuses me a great deal when people grant themselves the title of Elder.
There’s a world of difference between being a senior and being an Elder.

You meet a lot of people on your way through this life. By the time you get to 55 like me you’ve met a ton of folks. Some of them are fringe dwellers and never really get a foothold in your story and others become fixtures in your tale. The trick is that you have to learn to meet everyone openly because you never know when someone special will walk in unannounced.
Age gives you that grace. But when you’re young it’s easy to miss their influence.

It’s been rainy and cold in the mountains this spring and early summer. Mornings have dawned dismal and dark. When evening has come, the world has been a gray place and our house is so chilled and damp that we’ve had to burn wood in the fireplace. It’s odd. We’re used to dry heat in the summer and I never thought I’d see me lighting a warming fire as the summer solstice nears.

They say age offers you an elegance you never much experienced in your youth. I don’t know who said that or whether it’s necessarily true, but I sure hope it is. I lived an inelegant life for the first quarter century and it’s taken some doing to cultivate a measure of grace in the next one. At 55 the one true gift I’ve found is reflection. In the looking back I offer myself a chance to reframe a lot of experience.