LIFE LESSONS

LISTEN TO YOUR ELDERS

"LISTEN TO YOUR ELDERS!"

Anathema, right?

Who wants to listen to a bunch of old wrinkled people droning on and on and on about (insert appropriate croaky/indignant voice) "Back in my day..." and "When I was your age..." and the mother of them all: "I was you once!"

No you fucking weren't! Right?

There's no relevance. Back then, their world was a different place- as foreign to you as those boring slabs of writing describing times past in textbooks . Who cares? Ye, so they suffered hardships and wars and famines and depressions and any manner of injustices. Why do they, though, feel compelled to tell you- like you're supposed to give a damn about things that happened before your time? Right?

I mean it's bloody boring. Then you have the whole "I'm older, so I know better than you," thing going on. And you in turn rebel and say "Fuck you, you may be older but I know better! You can't tell ME what to do!"

And you do know better, of course. I mean you have the world at your fingertips. You control your life to the nth degree- most of it on Social Media. Right? You live on a 'need to know basis'- simplified; you need to know something, you type some words into your phone, and there you have it. The answer. No need to think or even bypass that and ask someone. You can't beat this instantaneous knowledge. Right?

Wrong.

(Insert appropriate croaky/indignant voice:)

"Back in my day, extended families or large social groups sat together- irrespective of age, ye? You go to group gatherings/family things today however... the 'elders' are sat together, the 'children' sat separately. It irks me, this deliberate segregation!"

... I had cause to say this to someone today.

Took the recipient of this particular irk (Poor Renn...) quite some time to grasp what I was trying to convey. He had to lose his egocentric view of things first- quite a feat for one of his generation. What do I mean? He had to stop 'identifying with' and 'justifying' and offering up things like "ye, I thought that too," or "ye, I did that too and this was the result," and "ye, I have tried over and over to make them see my point of view but I've stopped trying, what's the use?"

Ego-driven exchanges lead to clashes of both ego and will. There IS no use to those.

What do I mean by I had cause though?

We were discussing something when the thought hit me: Everything I was doing in my life was an effort to 'preserve' certain knowledge. More and more, I was imparting knowledge; keenly aware that my time with my sons (and my other 'adopted' kids) was limited.

Of course, this led me to wonder WHY I was a magnet to the young ones. Why I was 'separated' in their minds from the rest of the 'elders' around them. Why they could 'talk' to me as though to an equal.

THEN! I realised (quite a shock!) that I was in fact (and largely unconsciously) trying to preserve what I'd amassed in my head- by passing it on to the next generations! This, out of desperation brought on by what I was seeing around me: the systematic 'dying' of the will to learn from one's elders.

You've all heard of the "Dark Ages"... a period in our history which for reasons still disputed to this day... paused man's progress. Like someone switched the lights off for a few centuries. Nobody home.

Then... we had the "Renaissance"; a buoyant period of growth, innovation and vigorous discussion and expression.

The first Dark ages- books were burned (as is alleged) and thus certain 'knowledge' was lost to us forever. The zealots - or whoever drove this first destruction - targeted 'physical' knowledge- the stuff in books and manuscripts and papyrus leaves. They went after the written word.