Lessons from my Elders

The Long Fight, Taking Pause, and the Wisdom of the Elders

I wake up from a nap, the kind where you fall asleep in the daytime and wake up in the unexpected blackness of night, and roll over towards the phone on my bedside. I pick it up and unthinkingly open Instagram. The stories are so much of the same that I’ve been trying to unhinge my jaw and swallow whole for the last two years– ICE raids, the siege on Gaza, healthcare being taken away, trans friends struggling to change names and passport information, friends of all kinds fired from their now-defunded jobs, and whatever other specific horrors are hitting my timeline on this particular day. When I try to clear my head and go to the park, I’m approached by a woman making a documentary on AI ethics, she says, “things are changing so fast, with no regulation, and would you have a moment to talk to me about your thoughts on the unchecked technology policies of the Trump administration?” It’s becoming less and less that there are moments to feel anything but overwhelm, that every second counts towards a dire end unless my body is thrown right in front of whatever vehicle is hurtling down the highway today.

The next day, I’m at a food distribution tha where the line gets longer and longer every week. On a nice day in the summer, we can expect 500 people cued up to receive boxes of almost-expired produce meant to fill in the gaps that the American government would rather not acknowledge. Every week, families tell us about cuts made to their food stamps and every week the volunteer numbers swell with the hopes of being able to get first pick of the distro boxes. I put on my latex gloves and go to where I always go, which is with the crowd of old-timers who have been working the line for almost thirty years. I approach one of my favorite familiar faces, a church-going woman named Miss Amy, who has seen my Brooklyn neighborhood pass by for the last eighty some-odd years. As always, she greets me with an exuberance and kindness that brings me back to myself, giving me a hard time for missing the past week and thinking she wouldn’t notice. When she asks how I am, I tell her about the heaviness in my heart, how it feels like the news is going to swallow me up and that there’s always so much to be done and that it will never be enough. I ask if she feels this way, like the times are as dire as they feel, and she laughs out loud, “Baby, I’ve seen a lot of mess.”

Amy tells me about seeing the neighborhood through the crack epidemic, through a time when she had become accustomed to half the people on her block either dying or getting put in prison. Another woman, Linda, chimes in to tell me about the Vietnam draft and losing a generation of sons and brothers to violence. I forgot that we’ve always been living through the end times.

1964

I’ve always loved being in community with people much older than myself, and I consider myself incredibly lucky that so many of them have taken me under their wings. One of my closest friends is 70, and on any given day my phone is lighting up with texts in my coven’s group chat, whose members range from ages twenty to eighty-eight. The lessons my elders share with me are my greatest inheritance in this life, and oftentimes when I’m speaking to other friends my age about my robust squadron of intergenerational loved ones, they express a certain wistfulness of not knowing many older people they can call friends– people who are not the boomer stereotype, but genuinely kind-hearted and radical old folks who have been staying within a current of resistance and joy for their lifetimes, folks whose footsteps walked the path before my own. It is with the utmost gratitude that I share my time on earth with my elders, and I don’t know where I would be without their guidance. They bring me back home to myself.

Recently, time has been flying by with a restless unease that is fitting of the collective disintegration we’re all witnessing in real time. In the past week alone, I’ve had several conversations with friends about a feeling of impatience or urgency in every aspect of our lives, something that is being echoed in every level of the larger world. There’s a lack of long-sightedness that comes with the feeling of the ‘pressingness’ of the moment– for the climate-change generations, we’re used to living with an idea of a timer ticking down. We’re used to the idea that time is running out, the time is now, time is of the essence; to think otherwise would be ignorant at best, and downright harmful at worst.

But repeatedly, the messaging that I get from my elders is to be the calm in the center of the storm, to act tactfully rather than frantically. In organizing spaces, many folks are familiar with the phrase “it’s a marathon, not a sprint,” but this platitude is more easily said than felt. Again, the messaging we get from almost every corner of current events is that things are Urgent and things are Now. I sit across one of my friends who has been organizing for Palestinian liberation for almost fifty years, and feel myself shrink into awareness when he reminds me of all the stages he’s seen this movement go through, and all the many phases of heartbreak, grief, joy and optimism that all get wrapped up in it. It’s a perspective that I need to be reminded of, and to hear it from someone who has felt the truth of the years tally in their being hits a whole lot harder than someone trying to convince themselves of time’s laborious march onwards.

Portrait of Leila Khaled, now eighty one, on the Bethlehem border wall

When I am being swallowed by the stark cycles of pain and desperation that feel more and more dire, I consider it a spiritual imperative to talk to someone over fifty who I genuinely admire. Hearing stories of queer elders fighting through the AIDS crisis or Indigenous elders fighting for land sovereignty reminds me to have a generational state of mind, and that to be committed to a lifelong journey necessitates having a birds-eye view. I’d also like to note that those elders are some of the funniest people I’ve ever met, and it’s clear to me that part of their tirelessness comes from the unrelenting playfulness and curiosity they exude.

One of my elders, an eighty-five year-old author, prays every day for the spiritual resiliency of the younger generations. I think a lot about what that means and how to honor that prayer. A lot of it has to do with letting go of the doomsday headspace that humans are so apt to take, and shift instead to a reminder that generations of horrors have been not only survived through, but laughed through, danced through, and loved through. In the unending surges of grief and shock, we must remember to take the time to sit still and tend to the flame that we’ll pass onto the next generations. Each life is like an individual love letter to be passed down, with the lessons and stories therein lasting much longer than our time on earth ever could, and it’s okay to pause and consider what you want that letter to say.

Like many others in my community, today I’m fasting in solidarity with the people in Gaza. As I walk around with a continuous reminder of struggle in my body, I also remember that today is the new moon– a time of the month when I historically fast anyways, taking pause to feel the emptiness that comes with the beginning of a lunar cycle. Today this solitary act of slowness is felt collectively, and it’s a slowness that reminds me of the elders and the decades they’ve spent engaged in similar acts. This feeling of a “long self,” the self who is aware of the length of the journey we’re all crossing, is a sense of eldership we all have within us. Whether you’re sheltering in the wisdom of a literal elder or this inner knowing, there’s a clarity that comes along with the larger dialogue. I sit in the remembrance of the many apocalypses that have been weathered until now, and know that I am one chain link in the much longer tether towards a brighter future.

Happy new moon, reader. I hope you know you’re a part of that chain, too.