II. Young and Old

The Dance of the Generations

Introduction

Since my mid-twenties, I’ve been lucky to work with people younger than I. When I began teaching college, I had only a few years on my students—but for some inexplicable reason, the age gap between us grew wider as time went by. For the past three decades, as a workshop and retreat facilitator, I’ve often worked with people twenty to forty years my junior. Without these relationships across the generations, my life would have been so much poorer, and my aging would have been deprived of a source of vitality.

When young and old connect, it’s like joining the poles of a battery. Together, we generate energy for personal and social change that an age-segregated society cuts off. The social conditions that keep us apart aren’t going to change any time soon. But elders can reach out to the young, many of whom yearn for us to take an interest in them, their fears, their dreams, and their futures.

The first essay in this chapter, “The Music of Mentoring,” comes from my own experience of being a mentor. But its roots reach back to the years when I was mentored, to the elders who graced my life and helped me find my path when I was young. Mentors kept showing up for me until I was in my mid-thirties—then they stopped coming.

I grieved that fact for a while, until I saw the secret hidden in plain sight: it was my turn to pay it forward by serving as a mentor for members of the rising generation. Then I found another secret hidden behind the first one: when I help young people flourish, they return the favor.

“Welcome to the Human Race” is a letter to my friend and colleague Courtney Martin. For several years, she and I have been online weekly columnists at On Being Studios. One week, Courtney wrote an open letter to me about the struggles that people in their mid-thirties, especially women, have around questions of purpose, and invited me to respond with an open letter to her.

“Living from the Inside Out” is a commencement speech I gave to the Class of 2015 at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. As a rule, I don’t enjoy giving graduation talks. I feel like a stranger who’s crashing a party of family and friends where people are polite, but would just as soon I wasn’t there. So I do the job my host has asked me to do as well as I can, knowing that my real job is to get out of the way so the party can begin. But the Naropa University commencement felt genuinely welcoming, and it gave me another chance to help generate some intergenerational electricity.

“November 22nd” is a poem I wrote on the forty-fifth anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. On that date in 1963, I was a twenty-four-year-old graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley. I remember exactly where I was when I got the news, of course: Cody’s Bookstore on Telegraph Avenue. In that moment, I began my journey from youthful naiveté to a more tragic view of life, while setting off on a quest to find meaning beyond the madness.

The Music of Mentoring

Every spring, commencement speakers take the stage across the country to tell the graduates, “Our hopes for the future are in your hands.” I have an urgent message for these speakers: in the name of God, don’t do it!

It’s unfair to lay all responsibility for the future on the younger generation. After all, the problems they face are partly due to the fact that we, their elders, screwed up. Worse still, it’s not true that the young alone are in charge of what comes next. We—young and old together—hold the future in our hands. If our common life is to become more compassionate, creative, and just, it will take an intergenerational effort.

Let’s stop talking about “passing the baton” to the young as we elders finish running our laps. Since most of us are more skilled at sitting than at running, let’s change the metaphor and invite young adults to join the orchestra. As we sit together, we can help them learn to play their instruments—while they help us learn the music of the emerging world, which they hear more clearly than we do. Together we can compose something lovelier and more alive than the current cacophony, something in which dissonance has a place but does not dominate.

Many people, said Oliver Wendell Holmes, “die with all their music in them.”¹ I was saved from that sad fate by a series of mentors who reached out to me when I was young to help me find my own music and learn how to play it. Now I have chance after chance to pass that gift along to the next generation, whose music is waiting to be heard. So does every elder who’s within reach of a younger person.

When I ask people to tell me about their great mentors, they almost always respond with words akin to what I’ve said about my own:

My mentors saw more in me than I saw in myself. They evoked that “more” in many ways—challenging me, cheering for me, helping me understand that failure is part of the deal. Then my mentors opened doors for me, or at least pointed me toward them. When I was willing to walk through those doors, I found purpose and meaning. My mentors changed my life.

Age and experience have taught me that mentoring is not a one-way street. It’s a mutuality in which two people evoke the potentials in each other. To borrow a phrase from theologian Nelle Morton, mentoring is about “hearing one another to speech.”² Equally important, mentoring gives us a chance to welcome one another into a relationship that honors our vulnerability and our need for each other.³ Mentoring is a gift exchange in which we elders receive at least as much as we give, often more.

As elders, we know—or should know—that we have gifts to offer the young. In many cases, we’ve been where they are and done what they’re doing. We’ve fallen down and gotten back up, learned from our failures, lived to tell the tale, and gone on to get a few things right. When the moment comes to share our stories with the young, we can help them find their way through the thickets of life and work.

I once led a daylong faculty workshop focused on the optimal conditions for student learning. At lunch, I sat with seven professors, all men. One began talking about how he hit the wall in college when he failed the organic chemistry course that stood between him and the medical degree his father wanted him to get. “It was the most devastating moment of my young life,” he said, “but it led me toward a career in literature that has fed my soul.”

Everyone at the table, including me, had a story about a youthful failure that morphed into fulfillment. As people got ready to return to the workshop, I asked, “How many of you have told your story of ‘creative failure’ to your students?”

When no one’s hand went up, I said, “Your classrooms are filled with students who feel like failures in some area of their lives, maybe in your course. Your stories could help some of them catch a glimmer of hope. So please, please tell them when the moment is ripe.”

We elders have gifts for the young, but the young are often unaware of the gifts they have for us. They rarely understand, for example, that when they approach an older person for mentoring, they assuage our fear that we’re over the hill and out of the game, that younger folks regard us as irrelevant. Few people in their twenties know the power of saying to someone like me—who’s seen twenty nearly four times—“I want to learn from you.”

The young also bring gifts of energy, vision, and hope that hard experience has stolen from me, often without my knowing it. They soften my cynicism when I see them taking on a problem I regard as intractable, approaching it from a new angle that just might work. “Once more into the breach,” I think, “as long as I can go with them.”

I disagree with elders who say, “We must keep the young from making the same mistakes we made.” They’re going to make mistakes, but they’re not going to make the same ones we did. They are not us, their world is not the same as the one in which we grew up, and it’s possible that they’re wiser than we were.

So let’s share our experience with younger folks in ways that help them step up, not back. Then let’s walk alongside them as they “do it anyway,” which happens to be the title of a fine book by Courtney Martin.⁴ In it, she tells the stories of eight young activists who do what needs doing even when the smart money says it can’t be done. When they fall down, as change agents invariably do, we can help them get up, or simply be inspired as we watch them do it on their own. Maybe their next try will be one of those delicious moments when the smart money proves itself dumb.

There’s much more to be said about the gifts the young offer the old, including the way many of them walk so unselfconsciously across the so-called lines of difference between us, as if deep down we had more in common than appears on the surface. Which we do, of course.

But rather than enumerating all the gifts the young have to offer, I’ll close by naming one more that too often goes unseen and unsung. Unlike many folks my age, the young people I work with waste no time grieving the collapse of the “old order,” of the religious, educational, vocational, and political structures that helped form their elders’ lives. When today’s young adults were born, many of those institutions were well on their way to becoming dysfunctional.

Instead of bemoaning what’s on its way out or already gone, many of the young adults I know are inventing forms of work and life that hold great promise—from political movements, to religious life, to staying connected in communities of meaning. They’re also crafting independent careers and creating alternative workplaces, declaring their freedom from corporations that force people into rigid roles and treat their employees as replaceable cogs in a machine.

That freedom allows them to be loyal to their own gifts and visions, and to the relationships required to bring those visions to life. I find it inspiring to hang out with people who aren’t bemoaning the loss of what no longer serves us well. Instead, they’re exploring possibilities that we, young and old together, can midwife into life.

As I was working on this essay, one of my mentees reminded me that I’d written about mentoring in my 1997 book, The Courage to Teach, a fact I’d forgotten. (Here’s another gift the young offer the old—they serve as auxiliary memory banks.) Now that I’m old enough to mix metaphors without caring what my English teachers say, I’m going to quote from that book, and invite the young to join us elders in “an ancient dance” instead of “the orchestra:”

Mentors and apprentices are partners in an ancient human dance, and one of teaching’s great rewards is the daily chance it gives us to get back on the dance floor. It is the dance of the spiraling generations, in which the old empower the young with their experience and the young empower the old with new life, reweaving the fabric of the human community as they touch and turn.⁵

Either way, orchestra or dance, intergenerational rhythms can move our hearts, our minds, and our feet— and might even help move the world to a better place.

Welcome to the Human Race

Dear Courtney,

I have many reasons to treasure our friendship. Among other things, you’ve invited me into your world, an act of trust, which has made my world larger, a true gift. You and your thirty-something friends have opened my eyes to realities and possibilities that someone like me—a white, straight male who’s more than twice your age—might otherwise have missed. I’m ever grateful.

At the end of your letter, you ask me (with a grin) to make you wiser. That’s way above my pay grade. We both know that everyone has inner wisdom, and that one of the best ways to evoke it is in dialogue. When we knock down the walls that keep us apart (e.g., gender and age), and meet in that in-between space, we all have a chance to wise up. Already, in this exchange of letters, I’ve grown in my understanding of the questions you raised, questions about women and men and the different paths we walk.

As I read your account of the young women in your women’s group—some of whom lament that they don’t have a compelling sense of purpose—two feelings rise up in me.

I feel angry, again, at a society that makes so many people believe that they are “not enough” by devaluing certain roles and discouraging certain people from pursuing their goals. At the same time, I feel hope in the fact that you and your friends talk openly and honestly about your pain and its sources. That’s a vital step in caring for personal well-being and in animating every social change movement I know anything about.

Regarding your friends’ lack of a sense of purpose, you wrote, “We don’t wake up every morning and leap out of bed for work that is easy to express in a sound bite and directed and in pursuit of one clear goal.”

Honestly, if someone told me she woke up that way, I’d tell her to stop marketing her life and start living it. I’m one of those “diffuse” people you wrote about—I have a lot of irons in a lot of fires. When I’m asked for the “elevator speech” that sums up my work, I respond, “I always take the stairs, so I don’t have an elevator speech. If you’d like to walk with me a while, I’d love to talk.” I don’t know of a life worth living or work worth doing that can be reduced to a sound bite.

The only story I know well is my own, so let me return briefly to the thrilling days of yesteryear. When I was in my thirties, “purpose” was very unclear to me—my vocation didn’t begin to feel coherent until I was in my early fifties. At thirty, all I knew for sure was that I didn’t want my life and work to be defined and bound by big organizations. So I worked in marginal places, turning down invitations that might get me embedded in “centers of power.”

For example, with a PhD in hand, I became a community organizer instead of a university professor. I made little money and feared dropping off the professional radar, but I valued my creative freedom more than money or status. (I had a family, a wife and three children, and I did not have a trust fund to fall back on. But clearly I had a safety net in terms of race, gender, and class privilege, along with a debt-free degree, financed by a fellowship.)

I never saw my vocational journey in terms of “achieving great things.” I saw it then as I see it now: a series of probes into my gifts and the needs of the world, trying to discover where they might intersect. Some of those probes took me into the light, and others took me into dark places. I’ve come to regard my probes as “experiments with truth,” to borrow Gandhi’s description of his life. Like all experiments, some succeeded and some failed.⁶

You wrote, “I was looking around this table at these women, all of them doing incredible work in the world while also being loving mothers, friends, partners, neighbors, and thinking, ‘It’s crazy that this group of women doesn’t see themselves as having purpose.’” My hunch is that a lot of your women friends—certainly the ones I’ve met—are making probes of the sort I made, “living the questions” in ways that have meaning right now and will someday take them into meaningful answers.⁷

I wouldn’t try to talk your friends out of their feelings, of course. As you well know, feeling are feelings, not abstract ideas, and must be honored as such. But I might invite your friends to examine their feelings, to see what insights they offer into their souls, their lives, and their work. If I wanted to give them a gentle nudge, I might suggest that they congratulate themselves for refusing to foreclose prematurely on purpose, as this society keeps pressing young people to do.

Courtney, you asked some big questions about gender differences in how we hold vocation and values. As a recovering sociologist, I have little confidence in big generalizations on questions of that sort. All I know for sure is that the men I know best have struggled with questions of purpose as much as your women friends do.

Yes, this society opens more vocational paths for men than for women, and offers men bigger material rewards for walking them. That’s institutional sexism, which must be eradicated, as must all the other “-isms” that go hand in hand with it. But in my view, few of the well-paved paths in this society are “paths with a heart,” paths that lead to meaning. Paths of that sort have to be hacked out of complexity and confusion by men and women alike—and I regard you and some of your age-mates as trailblazers.

Among the men I know, few are so consumed by an egotistical sense of singular purpose that they ignore all else that’s important in life. But that’s not to say that all is well among us. Far from it. I’ve seen too many men lose their sense of identity—and sometimes their integrity—as their work roles diminish or disappear.

I don’t believe this happens because we men think too much of ourselves. It happens because we haven’t done the inner work required to develop a sense of self that’s grounded in who we are rather than what we do. When men lose sight of true north, it’s more from inner emptiness than from self-importance. That’s when some men go “looking for love in all the wrong places”—places that sometimes involve exploitative sex and substance abuse but more often involve lust for power, wealth, and/or fame.

The most common spiritual malady among the men I know is not the kind of ego inflation that “disappears” everything else in their lives. It’s what was once called “melancholy” that, when it grows deep enough, can cause one’s sense of self to disappear. As you know, I speak from experience.

This could change, I think, if more men came together—as you and your friends do—to talk vulnerably about their frustrations, fears, and hopes. There’s a reason why one of the best-known books on male depression is titled I Don’t Want to Talk About It.⁸

Your comments about men’s moral failings lead me to say a few words not about others but about myself. Something about “casting the first stone,” as I recall. You know me pretty well, so you know that I have a lifetime supply of flaws and faults. I have a hunch that the best words I’ve ever written have been written from and to my own mixed condition, written in hopes they might speak to others who know that being human means being broken and yet whole.

The word integrity comes from a root that means “intact.” At bottom, it has to do with being “integral,” whole and undivided—which means embracing our brokenness as an integral part of life. Do men compromise their integrity more than women? I don’t know, though I’m inclined to think we share this particular weakness as part of the human condition.

What I do know is that I yearn for the day when men and women alike can sit with people they trust, including each other, and share the journey toward broken-wholeness.

I’ll close with one of the big questions I’m holding as I enter the late autumn of my life: Given all my mess-ups, how have I managed to survive myself ? As age gives me an occasional glimpse into “the simplicity on the other side of complexity,” a few answers become clear: grace and forgiveness, the unconditional love of family and friends, and the openness of folks who’ve shared their stories with me, helping me to feel less alone in my struggles.⁹ More grace. More forgiveness. More loving and open friends.

Courtney, you are among the people who, in one way or another, have blessed me with the most healing words I know, words spoken not in spite of but because of my mess-ups: “Welcome to the human race!”

Maybe my main purpose in life is to pass on those words to people who need them as much as I do, so that they can pass them along to others—and all of us can get on with offering our gifts to the world.

Maybe that’s what you and your friends are already doing for each other, and for the people whose lives you touch.

With love and gratitude,

Parker

Living from the Inside Out

I’m grateful to be with you today at a university that’s been pioneering in contemplative teaching and learning for the past forty years. The seeds you’ve been planting are now growing across American higher education in ways no one could have predicted when Naropa was founded. It’s a mode of higher education that benefits not only you personally but the larger world as well.

It’s an honor to share this important moment in the lives of the Class of 2015. I’ve brought two modest graduation gifts with me. The first is a collection of six brief suggestions about the road ahead of you. The second is a promise to stop talking in about twelve minutes so you can get on that road sooner rather than later.

My first suggestion is simple: be reckless when it comes to affairs of the heart. Now, lest someone think I’m trying to corrupt America’s youth—I’m looking at you, parents and grandparents!—what I mean is to fall madly in love with life. Be passionate about some part of the natural and/or human worlds, and take risks on its behalf, no matter how vulnerable they make you.

No one ever died saying, “I’m so glad for the self-centered, self-serving, and self-protective life I lived.” Offer yourself to the world—your energies, your gifts, your visions, your spirit—with openhearted generosity.

But understand that when you live this way, you will soon learn how little you know and how easy it is to fail. To grow in love and service, you must value ignorance as much as knowledge and failure as much as success.

This is ironic advice on a day when we celebrate your success at passing a rigorous test of knowledge. But clinging to what you already know is the path to an unlived life. So cultivate beginner’s mind, walk straight into your not-knowing, and take the risk of failing and falling, again and again—then getting up to learn again and again. That’s the path to a life lived large in the service of love, truth, and justice.

Second, as you integrate ignorance and failure into your knowledge and success, do the same with all the alien parts of yourself. Take everything that’s bright and beautiful in you and introduce it to your shadow side. Let your altruism meet your egotism, your generosity meet your greed, your joy meet your grief.

Everyone has a shadow, even high-minded people like us. Especially high-minded people like us! But when you are able to say, “I am all of the above, my shadow as well as my light,” the shadow’s power is put in service of the good. As a person who’s made three deep dives into his own shadow side, and lived to serve another day, I don’t speak lightly of this. I simply know it is true.

When you acknowledge and embrace all that you are, you give yourself a gift that will benefit the rest of us as well. Our world is in desperate need of leaders who live what Socrates called “an examined life.” In critical areas like politics, religion, business, and mass media, too many leaders refuse to name and claim their shadow because they don’t want to look weak. With shadows that go unexamined and unchecked, they use their power heedlessly in ways that harm countless people and undermine public trust in our major institutions.

If you value self-knowledge, you will become the leaders we need to help renew this society. But if, for some reason, you choose to live an unexamined life, I beg of you: do not take a job that involves other people!

Third, as you welcome whatever you find alien within yourself, extend that same welcome to whatever you find alien in the outer world. I don’t know any virtue more important these days than hospitality to the stranger, to those we perceive as “other” than us.

The old majority in this society—people who look like me—is on its way out. By 2045, the majority of Americans will be people of color. Many in the old majority fear that fact—and their fear, shamelessly manipulated by too many political misleaders, is bringing us down.

The renewal this nation needs will not come from people who are afraid of “otherness” in race, ethnicity, religion, or sexual orientation. Because of that fear, our once-vital society is gridlocked and stagnant, if not actively regressing. Our main hope for renewal is diversity welcomed and embraced.

I recently met a professor who left a predominantly white college to teach undocumented youth in Southern California. When I asked him how it was going, he said, “Best move I ever made. My previous students felt entitled and demanded to be entertained. My undocumented students are hungry to learn, hard working, and courageous enough to keep moving beyond their comfort zones.”

America will be renewed by people with those qualities. And if we who have privilege and power will welcome them, collaborate with them, and help remove the obstacles in their way, the years ahead will be full of promise for all of us.

Fourth, take on big jobs worth doing, jobs like the spread of love, peace, and justice. That means refusing to be seduced by our cultural obsession with being effective as measured by short-term results. We all want our work to make a difference. But if we take on the big jobs and our only measure of success is the next quarter’s bottom line, we’ll end up disappointed, dropping out, and in despair.

Think of someone you respect because he or she lived a life devoted to high values: a Rosa Parks, a Nelson Mandela, or someone known only to a few. When that person died, was he or she able to say, “I’m sure glad I took on that job because now everyone can check it off their to-do list”? No, our heroes take on impossible jobs and stay with them for the long haul because they live by a standard that supersedes effectiveness.

The name of that standard is “faithfulness”—faithfulness to your gifts, to the needs of the world, and to offering your gifts to whatever needs are within your reach.

The tighter we cling to the norm of effectiveness, the smaller the tasks we’ll take on, because they are the only ones that get short-term results. Public education is a tragic example. We no longer care about educating children—a big job that’s never done. We care only about getting kids to pass tests with measurable results, whether or not those tests measure what matters. In the process, we’re crushing the spirits of a lot of good teachers and vulnerable kids: there are millions of kids in this country who long to be treasured, not measured.

Care about being effective, of course. But care even more about being faithful, as countless teachers do—faithful to your calling and to the true needs of those entrusted to your care. You won’t get the big jobs done in your lifetime. But if, at the end of the road, you can say, “I was faithful,” you can check out with a sense of satisfaction.

Fifth, since suffering as well as joy comes with being human, I urge you to remember this: violence is what happens when we don’t know what else to do with our suffering. Sometimes we aim that violence at ourselves—as in overwork that leads to burnout or various forms of substance abuse. Sometimes we aim that violence at other people: racism, sexism, and homophobia often come from people trying to relieve their suffering by claiming superiority over others.

The good news is that suffering can be transformed into something that brings life, not death. It happens every day. At my age, I know many people who’ve suffered the loss of the dearest person in their lives. At first, they go into deep grief, certain that their lives will never again be worth living. But then they slowly awaken to the fact that—not in spite of their loss but because of it—they’ve become bigger, more compassionate people, with more capacity of heart to take in other people’s sorrows and joys.

These are brokenhearted people, but their hearts have been broken open rather than broken apart. So every day, exercise your heart by taking in life’s pains and joys. That kind of exercise will make your heart supple, so that when it breaks—which it surely will—it will break not into a fragment grenade but into a greater capacity for love.

Finally, I quote Saint Benedict, who said, “Daily keep your death before your eyes.” That may sound like a morbid practice, but I assure you it isn’t. If you hold a healthy awareness of your own mortality, your eyes will be opened to the glory and grandeur of life. And that will evoke all of the virtues I’ve named, as well as those I haven’t, such as hope, generosity and gratitude.

If the unexamined life is not worth living, it’s equally true that the unlived life is not worth examining. So I’ll close with this brief quote from the writer Diane Ackerman, who reminds us to live—truly live—our lives:

The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one’s curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills every day. Where there is no risk, the emotional terrain is flat and unyielding, and, despite all its dimensions, valleys, pinnacles, and detours, life will seem to have none of its magnificent geography, only a length. It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.¹⁰

Once again, a deep bow to the Class of 2015. To each and every one of you, traveling mercies and many blessings as you make the journey from one mystery to the next and the next and the next.

November 22nd

On this day long years ago, our promising young president was killed. He was far too young to die and I too young to watch my world unravel as it did. I grieved my loss, our loss, then started to reweave—a work, a life, a world—not knowing then what I know now: the world unravels always, and it must be rewoven time and time again.

You must keep collecting threads—threads of meaning, threads of hope, threads of purpose, energy and will— along with all the knowledge, skill that every weaver needs. You must keep on weaving—stopping sometimes only to repair your broken loom—weave a cloak of warmth and light against the dark and cold, a cloak in which to wrap whoever comes to you in need—the world with all its suffering, those near at hand, yourself.

And, if you are lucky, you will find along the way the thread with which you can reweave your own tattered life, the thread that more than any other laces us with warmth and light, making both the weaver and the weaving true—the red thread they call Love, the thread you hold, then hand along, saying to another, “You.”

—PARKER J. PALMER

For several years, Courtney Martin and I have had weekly columns at On Being Studios. In one of her columns, Courtney wrote me an open letter based on conversations in her women’s group, titled “Dear Parker: Purpose with a Capital P” (see http://tinyurl.com/ybrxk22h), and invited me to respond. This is what I wrote.

This is an edited version of my commencement address to the Class of 2015 at Naropa University, Boulder, Colorado. The talk can be viewed on YouTube at http://tinyurl.com/y8bjdzce.