- What would you like the last third of your life to look like?
- What wisdom do you have to “harvest” for the next generation?
- Are there relationships in your past or present that need repair?
- Are there people, perhaps even yourself, that you want to forgive or whom you wish could forgive you?
These are some of the questions we explore in workshops on spiritual eldering. We also write our own obituaries and vidduis/confessionals, and we write our ethical or spiritual wills. This work is ideally done in our fourth and fifth decades of life, and it can be done until we die.
I was fortunate to be trained to lead spiritual eldering workshops by my teacher, Rabbi Nadya Gross and in the tradition of her teacher, Rabbi Zalman Schachter Shalomi, z”l, may his memory always be for a blessing. Reb Zalman conceived of the idea that in our elder years, our developmental task is to harvest our wisdom for the next generation. It is also the time in our lives to begin to reconcile our past and present, so we may have the future we desire.
In our contemporary American culture, we are so focused on youth that we often ignore the other stages of our lives. We are busy with getting educated, making a living, raising a family, building a career. We may put money away for our aged years, and we may even write a will, but how many of us actually imagine the lives we want to be living when we’re 75, 85 or 95?
We may know that we don’t want to be a burden on our children or that we’d rather die than have to leave our own homes when we can no longer take care of ourselves alone, but what have we actually done to provide ourselves with alternatives we’d like to have available when the time comes?