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COLUMN: On friendship, and elderhood

Charles Jeanes
By Charles Jeanes
January 22nd, 2025

 

A friend is one to whom one may pour out the contents of one’s heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that gentle hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.  George Eliot

A secret about friendships in adulthood: Sometimes they are really, truly, hard.  But so often the friends we have in our adult years are the thing saving us from hitting a soul-bottom.

The truth is that even the strongest friendship bonds are not forged in stone. As life is ever changing, friendships will always ebb and flow. People change; you change. Change makes differences; differences unravel friendships.

Sometimes your closest friends fade away into the background of your life; sometimes background friends become part of your inner circle.  Sometimes brand new people enter your life and become the friends you never knew you needed; sometimes your heart aches because it misses the friendships that used to be but are no more.

No matter where you are in your adult friendship journey, don’t over-think it, nor dwell in the past. Instead, hold on tight and ride the friendship wave. Welcome the ones that find their way to you. Send peace to the ones who fade away. Cherish memories.  Love the friends that are here right now.  — adapted, by the Arc’s writer, from a Facebook post

What time hath wrought: on becoming older and changing a mind

I fully expect that whatever base I have built among readers after 13 years of writing this column, my readers have come to know me and my cast of mind.

During these years of composing and researching The Arc, I have grown from a man in late-middle age (60) into an Elder. That process is essential for the evolution of my interest in new spheres of human life, and lessening of passion for areas that used to rouse me and bring out the “Jeremiah” in my character.

I still love to study history, to comment on, and conclude from, the studies, but I care much less for present political ephemera and fighting “for a Cause.”

Elder = more at leisure for contemplation

Retirement for one such as I, is a pure privilege, replete with good health and security of home; there are few deficits to the withdrawal from the world of work, marriage, child-rearing, and community/civic engagement. I am at liberty to choose just as much activism as I wish, and am finding that grandfather attachments and duties are immensely satisfying.

I am also learning that I love the freedom to “do nothing” while my mind is at play with ideas, and to discover what I had hitherto neglected to contemplate.

Friendship is one such discovered fascination; hence the epigraph to this column.

What matters, and what one can let go

My knowing readers have seen my fondness for citing the Desiderata in the column several times over the years. https://www.sfu.ca/~wainwrig/desiderata.htm

Surprising to me is the relative unimportance in this prose-poem of friendship among the topics; the major advice is to avoid loud, aggressive people, while nothing is said about the soul-connection of friend to friend.

I think the poem is worthy of attention for people of all ages, yet it is fairly clear that people in the midst of a busy, career-pursuing, active communal life, are the ones who need the advice offered, rather more than an elder in retirement.

There is so much one can let go of, as an Elder. And so much one really learns to leave, because age allows one to push to the fringes the people and situations that one was forced by life, by work, by family, to allow in.

Elderhood is the great liberator from the force of circumstance, if one is lucky.

Wheel of Fortune

I have come to comprehend as never before in my life, that strokes of fate, fortune, health (illness), loss (gain), war, and natural disaster, are so far beyond our control that the dominant narrative that each of us is “master of our path and captain of our ship” is quite wrong, and quite harmful to the spirit. One has to know the limitation of one’s power in life. Powerful, “successful” people set the pole-star of their life by their command over the world, and measure happiness by their invulnerability to “slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.”

Such winners are no more able to command true love and friendship than anyone else.

Soul, Peace, Friendship

Readers may find the notion of their “soul” of no purpose or utility to their understanding of their happiness, their identity, and their relationships. I find otherwise, but readers can substitute words that feel right for them in place of the word soul in what I write below.

A friend is a connection, in a world where a great deal of our dominant cultural narrative is founded on a physicalist, scientific, mathematical standard of truth and reality where a meaning for it is denied, and religion is not countenanced.

Humans require meaning. Peace is as crucial as air, food, sleep, for our lives.

No one who has loved their child can misunderstand how important connection is. Friendship is the other great love, not between two who create a new life as parents, but between two who feel a link that is soul-deep. It connects such profound parts of your identity, of how you understand your worth and value in the world, that friendship is truly the food that nurtures in a way unique to it.

Not everyone finds such friends. Hermits and holy ones claim not to need it.

Conclusion

Elders have often already lost people on the path to their advanced age. Grief is a feeling we learn to process well or, we will suffer inordinately for not learning.

Loss of friends is hard. To death, inevitable. But losses from alienation, drifting apart, from differences that were unimportant hitherto… these are the hardest.

Making profound new friendships in elderhood is a blessing one cannot expect, like other strokes of good fortune. Cherish and celebrate such good luck.

Spend the time you have and the time you both desire, with friends of the highest quality. You know who they are.

This post was syndicated from https://rosslandtelegraph.com
Categories: GeneralOp/Ed

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