The higher I climbed, the clearer it became that my ladder of success was leaning against the wrong building. I needed to be successful in something else.

Relocating my success ladder proved challenging, heavy with past-centered identities and ego. However, after a few years of focused effort, I finally positioned it against the Elder Building. From this vantage point, the view wasn’t idyllic but a stark reality. Yet, my perspective of reality was transformed dramatically—from older to elder eyes.

As Marcel Proust stated, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” Becoming an elder enabled me to see reality and myself from a profoundly transformed
perspective, inaccessible atop the ladder leaning against the Western Culture Building.

Climbing the ladder against the Elder Building led me to engage deeply with Indigenous elders in Mexico, British Columbia, New Mexico, and Arizona and recognized elders in the United States. I participated in their programs, pilgrimages, ceremonies, and teachings, expanding my understanding of elder from knowledge-based to now include experience-based.

Knowledge turns into wisdom when merged with experience. Being with elders, speaking with elders, doing ceremony with elders, had a direct impact on my development as an elder.

At these elder encounters, I witnessed firsthand the profound wisdom of non-Western traditional cultures, where elders were revered for their higher wisdom and harmonious and balanced presence.

Elders held honored places within their communities and were respected and admired for their insight and guidance. They brought peace, equanimity, and self-understanding to their communities. Everything now
missing in our communities, in our country, in our world.

How do I embody the power and grace of an elder within a culture resistant to growing old, distains higher wisdom, and denies death as part of life? A culture now plagued by fear, distrust, and division?

As I reached the rooftop of the Elder Building, I realized the elders were reservoirs of profound wisdom. During my climb, I had gained higher wisdom myself. But to convey this wisdom, an elder needed to command respect and inspire thoughtful listening for it to be truly heard. Elders must be acutely relevant to our times and culture yet deeply rooted in the elders' ancestral world.

Unlike the crowded rooftop of the Western Culture Building, where discontent prevailed, when I was on the rooftop of the Elder Building, I found peace, joy, and serenity. I found and followed my higher purpose. But what was most rewarding was the existential and metaphysical; for now, I could fulfill Gandhi’s principle, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” 

My mission became twofold: one, to train and develop late-aged people to be authentic elders who can operate successfully as elders in our Western culture and two, impact the culture so elders can become real in our culture.

Over the last three years, I have successfully accomplished this transformative process on a scale sufficient to have accomplished proof of purpose and proof of concept. With many good people together, they have
become elders in their right. They are now living into late life as creators not victims, as authors rather than readers of their last chapters.

 
Personally, being an elder has enriched my life profoundly, yet it also carried a poignant awareness. I’ve come to intimately and empathetically feel the world’s suffering—its hate, greed, misery, and anger—an awareness
that cannot be ignored or suppressed. And now as an elder, my mission, my overriding purpose are to bring the presence and phenomenon of elder powerfully into the world.

Choosing the elder’s path was a road less traveled. In the words of Robert Frost, “Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”

-      Rober Frost –The Atlantic Monthly (1915) Mountain Interval (1916). 

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