Hakuna matata

Over the summer I played in the wedding of an acquaintance. Her grandfather, a minister, gave the sermon, and spoke about the difficulty of moving beyond the initial stage of being in love to putting in the hard work required to make a marriage work. I sat, sagely nodding my head, knowing exactly what he meant, and looking at the young couple with stars in their eyes who thought they knew what he meant, but actually had no idea what they were in for.
It has given me food for thought recently--not just young persons' inherent disregard for older persons' words of wisdom, but also older persons' inherent desire to try to get their message across, despite having once been young themselves. It seems that most of the more difficult lessons in life are only really learned the hard way.

Another thought that struck me during that ceremony was how the culture of our times has moved away from the multi-generational society. Families used to be the center of life--people lived with extended family out of financial necessity. The roles of women were defined very narrowly as the center of the family at home. The various stages of life were marked by rituals that were meaningful. The young were shepherded through difficult times by the generations before them, who had been through those same difficult times.

No doubt this pastoral scene I've laid out is rather naive. People also used to be less educated. Women were not allowed to choose their lot. Dysfunctional behaviors continued from generation to generation because no one was exposed to the possibility of a different path.

However, I think maybe we've gone too far the other direction. Children learn to be disrespectful pretty early in their lives. Instead of staying connected to our elders, we move out on our own as soon as possible, choosing to spend all our time with people our own age. We avoid family gatherings and the rituals that they often surround. Because of the loss of rituals, we lose the perspective of ourselves within the larger cycle of life and death. We connect only over the ethernet--anonymous and reinventing ourselves. We watch TV shows that distort the world and we believe that distortion, and make it the real world. Once television got a firm hold on our collective imagination, the young and the pretty became revered, leaving the wise out in the cold. Katie Couric's recent triumph is an example of this trend. Men and women have disfiguring surgeries to perpetuate their own delusion of youth instead of embracing their steady path towards old age.

We should be more aware of the circle of life--our food, the seasons, each day, our own mortality.