Quotes About Eldership

I wish to impress these matters upon you, because you are the eldest of your father's family. The oldest son should consider himself the second father of the family.

The eldership must clarify direction and beliefs for the flock. It must set goals, make decisions, give direction, correct failures, affect change, and motivate people. It must evaluate, plan, and govern. Elders, then, must be problem solvers, managers of people, planners, and thinkers.

Ambition is natural to the first steps of youth, who must experience its essential falsity to know the larger reality that stands behind it, but held on to too long, and especially in eldership, it always comes to lack surprise, turns the last years of the ambitious into a second childhood, and makes the once successful into an object of pity.

Life is meant to form us in independence, usher us into an adulthood that begins in apprenticeship and ends in mastery, and then, those tasks accomplished, to bring us to the acme of integrity, of wisdom, of eldership in the community of the world. It is a process of ripening as we go, getting stronger, getting more caring, becoming more procreative, sharing more wisdom as we grow—so that those who come after us can walk a clearer path.

I'm moving into that eldership age, you know? I'm at the 'wise woman' age where it's not about learning, but utilizing the information that I have in a way that serves other people. That's a high calling and it's a great responsibility.

It is an Akido style of martial art. The family disturber throws their disturbance at me like a punch, and I flow with it and its energy, while taking care of myself and my opponent. In Mindell's work, an attitude of eldership means the elder uses dance to dance freely between the energy of the disturber and the energy of the one disturbed. In Mindell's talk, he explains that when we get down to this level, we are in Process Mind or into the mind behind the system itself.

Being the oldest sometimes meant being everyone's boss, but mostly, it meant being everyone's pack mule.