Our relatively young country is being powered by diverse natural sources of energy. Mainly, water, heat from deep earth, and natural gas. Hopefully, if we put our heads together, we can have energy from the sun and perhaps fossil fuel underneath our seas, and even from the mountains of waste and garbage rotting in our landfills. They are the power plants that generate electricity, which is vital to our progress.
But there is a different kind of power in our midst that, if activated and properly harnessed, can be put to work to generate and produce another level of energy to boost our country’s progress. It’s easily accessible yet we choose to overlook and neglect this reservoir all these years.
Let me call it ‘May Gulang Power Dam.’ The sleeping power plant of Senior Wisdom. A fully charged reservoir of static or dormant energy that continuously drains and builds up year in and year out. It is there for the taking, just waiting to be plugged to the grid of our national life.
Every year, thousands of Filipinos join the ranks of senior citizens. Many opt or are forced by law to go into retirement. These include retired corporate executives, lawyers, engineers, architects, doctors, public servants like judges, agency heads, and many more. Then there are seniors in the field of arts: painters, writers, theater and film actors and directors. They belong to an exclusive, privileged club because one has to be old to be a member.
Given their deep and extensive life experiences, why push them to the side and allow them to waste their lives in obscurity? Why does it seem that the world has no use for them anymore? They are better seen than heard, treated with hypocritical, insincere respect. The young and the ambitious go getters see them as ‘over the hill,’ ‘jurassic,’ ‘past their prime,’ ‘washed out,’ no longer productive and use-able but disposable and replace-able.
Yet this annual stream of retirees going into the swelling ranks of the inactive or semi-active actually represent a dormant energy than can be turned into a kinetic force when switched on. They are a resource needed by our people, our leaders and policy makers, our corporate button pushers, as valuable as any technology or power plant, waiting to be tapped if only we’d take the time to truly listen. Our youth obsessed society will do well to tune into this humming, fluctuating frequency of deep, lived wisdom.
Society must start looking at older people as priceless assets, not liabilities that cost money and effort. Their wisdom is not outdated-it is time-tested. Their stories are not old-they are gold. Their presence should not be a burden-it is a blessing.
These lolos and lolas can take the young to the past, serving as a living bridge to history, providing context for current challenges that might otherwise seem unprecedented.
There is an African proverb, ‘A day spent with an elder is a history lesson that cannot be taught in a classroom.’
When you see an old man amble around a mall or park, that’s decades upon decades of experience and knowledge walking past by you.
Advice and counsel from a retired professional or an executive can save the young professionals a lifetime of questioning. They have answers that would have otherwise taken decades for them to reach on their own.
The brains of retired professionals need to be picked on now before dementia creeps in and completely takes over their minds. Consider the insights they have gained from decades of personal and professional experiences.
Their collective insights can help create a roadmap for adapting to change based on past experience. They’ve seen trends come and go, weathered storms literally and figuratively, and emerged with a nuanced and deeper understanding of human nature and social changes.
For instance, young journalists and media commentators and analysts discuss our devastating series of floods as if they happened only today. Talk to a 75-year-old and he would tell you about floods and calamities that happened many years ago. He will tell you about ‘siyam-siyam’ or ‘Beinte uno de Mayo’ and so forth. Political wrangling? Corruption? He’s been there. He’s seen it all. This long view can help us understand the cyclical nature of many issues we face today.
Imagine them as a collective force that can energize the minds of our youth, our leaders and our technocrats, our experts, in the same way that a hydro power plant generates the electricity to light up our homes, power the machines of our commerce and industry.
So, indulge me on this idea, even if it may be off the wall or too outside of the box.
In France, there is an institution called The French Academy made up of around 300 members, prominent senior achievers chosen from among the most eminent specialists in France and abroad. The members of the Academy are known as the ‘Immortals’ and have included many great names like Jean Racine, Voltaire, Victor Hugo, Henri Bergson, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Eugène Ionesco, Jacques Cousteau and many more. They represent the brain trust of France.
In similar fashion, maybe we can organize some sort of a Collegium of Senior Wisdom consisting of an open community of seniors who feel they still have much to give to society. It would welcome every senior or elderly who wants to impart his/her learnings and accumulated wisdom to the present before leaving this life.
It won’t be a fossilized institution but a camp of disciplined seniors, trained as resource persons to speak, educate, and inspire, ready to be deployed to places where their knowledge and expertise are needed, similar to Navy Seals, Rangers or Special Forces or Commandos. But instead of physical battles, they would be engaged in a battle against ignorance, mediocrity, against forgetting, against ‘puwede na’ mindset.
The point is to provide platforms and opportunities for this cadre of retired but mentally active senior citizens, including National Artists and other personalities to become resource persons on various subjects, including but not limited to the arts, the sciences, culture and history, sociology, climatology, and so on.
If we can make this possible, seniors will never see retirement or age 60 as a dead end but as transitioning to another active productive phase of life, part of a power plant, humming with wisdom and intelligence, generating and bringing high kilowatts of knowledge to young people everywhere through lectures, seminars and workshops, lighting up their minds and infusing passion into their hearts.
So never leave a senior outside the door. Invite him into the room and provide a prominent seat for him at the table. As someone said: ‘When we sit with the elderly, we sit with history, with wisdom, with stories that shaped the world. They are not burdens-they are bridges.’
Listen intently, for he is downloading, sharing forward his accumulated wealth of wisdom. Someone’s tomorrow depends on the strength of his yesterday.