From time to time I am asked if I have children. My favourite reply? I am glad that I have never had the opportunity of helping to ruin the next generation. I cannot say that I have ever really chosen to have or to not have kids. It just never seemed to be part of the plan for my life and I really have no regrets. I have absolutely no idea what kind of parent I would have been and I'm glad that this is something I will never have to find out.
I often have many opportunities of interacting with and befriending people who are considerably younger than me. Currently and more recently this has been with Latin Americans though at other times I have had younger Canadian friends as well, but as is often the case with younger people they have not been easy to keep as friends. I'm not complaining. I never stayed in contact with anyone I knew in my twenties, thirties and forties and some of these people were old enough to be my parents.
I don't think that it is common for young people to really stick to long-term friendships and often that seems to be part of the whole adventurous and exploratory nature of youth. As for myself, now that I am older, I really do appreciate friends and friendship a lot more than I used to and I really try to do my part, short of locking my friends in a cage, to keep my friendships going.
I am resigned to the likelihood that, except for maybe one or two, I will not be in contact with any of my younger friends in ten years' time. I do hope that while we are in contact that I can at least have a positive and redemptive influence on these people, much as some of my older friends did for me when I was much younger. Let's think of it as paying it forward.
I have to admit that I don't think a lot in terms of generations. I refuse to refer to people younger than forty as "Millennials". It is every bit as dumb and useless a catch-all as Generation X and the Baby Boomers. This isn't to say that we aren't formed and shaped by the zeitgeist of our times. Of course we are. But this really just touches on superficials, and it does nothing at all to touch or focus on what we all share in common as human beings. It also goes without saying that each generation goes through the same stages of life: childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, middle age, old age. The way we handle these changes and transitions does vary throughout the generations but I still hear the same song being sung by kids in their twenties, as I was singing in my twenties and my parents were singing in theirs: the need for independence, self-determination, a sense of identity, of community, a need to individuate, to explore, learn, meet a soul mate, marry or prepare for marriage (or choose not to), have children (or not),
I am also aware that just as my generation was discovering new worlds opening up to us that did not exist for many of our parents' generation, this is also happening with the current crop of younger people. We all need one another and there is something particularly rich and gratifying about intergenerational friendships. As I found with my older friends when I was in my twenties and thirties, there was a certain wisdom and stability that they had to offer, nonexistent in my generational peers. They also tended to be kinder, less judgmental and more grounded and stable. They had lived through unimaginable crap and horrors, their asses had already been kicked by life many times over and they had lived to tell and in many cases had come out as better people because of it. Through their presence and influence I was able to learn and appreciate that there was light at the end of the tunnel, and each in a different way offered me a kind of reference and a sense of hope of how I could possibly envision my future self.
I also know that I have benefited from their moral compass and their sense of ethic, qualities often nonexistent or just developing for us when we are young. In this regard I definitely want to influence the young since they are inheriting the earth from us, or should I say that we have borrowed it from them.
By the same token I am reminded by younger people of the importance of staying open, flexible and of never turning down the opportunity to live a little bit more richly and perhaps more dangerously (but not too dangerously) This isn't to say that I envy youthful self-destruction. I don't and I see this as one thing that everyone could stand to grow out of. But neither do I want to lose that thirst and the daring that comes with it of trying new things, travel, visiting new places, new worlds, knowing new people and learning new ways and new ideas.
Still there is often a certain rigidity in the thinking of young people: many of them can be judgmental, viewing everything in black and white. Anyone who has the good fortune of aging well is going to be in a strategic position to mentor while at the same time being mentored towards staying open to the new.
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