ADULTHOOD AND ELDERHOOD HUMAN CENTRIC AND ECOCENTRIC DEVELOPMENTAL WHEELS

Striving is a key characteristic of adulthood. Early adulthood is about finding your place in the world and actively working to manifest it. That place is ideally the nexus of three facets. Think a Venn diagram of

What you are really good at

What lights you up

What you care about

If you are able to arrive at the center, that’s a real accomplishment in our society which does a perfectly miserable job of working with our adolescents to help them become spiritually healthy adults.

At a certain point, after and only after you have made your mark, ideally you shift to being much more interested in your legacy and passing on your passions to the next generation. You are still striving, only it is in the role of teacher and your success is measured by how successful your students are.

Here’s how this played out in my life on a human centric developmental wheel. What I mean by human centric developmental wheel is how we humans develop where our focus is only the context of the human world, not the larger ecological or cosmic world.

I was really good at running an organization.

It lit me up to see an organization really firing well and fulfilling its mission.

I cared deeply about people feeling good about their work.

When my business partner died when I was 54 years old, I came into operational control of the business (which had been his role beforehand). I was nervous whether I could run the business. I worked hard and strove to fix the various problems I had inherited, particularly the internal ones about how the organization functioned. I rapidly learned that not only could I run it, but I could do it really well. That was hugely gratifying to my ego. This is early adulthood. I had a delivery system for a certain community and it worked. A miracle.

I then turned my energy to conveying everything I knew about running an organization well to training my staff to do it without me. I knew I could run the organization until I physically could not, but that was no longer the point; the point was for them to learn what they could from me. This is late adulthood.

Elderhood is characterized, I think, by the disappearance of this striving. I think instead we turn our focus to less ephemeral things than success in the human world which is inevitably fleeting and absolutely not in our control once we die. I worked hard to develop a business that could last hundreds of years. Will it? I’ve absolutely no control over that once I’m gone. And lately I’ve come to accept this completely. I see myself and my ability to run organizations as a resource to be called upon—and the outcome matters far less to me than it once did.

If I am an elder in the human centric developmental wheel, I certainly am not in the ecocentric developmental wheel. The Venn diagram is that I can support people in their spiritual development, I care deeply about the possibility of Jewish Animism and teaching and writing about it light me up. I’ve just started to write and teach for the past 2 years and am slowly building up some people I influence. This is all early adulthood from an ecocentric perspective.

I’m completely not ready to shift to focusing on nurturing the next generation of Jewish Animist teachers. I’d love to be there, but it’s not happening yet. I pray every day for spiritual heirs and recognize that is a prayer for the future, not the present.

Here’s the odd thing. As a chronological elder (I’m 67 as I write this), the whole striving thing of early adulthood feels wrong (it didn’t when I was 54). So I simply don’t do the kinds of marketing things that an early adult should do to grow my sphere of influence. My body says to me that whoever finds their way to me, finds their way and that’s good enough. Is some of this also influenced by my wanting to stay under the radar because that feels safer to my inner children? Absolutely. And I can’t ignore that part of me that feels like an elder and reacts to any kind of striving as “been there, done that, time for someone else to do that.”

Usually I end these blogs with some questions or a practice. I really want to know what your sense is of where you are at—both on the human centric developmental wheel and on the ecocentric one. I’m particularly curious if you feel you are in different places on the two wheels.