The Elder Who Rose

“Boy, did we need that.”

These words followed poet Nikki Giovanni’s moving address at the 2007 Virginia Tech convocation. Thirty-three lives had been lost in a mass shooting, including the shooter. As grief hung heavy in the air, Giovanni stood and delivered words that steadied a wounded campus:

“We are Virginia Tech

We are strong enough to stand tall tearlessly, we are brave enough to bend to cry, and we are sad enough to know that we must laugh again.”

…

“We are the Hokies

We will prevail

We will prevail

We will prevail

We are Virginia Tech”  

In that moment, Giovanni was the elder Virginia Tech needed – seeing beyond individual grief to tend to a wounded collective with clarity and care.

The Rarity of Elders

Elders are rare.

Eldership is never claimed; it is conferred.

It builds slowly through countless moments of eldering— like the nails, bolts, and beams that eventually form the ship capable of carrying others through storms. It emerges from the patient cultivation of care: for others, for the whole, for truth.

The term elder has roots in traditional societies and indigenous cultures—ways of life many of us have grown distant from. An elder is not simply someone older, but someone whose wisdom and dedication make them essential to collective well-being.

Eldership transcends seniority—it's a vital social role. Elders guide healing, offer moral clarity, and preserve our humanity. As Stephen Jenkinson notes, they are a “sentinel species for humanness.”

Eldering and Care Intelligence

Most people grow older. Few become elders.

Yet most adults have the potential to engage in acts of eldering.

To elder is to offer care with wisdom and perspective—an act available to anyone willing to see beyond themselves and respond to others’ needs. Acts of eldering arise from something I call Care Intelligence: the capacity to meet human needs by balancing power and unity with discernment, humility, and heart.

First, Eldering requires being in service—giving not for status or control, but to address others’ needs. Sometimes this care is offered quietly and is deeply personal. I think of my 80-year-old friend Nancy, who gave me the gift of her steady presence as we walked side by side along the windy bay. I was reeling from the shock of my newly wedded husband asking for a divorce, and she didn’t try to fix or advise—she simply stayed with me.

Other times, as with Giovanni at Virginia Tech, eldering embraces an entire community—her thunderous speech tending to a collective wound with fierce compassion and unshakable grace.

Second, eldering demands seeing the broadest possible perspective with psychological insights and sociological imagination. My friend Leticia Nieto, a psychotherapist and dramatist suggests greeting each person as someone accompanied by their lineage—seven generations before and seven after. Fifteen souls.

At the same time, eldering calls for an acute awareness of how one exists within a multidimensional landscape of power—shaped by positional authority, inner resilience, expertise, class, race, gender, age, and more. Sociologist and Black feminist Patricia Hill Collins advanced this understanding through the concepts of intersectionality and the matrix of domination, naming how overlapping systems of oppression and privilege define one’s social location and organize power throughout society.

Third, eldering calls for holistic awareness—the ability to attune to the subtle, unspoken wisdom beneath surface-level conflict and identity. It’s not about doctrine or belief. It is a felt sense of the deep unity that underlies all difference. Arnold Mindell, founder of Processwork Psychology, calls this the essence level reality: a realm of barely speakable, sentient experience that quietly guides us toward connection, healing, and transformation.

I’ve seen this wisdom in action among village clan elders in rural China. On study abroad trips, my students and I watched great uncles mediate conflict within families and between neighbors—not through argument, but by gently reminding them of their shared humanity and common bloodline.

These principles—serving need, holding complexity, and seeing unity—are the essence of Care Intelligence.

To elder is to care intelligently.

Learning How to Lose

To elder, one must first learn to lose.

Care intelligence is not something we can perform or pretend. It must be cultivated. And that cultivation begins in earnest when life starts taking things away—our hair, our roles, our identities, our relationships, our youthful vigor, our health.

In my twenties, I practiced Ashtanga yoga—a particularly athletic and disciplined form—every morning at 6 a.m., two hours a day, chasing grace, strength, and perfection. One day, frustrated that my body couldn’t twist like a pretzel or float like a bird, I voiced my irritation. My teacher smiled gently and said, “Just wait until you need to let go of each pose.”  I didn’t understand it then, but I do now: mastery is not just about what we can do, but what we’re willing to release.

Loss humbles us, revealing the boundaries of our power and forcing surrender—not as defeat, but as invitation to something deeper and wider. We begin to distinguish between power over the external world and power within: rooted in awareness, presence, and choice.

Loss also urges us to look outward and backward—to examine the forces that have shaped us. History, both personal and collective. Family legacies. Social structures. What did I inherit? What was never mine to begin with? What stories have I absorbed about who I must be? This reckoning, if undertaken with honesty, helps us locate ourselves in the world and see clearly what lies beyond our control.

But loss also directs our gaze inward, even as we look forward. What can I influence? What do I still hold within my grasp? How can I respond with integrity and intention to what remains?

Loss is where depth takes root.

The ultimate loss, of course, is life itself. The inescapable reality of death is the clearest mirror we have. To face our own mortality with openness is to confront the finiteness of this life within the infiniteness of time and space—and to ask: What is this brief life of mine for?

And care often emerges as the answer. The better part of us chooses care.

Care draws us beyond ourselves. To serve. To offer what we have, what we know, what we’ve lived—for the benefit of something greater than us. Care gives meaning to our brief time here.

And when we seek to care well, we are moved to understand others and their needs with the same depth and clarity we’ve used to examine our own lives—inside and out. What is within the control of the individual or community seeking care? What forces have shaped them, and how can we support their awareness of these historical, personal, and social influences?

To lose well—to lose deeply—is the beginning of cultivating care intelligence.

It is the first step toward learning how to elder.

Midlife as Elderescence

Learning to elder begins earlier than old age—midlife offers the most fertile ground for cultivating care intelligence.

Middlescence, a term describing mid-adulthood transitions, has been revived recently. But rather than viewing it as a “second adolescence,” I offer a different lens: If adolescence is the apprenticeship of adulthood, then elderescence—from the suffix “-escence,” meaning the process of becoming—is the apprenticeship of eldership, not merely elderhood.

Elderhood is a life stage associated with age. Eldership, by contrast, is a relational and intentional practice. It is a role we grow into—a role marked by discernment, humility, and service. Not everyone in elderhood becomes an elder, but midlife plants the seeds of eldership.

Midlife often brings loss: career plateaus, health crises, divorce, parental death, children's independence. These disruptions break open our identities, challenging the roles we've clung to and revealing the impermanence of our constructed lives.

Those who don't bypass this apprenticeship of eldering, confront the consequences of earlier choices and ask: What remains true? What no longer fits? What needs shedding? What must be reclaimed? These questions echo earlier lessons of loss but emerge with greater clarity, tempered by lived experience.

And in this self-examination lies a turning.

 A turn toward care—more widely and wisely. We turn toward service, broader perspectives, and offering insights that support others. Here care intelligence matures as presence, humility, and orientation toward the whole.

Psychologist Erik Erikson called this midlife task generativity—the impulse to nurture and contribute to future generations. Without this outward turning, stagnation follows. Later theorists expanded this model, demonstrating how midlife represents not decline but necessary reorientation.

As a social gerontologist, I take care not to overgeneralize—life stage theories often ignore the influence of culture, power, and structural conditions. Midlife varies widely across contexts and generations. Midlife for millennials arrives later and takes a very different shape than it did for baby boomers, shaped by powerful social, economic, and historical forces. 

Yet across time and cultures, one theme does seem to persist: caring. The turn toward care—toward others, toward legacy, toward meaning—is a deeply human response to midlife’s call.

In answering that invitation, we don’t just prepare for elderhood. We begin practicing eldership—the capacity to hold wisdom, offer guidance, and cultivate the wellbeing of others with clarity and care.

Midlife is where this practice begins in earnest. It is not an ending, but a beginning.

It is elderescence.

Eldership in Leadership

Most organizational leaders at the executive level today are in midlife, the 50s—ripe for cultivating not just strategic skills but care intelligence: leading with presence, discernment, and relational depth.

Yet in crises, leaders often outsource care to someone outside the formal hierarchy—someone trusted, wise, and grounding. Consider Nikki Giovanni at Virginia Tech; the university president deferred to a poet—an elder in spirit.

This reveals an important truth: positional authority doesn’t equal care authority. One can hold power without being experienced as a source of care.

What if leaders embodied eldership themselves?

What if care weren’t delegated in hard times but emanated from leadership itself?

We’ve seen glimpses of eldership in contemporary leadership.

Igniting a heated debate within her nation and beyond, German Chancellor Angela Merkel boldly declared “Wir schaffen das” (“We can do this”) on August 31, 2015, as she opened Germany’s doors to a mass influx of refugees, in the face of Europe’s greatest refugee crisis since World War II. Her unwavering commitment, driven by a moral compass rather than political convenience, reflected a leadership grounded in care.

CEO Satya Nadella quietly transformed Microsoft’s culture, guiding it toward empathy and inclusion, and redefining its core values. “Being the father of a child with special needs was a turning point in my life,” he has shared. His experience caring for his son Zain, who had severe disabilities, deepened his understanding of human fragility, leading him to foster a culture at Microsoft that is not only more innovative but also more humane.

Eldership isn't granted by age or rank but cultivated through experience, inner work, and commitment to others' wellbeing.

When I became a tenured professor at 32, I was told I was now considered a senior faculty member and could now mentor junior faculty. My title changed—but I hadn't. My inner life hadn't deepened overnight, nor had my perspective widened. I hadn't yet earned the influence that comes from having grown into care.

Eldership in leadership requires this growth. It's not about charisma or control—it's about care. It’s about being the kind of leader whose presence settles rather than startles, whose insight uplifts rather than dominates.

For leaders seeking to cultivate this influence, I suggest four practices:

• Explore Loss—Heal Yourself.

Eldership is born through grief, not avoidance. Leaders must face and metabolize their own losses. Unprocessed pain leaks into leadership as reactivity, control, or disconnection. Care Intelligence begins with inner clarity. When we do the work to heal ourselves, we lead with less projection and more compassion.

• Be in Service—Offer Your Gift.

Care is relational. Elders don't center themselves; they offer themselves. Leaders must ask: What is my gift, and how does it serve the whole? True leadership emerges from generosity, not ambition.

• Widen Perspective—Challenge Your Frameworks.

Care requires complexity. Elders see the interconnectedness of people and systems. Leaders must learn to hold multiple truths, question binary thinking, and resist the comfort of certainty. This widening of view allows care to move beyond empathy for the individual to compassion for the collective.

• Hone Your Awareness—See Holistically. 

Slow down. Read—or better yet, write—poetry. Go into nature. Raise plants. Care for animals. Meditate. Move gently. Do anything that attunes you to life’s subtle rhythms. Such practices help you sense what is essential, interconnected, and quietly transformative.

To do these four things well, leaders often need support—a therapist, a coach, or most critically, at least one elder in their own lives.

Eldership in leadership isn’t just about being effective—it’s about being deeply human: in how we relate to others, steward power, navigate systems, and meet human needs. By practicing the acts and art of eldering, leaders prepare not just for old age, but to lead with a kind of care that transforms.