A Beautiful Night

One of the many beautiful things I learned last night was that being an elder doesn’t mean giving the youth a blue print on how to do it. We are not their navigation systems placed in their lives to give them step by step instructions to their truth. They’ll figure their own path out the way we’re figuring out ours… and those obstacles we want them to avoid and those mistakes we don’t want them to make will serve as building blocks for their wisdom the way it has served us in our lives.

In truth, what they really need from us is support. They need us to share our wisdom without trying to force them to use it. They need us to occasionally pick them up when they start to feel like they can’t go any further. They need us to quietly tell them they can achieve their dreams when the whole world is telling them to turn back and run into the cave of fear with the rest of the sheep. They need us to acknowledge their ascension to the thrones that are rightfully theirs and to step aside when the time is right. Most of all, they need us to stop hating on them for not being us and to love them for who they are.