Elder in Training

I will start with a confession, though perhaps not the one you are expecting.

I have been impatient to get older my whole life.

In my twenties, I could not wait to be thirty. At thirty, I could not wait to be forty. Forty made me hungry for fifty, and fifty spent ten good years leaning towards sixty. While friends lowered their voices around their birthdays, as if a number were a diagnosis, I was the one counting down.

Every decade has given me more than it took. More of myself. Less need for anybody's permission.

I have never been afraid of ageing, in the same way I have never been afraid of death. My spiritual belief has held me all my life: this earth time is a visit, and when it is over, I am going back home. When you know you are going home, there is nothing to dread about the road getting longer. Every year is simply more of the journey.

And here is the part that makes people raise an eyebrow: the decade I am looking forward to most is my seventies. I believe they will be my most productive years — not in action, not in the busyness I wore like a medal in my forties, but in impact. Fewer things done, each one landing deeper. Fewer words spoken, more of them heard.

So when sixty arrived, I was ready for it. More than ready.

But I knew something else, too. Being ready to get older and being ready to become an elder are not the same thing. I have sat with too many women — in client sessions, in the rooms of Silver Sirens — who arrived at sixty, or seventy, or eighty and found that the years had come, but the role had not. Eagerness alone was not going to make me an elder. That would take intention.

So on my sixtieth birthday, I made a pledge. Not a resolution — resolutions are made in January and quietly abandoned by February. A pledge is something you stand behind. I promised that from that day forward, I would not simply get older.

I would become an elder. And until I had earned that word, I would call myself an elder in training.

People sometimes ask me what the difference is. Isn't an elder just an old person with a better publicist?

No. And this is the whole of what I want to sit with you this month.

Old is a number. It arrives whether you are paying attention or not. You do not have to do anything to become old except keep breathing — which, bless us, most of us manage.

Elder is a role. It is something you grow into, the way a tree grows into its own shade. In the culture I come from, nobody is made an elder by a birthday. The community recognises you — slowly, over years — because of how you carry yourself, how you listen, how you settle a quarrel, what you choose to say and, far more often, what you choose not to. An elder is the one people walk towards when something has gone wrong. Not because she has all the answers, but because she has stopped needing to prove she does.

I am British-Nigerian, Ijaw by heritage, and an expat who has made her home in Sydney. In one of those worlds, the older woman is consulted. In the others, too often, she is managed. We talked. Talked about. Gently, kindly, invisibly moved to the edge of the room.

I refuse to be moved to the edge of the room. But I also know that refusing is not enough. If I want to be treated as an elder, I have to actually become one.

Hence the training.

What does an elder in training do all day? Less than you might think, and more.

She keeps learning — not to stay young, but because curiosity is what keeps the river moving. She keeps listening — especially to the people who are not like her, and especially when she would rather be talking.

And she keeps handing things on — stories, recipes, mistakes, the hard-won understanding that cost her years — because a woman who hoards her wisdom is not an elder, she is a vault.

She also forgives herself, often. Because training means you get it wrong. I still react when I would rather respond. I still want to be right more than I want to be kind. I still catch myself, at sixty-something, trying to earn a place in rooms I have every right to be in.

The word training is not an apology. It is a permission. It lets me be on the way without pretending I have arrived.

When I sign off on our Silver Sirens Elderhood Cards, I sign as Faith, Elder-in-Training. A few women have asked me when I will drop the "in training." My honest answer is: probably never. I suspect the moment I declare myself a fully qualified elder will be the precise moment I stop being one.

This month I want to walk you through what that pledge has looked like in my real life — not the pretty version. Next week, I will take you to Africa, to the retreat we have just come home from, where a circle of women and I spent our mornings with proverbs and our afternoons with death. After that, my mother, who would have turned ninety last month.

Then wisdom itself — what it is, and what it is not. And to finish, a story I am not proud of, about anger, and rent, and a swimming pool.

But it all begins here, with a promise.

Old is something that happens to you. Elder is something you agree to become.

I agreed. I am still agreeing, every morning. I would love you to agree alongside me.

With love,

Faith

Routines and Rituals That Held Me This Week

Wellness Wednesday. One day a week I do not open my inbox, I do not answer a work message, I do not solve anybody's problem — including my own. When I first started, I felt guilty for most of the morning. Now I think of it as elder training in its purest form: practising the radical idea that the world will keep turning without me holding it up. It does. Every single Wednesday.