The Wise Elder Is Not the One With All the Answers

When I was a young adult, my Gram sometimes gave me advice. I would bristle, listen politely because I had been taught to respect my elders, and then go off and do exactly what I wanted.

A few years later, I met a very different kind of elder.

She taught a summer anthropology class at my university. When we talked, she rarely told me what she thought I should do. Instead, she asked questions that got me thinking. Her voice was gentle, and she listened carefully to my answers. Then she might ask another question, or offer a thought of her own, not as the final word, but as something for me to consider.

She never told me what to think. She helped me discover what I thought.

I often left our conversations seeing something differently, either in myself or in the world around me. Because the insight had emerged from within me, rather than being handed to me as advice, I trusted it. I took it to heart.

That experience has stayed with me.

Now, after decades as a counselor, curriculum developer, spiritual practitioner, and facilitator, I am the person with experience to offer. The challenge is no longer whether I know something. The challenge is how I hold what I know.

Recently, I began facilitating a circle in which women explore spiritual truths and then give those truths form through painting and other creative practices. One woman in the circle lives with tremors in her hands. Until she told me, I had assumed the women could watch what I was doing and create their own version of it—a mandala, for example.

Her hands could not necessarily make the marks mine could. At first, I researched ways to make the tools easier for her to hold and use. That was helpful, though it did not address the larger question. Why was I asking everyone to paint as I painted?

I began changing my language. Rather than saying, “Paint what I am painting,” I now invite the women to “paint the energy of wholeness,” or surrender, presence, grief, or joy. The invitation is no longer to reproduce my image. It is to discover their own.

My expertise had not become useless. I still knew something about materials, color, spiritual practice, and facilitating a group. What changed was my relationship to that knowledge. I could offer it without making it the measure of another woman’s experience.

There are, of course, times when we are called to teach. We may know how to make a pasty, build a bookcase, tend a garden, or navigate a season of loss. We have skills and experience worth passing on. Yet even then, as I learned, where we teach from matters as much as what we teach.

We can teach from a desire to shape someone into our image of what they should become. Or we can offer what we know while leaving room for them to discover what belongs to them.

One approach says, “Here is the answer.”

The other says, “Here is what I have learned. What do you notice? What feels true for you?”

The wise elder does not disappear or pretend that decades of living have taught her nothing. She brings the fullness of her experience into the room. She simply does not use that experience to take authority away from another person.

I am still learning what this asks of me.

It asks me to listen beyond the first answer and to ask questions that open rather than close the conversation. What are you noticing? What wants to emerge? What does this truth look or feel like in you?

It also asks me to trust the wisdom of the circle. When one woman speaks about her painting, another woman may recognize something in herself that I could never have taught or planned. Women do not learn only from me. They learn from one another, and I learn from them.

Perhaps that is one of the gifts of elderhood. We no longer need to prove the value of everything we have learned. We can offer our knowledge and experience without insisting that others follow the same path.

My anthropology professor did not withhold what she knew. She offered it in a way that helped me hear what I knew. Decades later, I understand more fully what she gave me.

The wise elder brings a light into the room. She does not insist on being the only light.

About the Author

Constance Chapman, MA, MFA, is a spiritual practitioner, creative facilitator, and lifelong explorer of the ways creativity helps us hear our inner wisdom. After more than 35 years as a counselor, curriculum developer, and nonprofit leader, she now leads intimate creative circles for older women. Her work invites women to bring curiosity, spiritual reflection, and creative expression to the continuing adventure of becoming wise elders. Explore Constance’s free creative guide.