I had a wonderful visit with an anut/uncle in their nineties the other day.
I am not really the best driver, well the main problem is that my eyes wander to much. Like, 'Oh look there is a hawk', or 'look at that flower in the ditch', 'I wonder what is that person doing on the highway at this moment?'. You get the picture. So the point of this is, that Ellen drives me everywhere.
I called Uncle Butch and Anut Justine to see if they were home and if we could come over? Yes, they were home and yes we could come over. I forget, what a wealth of knowledge, that the two of them have. It is a rare privilege to have family in their nineties. We talked of past family, the trouble with war, the changes that have occurred over these past decades, plus more.
We as a society, have a tendency to shrug off this storehouse of wisdom from older ones. We might think that older ones don't understand the new lingo, smart phones, popular diseases. We take for granted that if I need a new TV, I go and buy one. If I have a headache pop a pill. If I have a problem go see a shrink. Instead we talked of the, value of working hard to earn that TV. If one gets a headache, work through it, not to swallow a pill. If you have an issue, talked to the individual, not a stranger.
What has happened to days of calm? What happened to mornings of wonderment? What of the day of hard work with a full night of sleep? It seems that we are caught in a vortex in which our lives are spinning, spinning and spinning!
This one small visit, helped me to understand the importance of listening. Listening to experiences of a seasoned, mature veteran. Not the ramblings of an old man, but of a man who values life's sophisticated worldliness.
Uncle Butch reminds me of the following experiences found in Elbert Hubbard's Scrapbook:
Do you fear the force of the wind,
the slash of the rain?
Go face them and fight them,
Be savage again.
Go hungry and cold like the wolf,
go wade like the crane;
The palms of your hand will thicken
The skin of your cheek will tan,
You'll grow ragged and weary and swarthy,
But you'll walk like a man!

Until the next time - HeWal