The Importance of Being Conversant
© 2011, Douglas D. Germann, Sr., Professional Corporation
The other day a couple came to visit. He is in the early stages of dementia, a jolly man.
She is telling him how to spell July, scolding him for taking more than one chocolate from the offered box. She has to help him up from the chair and into the car, and now on top of all this, all decision making about finance, legal things, and medical care falls upon her.
She is strong. She does not want to ask for someone at church to sit with “Bill” while she does some shopping or simply gets some free time or rest. She does not want to look into adult day care, “yet.” She does not want to ask her children to do more than cut the grass for her. Just last week she found “Bill” out in the garage getting a ladder out when there was nothing that he could fix. She has to be watching, watching. She is headed toward running out of steam. She is headed toward her own health decline. Unless she finds a way to ask.
Unless she converses.
Converses with children, church friends, buddies, her husband.
We are not in this world alone. There are others here whom we can help, and others who can help us. Sometimes we can’t tell who is being helped.
Why is it important to converse? First because we miss engaging: 1. the natural world around us; 2. the world within us; 3. the above and beyond flowing through us; and 4. the loving of the people who make our lives.
Second, but more importantly, the world misses our contribution. If we do not, this hour, add to the store of good of the world, the world can never grow that way again.
It is a wonderful metaphor that this world turns. Because we are of this humus, we are made to turn. Turn to one another. Touch and engage. Think together. Invent, find, create new life together.
So our essential task is to meet. Meet our family members, meet our friends, meet the people we encounter in our hours. Meet the other creatures and creation itself.
As elders-in-training, we have the gift of a longer view. We can see things from the top of the hill others can miss. This too is a gift we can share. Be elder to your tribe.
Conversing is so central to our life on this planet that we usually miss it. Neither do we see the air we breathe, nor focus on our breathing itself. Maybe we only see conversing when it is missing: when we lose our voice, when the phone goes dead, when politicians scream past each other, when our spouse is gone away.
Yet we can make life better. Only together. Meeting. Conversing.
:- Doug.
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