The glacial erosion of a sacred relationship
From a time when humans consulted their elders to a time when they consult the internet
Over the holidays, I was fortunate to spend time with two of my great aunts. One is a retired international diplomat and doctor who lives in Santa Rosa, and the other a retired history professor based in London. I’ve always cherished my time with them.
Being around them provides a sense of childlike security. In their presence, I get to hear their life wisdom, life during the violent India-Pakistan partition, the struggles they’ve endured due to being career-oriented women in those times, their seasoned view on men and love, on evolving relationships with parents, on society, and their general perspective on what matters.
In the collective Indian psyche, elderly family members represent the archetypal figures of wise sages, even gods. There is no scarcity of Indian art depicting a young disciple prostrated at the legs of an elder guru with complete and total devotion. The devotion is so strong that it numbs the young individual’s moral, religious, and rational authorities — an unconscious act to avoid blotting out the incoming wisdom from the guru.
One evening, my great aunt (the Santa Rosa-based one), with a glass of wine in hand, wanted to have a serious discussion with me. The topic was quality of intergenerational communication and ageism. At first, I thought of these as two unrelated topics. Then my mind created a bridge between the two — a possible cause leading to a symptom.
So with a bowl of dry fruits in front of us we commenced. My great aunt looked around the room, a pinch of despair taking shape on her face. She expressed her disappointment at the dwindling quality of human communication she had recently felt with the millennials and i-gens in our family, including myself. The root-cause could not have been language — we are all fluent in English.
She continued by saying she was unable to “access” us. Did we think she was not interesting? Absolutely not, we loved being around her.
It then struck me that it was perhaps a consequence of her attempting to reach a generation who think of natural in-person human communication as a distant, hard-to-achieve fantasy, and instead prefer to live inside a galaxy of asynchronous convenience-based communication. That was definitely one.
We continued to explore.
In the next half hour, we uncovered a huge variance between the idea of learning patterns and preferences. What she, during her youth, had learned through consulting with elders was what I was learning through the internet. I did not realize that every article or video or tweet or post or e-mail I consumed was gradually eating away my natural curiosity in life.
I did not carry an inventory of profound life questions for her, like ones she may have had for her elders. I was instead a box filled with misfit scattered information covering an enormous range of random topics (blockchain technology and snoopy videos?). So while I could talk about society and current affairs, I knew deep down that my perspective resided atop the wobbly legs of unreliable internet information. And as a result, the quality of our dialogue would be (a) impersonal and (b) of low quality.
We then navigated to the idea of a healthy and fulfilling life — she talked about freedom, compassion, responsibility, economic sustainability, and so on. When my turn came, things like expression, ambition, desires, goals, plans came up.
The next day I reflected and found my ideas to be one-dimensional and overly scientific, while hers sounded all-encompassing, incorporating the indisputable human faculty of feeling. It was clear nonetheless that we were islands apart. Our ideas shaped our priorities which shaped our actions which gradually configured our composition.
So between communication style, learning preferences, and general ideas of life, we had covered quite a bit of territory. It was 11:30 pm. We sipped the remnants of our respective cocktails, and decided to call it a night. The fact that we both were able to open our heart and mind on the matter felt as if we had come closer. But, even though we had successfully intellectualized the topic, the feeling of detachment persisted.
It was clear that the call to action resided on both ends — we each agreed to make conscious efforts in retaining the sacrosanct nature of a relationship that has remained central to human fulfillment in Hindu philosophy for thousands of years.
