Life Lessons from the Oldest & Wisest: Inspiration, Wisdom, and Humor for All Generations

INTRODUCTION

On April 28, 2018, at 7:30 a.m., I experienced my greatest fear and my greatest blessing, and it all happened at once.

I went for a morning run with my sixteen-month-old daughter in our rough-and-tumble jogging stroller. We were running down a very quiet street in the Mar Vista neighborhood of Los Angeles. This is a safe and secure neighborhood, with young children playing in their front yards, and parents and grandparents walking with their morning coffee.

It was the perfect Southern California spring morning, with a slight chill in the air, and the warm sun rising. I had just removed my sweatshirt and placed it in the stroller. My daughter snacked on her favorite cereal.

As we were crossing the street on the corner of Navy and Inglewood, a grey car slowed down at the stop sign, but strangely kept rolling toward us. I hollered at the driver to get his attention. I was sure he would hear me and slow down. But the car kept coming, and then seemed to accelerate. I screamed in anger and then shock and then terror as the car slammed into the baby stroller with my daughter inside.

The stroller exploded out of my hands and went flying in the opposite direction.

Imagine my horror as I ran to the stroller which had collapsed on the ground, fifteen feet away from impact. My daughter was strapped into the stroller and crying hysterically. With my shaking hands, I unbuckled her and held her in my arms.

The driver sped away. It was a hit-and-run. It came out of nowhere. The firefighters arrived, then my wife and three-year-old son, then the police.

We took my daughter to the doctor and she was okay. I was okay. We dodged a bullet.

It all happened so fast, but in the moment before impact, I desperately tried to make eye contact with the driver. I could not see his eyes. He was looking down at what must have been his phone. As I write this, it is still an open investigation with the LAPD.

Whether or not they catch the driver, I am just grateful and fortunate to be able to share a happy ending to this story. But it was a warning to me, and to you. All a father wants to do is protect his children, and to think danger came exploding out of the blue on an otherwise tranquil weekend morning.

Now you might be thinking, that’s a scary story but what does this have to do with the oldest and wisest?

Einstein said, The distinction between the past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.

All of time is woven together and intricately connected, like one of those lanyards you create in 3rd grade. The past creates the future just as the future informs past. If I think too hard about it, I get confused.

But something happened in the days leading up to the hit-and-run incident with my daughter. I feel that I had been prepared for the meaning of the impact.

A few weeks prior to this hit-and-run incident, I received a rather blunt email from a woman named Tara. The message read, Dave, I received your blog in the past and thought you were taking the branding kool-aid. So I never paid attention. But the work you are doing with elders is refreshing.

This one brief message sums up the arc of my personal journey. In the past, I combined yoga with chocolate and wine. It was all about joie de vivre and living in the moment. It was fun and playful, but it wasn’t adding much value to the world.

Then I became a father and wanted to do something more meaningful. How could I, in some way, leave the world a better place than how I found it?

When my last surviving grandparent passed away in 2010, I realized it’s hard to get old. But in America, we make it even harder. If it’s not the aches and pains of aging, then it’s the social isolation. Most elders do not have a prominent voice in our communities. Many are living lonely lives in retirement facilities, disconnected from the younger generations. And yet, these elders have so much history, so much to share.

So I put out a simple request to my community: who is your favorite elder?

Some people shared memories and inspirations from a favorite elder, many of which are included as little quips and quotes between the chapters to come.

Other people started connecting me with their grandmothers and elder mothers, college professors and high school art teachers, neighbors who are Holocaust survivors, nannies who have become mentors. They were all in their 80s, 90s, and 100s, and they all had something they wanted to share.

These elders told me many powerful life lessons that helped me become a more purposeful professional, a more vested parent, a more awakened husband.

Here’s the thing. The advice from someone at the very end of their life is much different from someone in the middle of their life. An elder’s wisdom is often raw, unscripted, unbranded, poignant, and deeply personal. It probably won’t come to you in short, polished soundbites that you can cut and paste onto social media.

But I have found that if you ask an elder to share their story, and if you are willing to spend some time and listen to their answer, they will teach you something that you cannot learn from even the most successful self-help gurus or the most high-impact business coaches.

For example …

The aforementioned woman, Tara, responded to my request and invited me to Jackson, Mississippi, to meet some of her favorite elders. It’s not exactly easy to get from Los Angeles to Jackson–with two small children at home, I find it hard enough to take a shower, let alone journey to the Deep South.

But the day after speaking to Tara, I was driving through Los Angeles and listening to the Grateful Dead Channel on Sirius. There was a concert playing in its entirety. For more than two hours, my car’s radio display read:

Grateful Dead

Jackson, Mississippi

December 19, 1978

As Confucius said, Signs and symbols rule the world. Not rules and laws.

Come April, I flew to New Orleans, rented a car, and took off on a gorgeous road trip up the I-55 to Mississippi. In April, the South is in full bloom with newly birthed bright green leaves, and purple, orange, and yellow wildflowers illuminating the entire interstate. Listening to a playlist with some Dierks Bentley and feeling momentarily free from the rigors of parenting, I sang, and at times screamed, Free and easy down the road I go!

Our first stop was a town outside of Jackson called Byram, Mississippi, population 11,489.

Tara took me to meet Eula, an African-American woman who was 105 years old, days away from turning 106. Eula and her niece answered the door to greet us. They led us past a spread of sandwiches and potato chips they had placed out for us, and into her living room.

I looked around at Eula’s walls, decorated with 105 years of history. I saw a beautifully framed image that read PRESIDENT OBAMA from the night he was elected in 2008. Eula said the greatest moment of her life was seeing a black man elected President.

I noticed a newspaper article about Eula’s father, a World War I veteran, who died in 2000 at the age of 104.

Next to another Obama picture was a framed poster of Psalm 23:1-2, The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters.

Eula wore a bright red sweater which matched a bright red pillow woven with a white cross lying just beside her. Painted portraits and photographs of her two children and late husband decorated the wall behind her.

The first thing she told me, proudly: I live by myself.

Eula was born May 24, 1912, which made her seventeen years older than MLK and five years older than JFK.

I asked how old she feels on the inside.

She said in a deep Southern accent with a touch of gospel spirit, I don’t know how I feel on the inside or the outside. I just go.

Eula told us a little about her childhood. We grew up on a white man’s place down on the Pilgrim West Road. We had to walk to school three miles there and three miles back when we were just five years old. We had to walk in the rain and the mud, cold weather. School bus would run by and splash water up on us and children throwing spitballs out of the bus at us. But it didn’t bother us. We just went right on. God is good.

Eula was one of nine siblings. She adopted two children, through whom she has thirteen grandchildren.

There is a lot of family and a lot of love in her life. Her niece, who greeted us, lives in the house across the road from Eula. She wakes up each morning, and looks across the road to make sure she sees Eula’s little light on. She looks out for her, as do most of the people in their local church, many of whom are related to Eula. She is now the oldest person in the church, and her community looks to her for wisdom and advice.

Eula seems to be rounding the corner to 106 with her own kind of momentum. I can’t get around like I used to but I still enjoy waking up in the morning and seeing the sunshine. It’s a joy to be livin’.

She has a great faith. Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. And you’ll be alright! She asked for my favorite verse from the Bible and I responded, I’m Jewish.

And she quipped, Just cause you’re Jewish don’t keep you from havin’ one.

She laughed out loud.

I looked around nervously to see if I said something I shouldn’t have said. But Eula’s laughter kept on going and kept on building. So I started laughing, hesitantly at first. But then the laughter caught on and my laugh is not exactly bashful. A 105-year-old Southern Baptist from Mississippi and a 45-year-old Jew from LA. God is good!

They say that laughter creates trust and what felt like a forced conversation began to find a little rhythm and flow.

I asked her if she believes in the afterlife. It’s there. Whether we get it or not, it’s there. When the Lord says ‘that’s enough come on up, join the crowd,’ I’m ready to go there.

She sang Amazing Grace for us. If only you could hear the spirit and history and antique beauty in her voice,

Amazing grace! how sweet the sound,

That saved a wretch like me!

I once was lost, but now am found,

Was blind, but now I see.

Her niece shared what may be Eula’s special secret for longevity, aside from genetics: She has seen her eight sisters go. And most of them she was very close to. The faith has sustained her. She is able to place [their loss], compartmentalize it, and keep goin’.

That