The Sorrow of the Youth

There is a deep sorrow in our youth.

I don't mean the ordinary unhappiness of being young: the heartbreaks, the confusion, the not-knowing-who-you-are that comes with being twenty-two. That is not sorrow. That is becoming. The discomfort of growth has always been part of the deal, and the young have always survived it the way young bodies survive most things. Messily, with more resilience than they know they possess.

What I am talking about is different. Deeper. Something I have watched arrive over the last decade with the slow accumulation of evidence that precedes certainty.

It is a loss of self. Not the ego self we all build our lives around. Not the curated life that looks so convincing from the outside. The actual self. The one buried deep, underneath the fantasy of who we think we're supposed to be, the self that arrives with a purpose and a hunger and a set of questions that are its own and no one else's. The self that the myths were supposed to help us find.

We have failed our children in sharing the myths. Not the ancient myths. Though those too, yes. The modern myths. The stories that explain, in the language of the time we're actually living in, what it means to be alive and mortal and confused and full of longing. Joseph Campbell spent his life saying this: every civilization needs its myths, not as entertainment but as initiation, as the psychological and spiritual framework that carries a human being from one stage of life to the next. We have not updated ours. Or rather, we have replaced them: with content, with consumption, with the machinery of attention that turns seeking into scrolling and longing into likes.

The young feel this. They may not name it. Naming it requires the vocabulary we haven't given them. But they feel it. The despair that shows up in the statistics, the anxiety that has become a clinical category, the numbness that masquerades as irony. These are symptoms. The disease is that we have not initiated them into this life and this world and this time.

Here is the thing I keep coming back to. The old stories, the ones that carried the mythic and the archetypal and the sacred, were told. They were oral. They moved and adjusted according to the culture within which they existed. They could be retold in the language of the people who needed to hear them, set in the context of the wilderness and the technologies and the realities available at the time. Then the printing press arrived and the telling was done. Set in stone. The reality is that the telling needs to be adjusted based on the culture of the times, put into the words that people can actually hear. We don't need to invent new stories. We need to retell the old ones in a language this generation can receive. We haven't done that. We froze the myths in amber and then wondered why the young can't find them.

Because we are not initiated ourselves.

I need to be honest about what I mean by initiation, because the word can sound like it belongs to another century, or to a culture that isn't mine to claim.

Someone deliberately, intentionally, over time, brought me across the threshold from the child I was into the man I was becoming. Not once. Not in a single ceremony or a single conversation. Over decades. Through a library and a set of summer reading lists and a series of full moon parties and a Korean War veteran who thought it was important that a child meet Tibetan monks and visit the Hopi reservation and learn to dream lucidly and ask questions that don't have answers.

Bruno initiated me.

He did not use that word. He would probably have resisted it. Bruno resisted most formal categories, preferring the thing itself to the name for the thing. But that is what he did. He took a child who arrived in a Hollywood doctor's office with a placenta and an argument and he spent thirty years building the container that child would need to hold the questions the world was going to hand him.

The swim coach initiated my body. Not my mind. The coach was not an intellectual, and the philosophical depth that surfaced at his kitchen table surprised people because it came from a man who shoed horses for a living. But he gave me the knowledge that lives in the muscles, the kinesthetic certainty of blasting off a starting block, the understanding that the body knows things the mind doesn't. He initiated me into physical presence before I had any idea what presence was.

Duane initiated me into a way of knowing that doesn't appear on any university syllabus. Two copper rods, a mountainside, the body's response to what is flowing underneath the ground. He didn't explain it. He put the rods in my hands and walked me through the field and the rods moved and the well came in with more than enough. Initiation by demonstration. By trusting that the young man's body would do what the rods asked of it.

Even my father (broken, bipolar, generous and leveraged and absent and returned) initiated me into something. Not deliberately. Not the way Bruno did it, with the reading lists and the library and the careful curation of experiences designed to build a container. My father initiated me by letting me witness the cost of building without a container. By handing me a business that was failing and watching me try to hold it. By being alive, decades later, to see me close what he couldn't finish. The wound was the initiation. I spent twenty-five years metabolizing it into something that could be given away.

Someone, several someones, each carrying a different piece of the map, stood at the threshold and said, through their presence and their teaching and their beautiful broken example: come across. The world on the other side of this is larger than the one you're standing in. It will cost you. Come anyway.

Most people do not get this.

I need to say that plainly, without false modesty, because the recognition has been arriving for years and I can no longer pretend I don't see it. Most people do not get a Bruno. Most people do not get a swim coach who gives them their body, or a water witcher who appears and disappears like a character from a myth, or a professor who decides, for reasons that remain mysterious, that a confused young man switching majors is worth keeping.

Most people get parents who love them and schools that credential them and a culture that sells them stories about success and failure and leaves them to figure out everything else alone. The question no one asks them, the one I wrote in a journal at three in the morning and keep returning to, is blunt: do you want your life to be outsourced? Or would you prefer to choose the life within which you want to live? Without initiation, the outsourcing happens by default. The culture chooses for you. The algorithm chooses for you. The path of least resistance chooses for you. And you wake up at forty-five wondering whose life you've been living.

We, the middle generation, the ones who are supposed to be the bridge, have pushed our own elders into the shadows. Into the retirement communities and the assisted living and the long slow fade of golf and Netflix and the narcosis of comfort that passes for a life's final chapter. No one trained them in elderhood. That sacred task has been bought out for coloring books and botox. And the older generation, pushed there, has quietly slipped into the role we assigned them: living out the rest of their days without anyone asking, let alone demanding, that they bring their accumulated wisdom to the table.

The younger generation has not sought elders because they don't know where to look. The older generation doesn't know what it means to be an elder. And it is not the same as being old. Being old is what the body does. Being an elder is what the soul does with what the body has carried. And between the young who are searching for something they can't name and the old who have stopped being asked, there is a gap, a chasm really, where the transmission is supposed to happen.

The transmission is not happening. This is the sorrow.

Stephen Jenkinson writes about this with more precision and more grief than I can manage. Eldership does not equate to safety, he says, in the same way that learning does not equate to safety. The elders should not be in the business of building safety nets. Or rather, the safety nets they build should be temporary scaffolding, not permanent structures. The job of the elder is not to protect the young from the world. The job is to unfurl what the world actually is. Including the shadow. Including the danger. Including the sacred uncertainty that safety is ultimately a construct. And to stand beside the young while they reckon with it.

To hold the space without filling it. To trust the young person's encounter with the real without rushing in to soften it. To be present the way Bruno was present at the full moon parties: not directing the conversation but creating the conditions in which a genuine conversation could happen, and then getting out of the way.

Bruno did this. I didn't understand it when I was living inside it. I understand it now because I'm standing on the other side of the threshold he spent thirty years walking me toward, and I can see the whole slope from here.

I think about the young water professionals in India. Their faces across the table when they sang happy birthday. Their instruments and their idealism and their hunger for something they couldn't quite name.

What do I owe them?

Not the answers. Not the framework. Not the Arrien gates or the Rohr stages or the Jenkinson grief. Those are mine. They arrived when I needed them, in the language of my own breaking, and they may or may not be useful to the young adults my children are becoming.

What I owe them is what Bruno gave me. Presence. The willingness to sit at a table and treat their questions as real questions. The library. Not a physical one necessarily, though I have that too, but the understanding that serious engagement with the world is not optional and that the questions are more important than the answers and that the people who pretend to have it figured out are the ones you should trust least.

And maybe most of all: the example of a man who was broken and rebuilt and broken again and rebuilt again and can sit on a bench, a different bench, a metaphorical bench, but a bench nonetheless, and say: I had something important to tell you. Here is what I know. It is incomplete. Carry it anyway.

The elders who have passed are no longer physically present, but they gave me the present of their wisdom. Wisdom I still have access to decades after their passing. Recursive time in motion. The past returning its gifts to me as I step across the threshold into the learning and apprenticeship of elderhood.

I am not yet an elder. I am apprenticing for it. Apprenticeship is this: not the arrival at wisdom but the willingness to be changed by the attempt to become wise. To fail at it. To try again. To offer what I have been given. Not as a finished teaching but as an ongoing experiment in what it means to live with your eyes open.

I wrote this in a journal, trying to say what that apprenticeship feels like from the inside:

I desire to age into wisdom, into elderhood
Not into an old folks home
Where my kin may or may not visit upon their whims
I plan to age with grace and dignity
Acknowledging the time of past as a reference for the future
To hold the space for the young
As they seek their own paths and their own tribulations
And know by witnessing my aging wisdom
That indeed their time has come
To solve the problems of their generation
As I hold the space for them to weep, to grieve, to mourn
And learn from those who came before
To not undo the past but to explore its ramifications on the future
And to do better than we
In building connection and respect for the world we live with
To help them navigate the welt and the wild
To not grow old in an old folks home
But to sing in the hearts of the young
The songs of our ancestors in place and time
So they may find their own way home

It is not a good poem. It is a true one. That distinction matters more to me now than it used to.

The sorrow of the youth is real. I am confident they will find their way. But it will take a toll on them and on us, and the toll will be heavier if we, the middle generation, do not step into the gap. Not as saviors. Not as experts. As elders in training. As people willing to stand at the threshold and say: the world is harder than you've been told and more beautiful than you can imagine and the questions you're carrying are the right questions and I will not pretend to have the answers but I will not leave you alone with them either.