Talk Amongst Yourselves? No!

Oakland, CA. Earlier this month. I piloted a new Coming of Age program, "Conversations on the Journey," at the American Society on Aging Fall Regional Conference here.

Oakland, as you may know, is the birthplace of the writer Gertrude Stein, who famously quipped about the place, "There is no there there."

Note to Gert: there is.

At least there was in the six hour gabfest I led. "Conversations" is a discussion program about compelling 50+ issues using clips from Boomervision!, the Coming of Age lecture series, as "trigger films."

In this program, a discussion leader screens a clip from the series, then draws people out regarding their thoughts and feelings about what the speaker has said.

In Oakland, we did four 90 minute sessions back-to-back. Our topics were "Living a Fulfilled Life," "Health and Well-Being," "Creativity," and "The Role of Elders."

Isn't Six Hours Just Too Long to Talk?

I had flown in the night before from Philadelphia, was still operating on East Coast time, had jet-lagged and felt exhausted. Not the best physical and mental state for leading a marathon conversation.

I entered the workshop room with considerable trepidation, thinking there was no way the 14 participants could yak it up for six hours!

Surely over that length of time, energy would wane; minds would wander; I would screen clips, ask a question and be met with blank stares.

Then the participants entered the room, and I panicked. Fully a quarter of them were under 50-- well under 50. How was this going to work?

Quite well, as it turned out.

In part, because there were younger people in the room. They, of course, had ideas about all the topics. Why wouldn't they? They wanted meaningful lives, to be healthy, explore their creative sides, and had ideas about how elders were and should be viewed.

Hmmmm.... I began to think, this might work.

Is Now the Time to Burn Your Scripts?

Shortly into our first discussion, "Living a Fulfilled Life," we spent a good bit of time reacting to Suzanne Braun Levine's notion that midlife was a good time to take a look at the "scripts" we had been handed and decide whether to continue to play the roles we had been encouraged to play for most of our lives.

Suzanne, one of the founding editors of Ms. Magazine, focuses on women in the video clips we screened: the scripts that many women have in their heads about being a good daughter, wife, mother, employee, etc.

At this point, two of the guys and two of the women in the group shared how they had come out as gay men and lesbians in the face of the intensely homophobic "scripts" that their families and others had handed them and how liberating doing so had been

They now planned to review other scripts they had been encouraged to follow and possibly give them the heave-ho as well.

Clearly, the energy in the room was picking up. People were sharing, connecting and learning from each other's experience.

By the time we hit the "conversation" about creativity, one woman shared that she had just lost her job and how the discussion we were having was very important to her as she contemplated the next steps in her life.

A Resounding... Resonance

Another woman responded how much the first woman's sharing her sitation touched her. More and more, the participants spoke about how the ideas in the clips resonated with their lives:

Two women talked about how they felt their pursuit of a fulfilled life, desire to explore their creativity, and the vision they had of themselves as vibrant, contributing elders were at odds with the plans (well, really lack of plans) that their spouses had-- and that they had or were about to divorce.

Others talked about how they wanted to have these conversations in their communities-- communities that were even more diverse than the group itself!

And then it hit me: one of the reasons this was all going so well is that this was such a diverse group: old were learning from young (and vice versa); rich were learning from not so rich; men from women; gays from straights; (vice versa, vice versa, vice versa).

This had all worked because of diversity. Because we were not "talking amongst ourselves" but within a much wider circle.

Yes, the video clips had provoked discussion, but it was the variety of experience, views, and identities that had made "Conversations on the Journey" such a rich experience and a journey itself.

To wit: by the end of the day, we had created community. Everybody exchanged contact information; many were making plans to pursue activities together; and the feeling in the room was exhilarating.

To wit #2: The exhausted, jet-lagged pessimist that I was at the beginning of the day was nowhere to be found.

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