“I wasn’t aware that was something a person could do.” – King George III, “Hamilton”
In a startling act of grace and service, President Joe Biden has ceded the presidential race to a younger candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris, who is now the presumptive Democratic nominee. Though many Americans wish Mr. Biden had stepped aside sooner, for the president, the decision to remove himself from the Democratic ticket must have been a gut-wrenching moment of reckoning with the realities of age and time. The realization that a younger person is more fit, more alert, more capable, more relevant, more suited to the job one has long done is not fun. We baby boomers can relate.
President Biden is just a little too old to be a proper boomer, but at our age, what’s four years among friends? We boomers are retiring and joining Medicare and collecting our Social Security checks in large numbers. We are the old folks now. Some of us may continue to work well into our 70s, but many of us do not. If we are lucky, we don’t have to work for a paycheck to get by. I imagine Mr. Biden’s pension will allow him to retire in comfort. I’m joking: Money is probably not his primary worry, although it is a concern with which many retirees wrestle. What’s often harder is the stepping down from a position that defines us.
The wisdom we supposedly accrue as we age can arrive in the form of humility or hubris. We may struggle with the idea that we are replaceable or even reject the idea altogether. Or we may see the writing on the wall. (It’s in the Bible: Look it up.) When I retired from my day job in a prison library, I had mixed feelings. I was good at my job, but I sensed that it was time for me to let go. Many retired friends speak of the same tangled web of ambivalence and yet a pervasive certainty. It is complicated to know the right time to go, but then we have to make our peace with the decision.
[Related: Worried you retired too early? Some tips for making the most of your twilight years]
I do not presume to know the president’s heart, but as I grow older, I find that the relocation of our place on the family tree can shake us up. Two of those movable branches are losing our parents and becoming grandparents. When we lose our parents, mortality looks dark. We’re next! When we meet our grandchildren, mortality looks brighter. The light our darlings give off illuminates the shape and the beauty of the cycle of generations. When we watch our grandkids grow and thrive, we wouldn’t want life to happen any other way. Our precarious perch on the family tree makes us feel in our very bones, brittle though our bones may be, that we are always in transition and that we are exactly where we’re supposed to be.
We boomers have often conducted ourselves as though we are the first generation to face any of the milestones of adulthood. We have sometimes acted like no one before us had ever gone to college, chosen (or fallen into) a career, gotten married, had children, dealt with teenagers, gotten divorced, cared for parents, buried parents, struggled with mid-life, hit menopause, had grandchildren, grappled with physical or mental deterioration or retired. We document ourselves in every phase with amazement, as though we have discovered some ancient truth, heretofore unknowable, that we must pass on with personal commentary. It is something I love and hate about being a boomer.
But we are right now living a moment that will be written about in the history books of the future. I know: We have lived through many such historical markers—the moon landing, the internet, our first wrinkles. Mr. Biden is surrendering his power and his ego into the hands of a new generation, with the hope of protecting the common good of the country and preserving our American democracy. His decision strikes me as a perfect example of the psychologist Erik Erikson’s last psychosocial stage of human development: integrity vs. despair. Dr. Erikson maintains that during this eighth and last phase of life, we either come to terms with the fullness of our lives, owning both success and failure, or we look back with regret, in danger of succumbing to hopelessness. Mr. Biden’s walking away from the mightiest position on earth is a real-world lesson in integrity, that is, accepting and embracing one’s place in the progression of chapters of one’s life.
We boomers can learn from this. We, too, can relinquish the limelight to the generations coming after us. With humility and God’s grace, we can quiet ourselves and allow their voices to be louder than ours. We can make room for their leadership. We can give focus to their concerns. We can vote in ways that will sustain the future roots and branches of our family trees. We can trust younger people with a future that is not ours to see. We can offer our young loved ones the wisdom of our experience but not bludgeon them with it. We can be the first generation of old folks who don’t think that everything was better back when we were young—because if we’re honest, it wasn’t. We boomers are a little dot on God’s timeline, and maybe the best way to leave our mark is to be willing to erase our more egregious marks.
“He must increase; I must decrease,” says John the Baptist, the voice in the wilderness who understands that the time has come for him to stop yelling. “I am not the Messiah.”
Words to live by. Words to discern by.
