Elephant or Dodo Bird?

As I reached the exit door of the Marquis fitness room, the person on the treadmill next to me and with whom I’d been chatting said, “I’m eighty-four years old, but when I exercise, I feel 70.”

During my neighborhood walk, this comment kept rattling around in my head. It resonated with my own sense of who I am. Whatever earlier generations have thought about people who crossed the 80-year mark, it is clear to me and others in the contemporary octogenarian class that we have energy, commitment, purpose, and staying power. In fact, we are an aspect of humanity’s evolution on planet earth. What do I mean? 

A recent TED hour on NPR radio set my mind swirling. For each TED Hour an NPR host collates three-to-four TED Talks that address a common theme and interviews the presenters. This one was on ‘Vacancies: What happens in spaces (or species) that have been diminished?’

 

One example was of elephants in a remote nature preserve in Africa. For decades poachers have been decimating their population for the purpose of selling their tusks on the black-market. Recently, however, these elephants have been making a comeback. How? The mama elephants have been birthing babies that do not grow tusks.

Elephants are extraordinarily empathetic, family oriented, and highly protective of their offspring. It seems that after years of watching humans 

kill their kin, brutally remove the tusks, leave dead carcasses bleeding on the ground, and drive off in a cloud of dust and raucous laughter, 

MAMA ELEPHANTS had had enough. 

Using their brain-body wisdom, 

they told their bodies to produce elephants without tusks.

Reflecting on this recent research of elephants adapting to a devastating change in their situation, put the contemporary turmoil around sexuality and human propagation in a bigger framework. Younger generations have made it clear that they are fed up with school shooter drills, static gender roles, and desecration of the environment. 

Likewise, older people are rebelling against being relegated to ‘retirement camps for the elderly.’ At either end of the age spectrum, humans are taking actions to assure the future existence of humanity and a healthy environment to sustain it.

If you or someone you know has or soon will reach eighty, know that you and they have a choice about whether to take the route of the Dodo bird or that of the innovative elephant. Be an elephant. Reimagine humanity, a healthy society, and our shared home.