I am thinking right now of life passages, of the change when the curtain goes down on one act but goes up on another. Everyone has heard the term "rite of passage". It means something one endures as a kind of initiation into another phase of life. My focus isn't the initiation but the fact that there are such major periods and that we do transit from one to another.

Transitions require grace and humility. Grace is called for because people just can't make it on their own; they need the undeserved favour of others. Humility is required because no one has it so much together as to do everything in the right way with the full measure of correct results. Successful transitions are those in which people get through and complete the adjustment in some way that allows life to go on. Hopefully, it goes on. It's a good enough transition.

Recently, I went on a vacation and I was off the Island for about ten days. While away I became aware of several transitions. It was a lot to bear and I have only just begun to realise how stressful such transitions can be; when they all come at once, it can wear a person out! I had to come back to the Island just to get some rest.

One transition that occurs in many families is the shift in roles between parents and children as people age. It's part of a continually developing relational adjustment that is always in flux.

When children are very young, they need to be protected. If they are unsteady on their feet, they need a parent to follow along and keep them from falling.

If they are crawling into situations they cannot comprehend but are unsafe, they need a parent to go ahead and help them investigate the world or to keep them from becoming overwhelmed. As children become older, parents need to adjust and to provide more enriching experience, and then, when children become adolescents, parents need to adjust once again to begin power sharing so that adolescents learn what it's like to live with the consequences of their choices and to shoulder the responsibility that comes with having more autonomy and power. When children become fully independent adults, parents have to adjust once again, letting them go, and finding a new footing of relationship.

Later, usually much later, there comes a final adjustment in which the roles become reversed. That is when children must become more parental with the people who used to protect and provide for them.

When people age, they lose some capacity. Some lose more than others. One thing lost, which is probably most benign, is processing speed. People just slow down. The pace of metabolism in general decelerates, so people put on weight; they also take longer to consider issues, solve problems, or even to find the right words to express themselves.

Part of that is because they've had enough experience to see life with more complexity, so a quick and easy answer is not so available, but it's also because their brains don't work the way they used to. They forget because they have begun to lose the neural circuitry that once connected "A" to "Z". When those little physical losses begin to effect larger psychological and cognitive functioning, then older people can resemble much younger people in their abilities to understand the demands and potential pitfalls in living. That's when they need to be more protected than at any time since they were infants.

That's also when one of the final adjustments in the relationship between parents and children takes place, and it's a difficult one.

It is a humbling one. It is one that tests the love each has for the other. It is a sad one, but it is also a glorious one, filled with the richness that a life full of years has brought to the final act in the play of life.

@EDITRULE:

Dr. Philip Brownell, M.Div., Psy.D., is a counsellor at Ashton Associates of Bermuda. He can be reached by e-mail at crossroadsg-gej.org