Generations
Being within the line.
My grandad on my mother’s side lived alone for as long as I can remember. I have a very faint image in my mind of my nana but she passed before I had a chance to know her. We used to visit him in his tiny bungalow with a potato field garden or he’d come and visit us and sleep in the top attic. I remember him babysitting when I was a young child and dying when I was a young adult after I’d left for University. He and I. The two extremes of a living triad of generations. Now I am in the middle. My mother out ahead and my children following on. I haven’t lived with my mother since I was 18 and my 17 year old daughter will be leaving our home within a year.
Have you ever wondered why the word for all of the people born and living at around the same time is a ‘generation’? Which is from the Latin and ultimately Proto-Indo-European meaning ‘to produce’, ‘give birth’ or ‘beget’. Less obvious is how it speaks of a coming from. Safe inside its letters is the idea of that which comes into being and also that from which it comes. The word generation is about those that are already here, those that come from them and the space that forms the join.
The earliest use in English was around the 14th century and referred to the act of procreation, offspring or lineage. At that time, in pre-industrial Britain, most lived in extended family groups and worked the land together. This was how they lived. And survived. This was lineage. It was live, tangible. Immediate and continuous. Their days and nights were spent together in and as each other’s lives. Their work and play were shared. With those who were older and those who were younger. There were few other options.
This natural togetherness, as old as the hills, as layered as the land, fostered continual learning alongside each other. Through conversation and perhaps even more powerfully through observation. The world and how best humans might survive in it changed at a very slow pace. What your parents and even grandparents had learned as they lived was valuable and even essential for you to survive.
The Industrial Revolution, around 1750, saw the beginning of a gradual shift as the young moved away to cities for work. This continued into the Victorian Era when the concept of the ‘self-contained home’ started to appear and became aspirational in the media and domestic manuals. We should also remember that Britons invented Industrial Revolution and inspired others around the world to follow suit.
Housing expansion and greater welfare supported people during and after the interwar period which reduced the practical necessity for care between generations within one household. The second half of the twentieth century has seen many move out of poverty, greater mobility and the care of the elderly shift from children to institutions. A lot of people benefited and we do now as a result. Some much, much more than others. At the same time, by the 1970s multi-generational households were firmly the exception.
Recent decades have seen capitalism separate us further, providing convenience at a price that most can just about afford and morphing the ‘self-contained home’ into the ‘self-contained individual’. When isolated we are vulnerable. First rule of the Savannah. Our care and company have been outsourced to people and systems that we do not know, exist remotely and are provided as long as we pay. A precarious kind of security. A contract not a blood pact. Not to mention the loneliness and a forgetting of love. As it happens the number of multi-generational households hit its peak in the UK in the 1970s. It is on the rise again today as cost of living has grown.
The natural, millennia old ways of learning as a group, from each other, from those that have come before and by bent of their survival had much to teach, has weakened to almost nothing. The pace of change that has accelerated immensely, almost all of which is in service of that which we aspire to but don’t need, now means that our elders most often do not know what our young people want to learn. Those in the middle are left trying to hold everything together and make sense of the life they are living versus the one they are told they are living. This is how it seems. This is what we are sold.
But it isn’t true and it isn’t real. That which our elders have to share is and always will be valuable and timeless. It is very valuable right now, precisely because it remembers what is important beyond the speed, the profit, the status and the stories. It has just become obscured by a frantic, daily race to amass and be seen and to win. And our young people have so much to share with us all, about their lives and what it is like to be them, and we are missing so much of it. They are missing so much of it. The way out of the challenging aspects of our lives is known in the space between us all. We need to reach again across that space.
The slow, informal, natural, automatic learning and dialogue that occurs when people live together, people of differing ages, is the living, flowing heart beat and blood of our humanity. For many reasons it has become a slow flow, a soft beat, a thinned blood.
So we have to act, deliberately and with conviction, to create opportunities where this kind of interaction can again fill us with the rich, relational exuberance of our strength as humankind. The generation of what it means to be human is between generations. Remembering the original meaning of the word generation we need to reclaim and value our lineage. From that, most simple, humble and vital of places, the future of our thriving will rekindle.
Perhaps there will be a way to be that change. To choose to come together to experience the ancient richness of being within the line, not just a frozen point on it. Perhaps my grandchildren and I will live our lives alongside each other. Maybe we’ll have a chance to be more than just visit now and again. Whether we make the changes as families or cluster around shared interests or choose to care for our elders in our homes are all steps towards, or perhaps, steps of returning to that which we hardly know we have lost.
Written by Gavin Birchall - Project Co-director.