To grow old in an African sense isn’t to drift to the edges of life but to draw closer to its centre. Age doesn’t loosen one’s grip on the world; it deepens it. While much of the world understands time as Chronos – measured, counted, and forever running out – I’m personally learning to live by Kairos with time as arrival, readiness, and the moment that knows when it’s meant to arrive.
I’ll welcome the slow silvering of my hair, for example, not as evidence of decline but as proof that something is gathering: life not emptying itself with age but filling it, wisdom not announcing itself loudly but settling.
The modern world prefers to place old age in quiet rooms and clean corridors, away from the noise of living, which has never felt right to me. I see myself staying close to the heart of my family. Not leading. Not instructing. Simply being present as the one who remains while others rush forward. People will come and go amidst laughter and disagreement, arrivals and departures. I won’t try to keep up, nor will I need to. My presence will be enough.
I can picture a shaded veranda and a hand-carved stool, worn smooth by time and use. In front of me, a neighbourhood that knows itself. Children running freely. Animals moving through the day without urgency. Seasons changing without announcement. Birds nearby, not performing nor demanding attention but simply singing as they’re known to do. It’s from this place that time will no longer feel like something slipping away. It will feel held.
My body will become a map as I rise into old age, my wrinkles not flaws to correct but the geography of a life fully lived: ridges of laughter, valleys carved by grief, long stretches of endurance. My hands, once built for heavy lifting, will carry lighter symbols: a fly whisk to mark a thought, a walking stick shaped from old wood carrying a history longer than my own. My voice – once eager and loud – will become careful, softer, and spare while carrying weight not because it demands attention but because it’s earned it.
With age comes a different way of seeing: a steady gaze and the ability to notice what others miss, recognise danger before it announces itself, and sense the truth without being told. This is a blessing and work of discernment as I’ll sit calmly where the young cannot yet stand, not above them but beyond the rush clouding their view.
I’ll become a bridge in this season, one foot in the physical world and the other resting gently in the unseen. I’ll negotiate quietly with God, with remembering names and things, and with spirit. For the health of children. For rain. For continuity. Not power as control, it’s simply my personal responsibility.
Respect, then, arrives without noise and will always be found in how a room settles when I enter. In the lowered eyes. In the softened voice that calls me “Gogo/kokwane.” Even my appetite will return home, the body asking again for what the earth gives freely: millet, sorghum, rooibos tea, spinach, and bitter leaves. Not foods of weakness, they’re the medicine of those who’ve lived long enough to understand restraint.
Finally, there’s the silence: the final, secret joy that will see my sitting quietly in moments of conflict not because I’ll lack words but because I’ll no longer need to prove myself. This silence doesn’t denote an absence of strength but rather serves as graceful authority.
In the African worldview, life does not end abruptly. It completes itself. When the time comes, I will not disappear but move closer as a proverb people repeat without recalling its origin and a tree they rest beneath without knowing who planted it. I’ll be the law guiding a lineage quietly and faithfully, and for that promotion, I am ready.
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