An Elegos to Relevance

🌑 Elegy to Relevance

Here begins...

The Deprived Unthreading of Significance

the privation of a soul's functional purpose ~

a woeful loss of pertinence and suitability ~

A sad ruing for those who have become...

~ adored but not needed

~ our wisdom respected but not consulted

~ our presence cherished but not central...

a heralding of the slow dying of social connections...

Hurt now burrows deep into our forgotten souls-

Once...

our names were doorways...

Our voices spoke and the room shifted,

our voices called...and the world rearranged itself

around our usefulness.

But time,

with its cruel and merciless hands,

reached out...unbuttoning us from the center.

Children have now grown strong and tall -

touching the sky...reaching beyond...seeking -

thriving to discover their own answers.

Our opinions no longer wax germane...

They Forget what we once taught...once advised.

Communities forget the timbre of our speaking,

of our once‑needed input, opinion and desire.

The phone rings less...if ever.

The world keeps spinning

without checking if we’re still holding on.

And so we learn

the quiet grief of existing inside the peripheral -

of a moon that no longer pulls the tides

as strongly as it once did.

The Ache is Unseen...

There is only a quiet loneliness

that refrains from announcing itself.

It sits in the chair we once filled with purpose,

breathing...

like a ghost of our former significance.

We mourn not power, but presence -

the feeling of being woven

into the daily fabric of someone’s life.

We mourn the gravity we once carried

without knowing it had weight.

But, finally...somewhere within that surprised self...

we arise...we discover

that our elegiac laments are not only endings...

They are thresholds---

thin places where the old self

loosens its grip

and the new one

waits with patient hands.

Relevance was never meant

to be a crown.

It was a season,

a migration of meaning

from one role to another.

And when the world stops asking for us,

something quieter begins to call---

a purpose not tied to usefulness,

but to a new concept of our being.

A reborn Reclaiming.

So let this be the turning...

May we learn to matter

in ways that do not depend

on being needed.

May we become elders, self carers

self-care receivers in the truest sense,

keepers of story...holders of silence,

witnesses to the sacred ordinary.

May relevance return , never claiming applause,

but as alignment...a soft, steady knowing

that our existence still ripples outward

in ways no one sees

but everyone feels.

Let Our Benediction Be~~

Here lies the old relevance,

buried with gratitude.

Here rises the new one,

rooted in presence,

not in performance.

We are still here.

We are still thriving,

apposite and apropos...

And the world,

whether it remembers or not,

has been shaped by our...Being.

.............................

Afterword:

Relevance deprivation syndrome...a post-retirement or post-career (post- usefulness) condition where individuals feel a loss of purpose, significance, and social connection.