Wednesday coming is the 1st October, which as every year, is World Older People’s Day. In the UK, the theme adopted for the day by Ageing Better is “Building Belonging: Celebrating the power of our social connections.”

There are words that echo with more weight as we age. Belonging is one of them. It is not a policy slogan, nor a sentiment to be spoken and forgotten. It is the pulse of being human. Without belonging, life feels diminished. With belonging, even in frailty or change, life can feel whole.

As people grow older, the stories told about them often shrink: into narratives like dependency, frailty, passivity. But the truth is far richer. Older people are key actors in families, communities, economies. They carry wisdom, networks, memories, relationships. They also harbour aspirations: to contribute, to be healthy, to be seen, to be part of the shape of tomorrow.

Belonging is not a soft value; it is essential to well-being. Where older people are socially isolated, health deteriorates faster, mental health suffers, mobility is lost. By contrast, connections – whether through volunteering, intergenerational activity, friendships, or just community life – reinforce identity, resilience, and purpose.

I have over the years written about and reflected an awful lot upon belonging and it seems as good a time as any to try to gather some of those disparate observations together in one place and to focus on the different elements which underline the importance of belonging for us all but perhaps especially as we age.

I’ve previously said that:

“Home is where you feel you truly ‘belong’. It is a belonging which is beyond bricks and mortar, wood and stone. It is belonging to a place where you can be yourself, where you can be recognised and loved, where you can rest and be.”

For many older people, that home is the house they have lived in for decades, the street where their neighbours know their name. That rootedness to place and space is why the giving up of that home for any reason is such an emotional strain and wrench for many. I think we underestimate the depth of grief people feel at the loss of familiarity when a place is lost to sight and touch.

But then when that happens – and when things go well – the care home becomes a place to belong; a place reshaped into familiarity through memory and relationship. Home, wherever it is, is less about walls than about recognition.

But there are other dimensions to belonging. Belonging is not only what we receive. It is also what we owe.

“Belonging is not just about where I feel safe, or where I am comfortable. It is also about what I owe to others and what they owe to me. Belonging demands compassionate action.”

This belonging is woven of mutuality. It is knowing that we are held, but also that we hold. Even in late age, perhaps especially then, the sense that we matter to others and they matter to us is sustaining.

To belong is not only to stand in the present moment. It is to carry with us the stitching of our story.

“Belonging is as much about memory as it is about the present. It is about continuity, about stitching the fragments of our story into a whole.”

The photograph of a wedding day, the remembered songs of childhood, the taste of a dish once shared with family long gone – these are not relics but anchors. In them, belonging persists even when place and circumstance change.

We often limit care and support and see it as a set of tasks –  feeding, washing, dressing – but belonging flourishes in the spaces between the tasks, in the moments when being and not doing reside.

“Belonging comes in the small gestures of recognition and the daily dance of relationship. It is the smile, the word remembered, the laugh shared, the touch that reassures.”

Belonging is created in the ordinary: the carer who notices your favourite cardigan, the neighbour who lingers for a story, the volunteer who brings not just a meal but companionship.

Belonging is also about being heard. Too often older people, especially those living with dementia or frailty, find their voices diminished by others speaking about them rather than with them. To belong is to have your preferences respected, your choices listened to, your story allowed to continue in your own words.

Belonging is not only about place but also about pace. In later life, belonging is affirmed when the rhythm of the day matches the rhythm of the person. When care hurries, belonging is lost; when there is time to linger, to share a cup of tea without rush, belonging deepens.

As bodies age and change, people sometimes feel estranged from themselves. Belonging is therefore also about reconciliation with the self – to feel at home in one’s own skin, even as it weakens. Gentle touch, movement, and respect for bodily dignity restore belonging to the self as much as to others.

As I’ve reflected already we often frame belonging in terms of memory and past, but belonging is also about still having a stake in tomorrow. For an older person to feel they belong is to know they are part of shaping what comes next-  in their family, their community, even in their society.

The Gaelic tradition deepens this sense. Dùthchas speaks of the inseparable belonging between people and the land. It is more than heritage; it is the conviction that you are of a place, not merely in it. For many older people in Scotland, dùthchas is the anchor that holds memory, identity, and dignity together.

Alongside it is cianalas –  that aching longing for home and kin, the yearning for belonging even when separated by distance or change. Cianalas reminds us that belonging stretches across absence, across generations, across the spaces of care. It is why even in a new room, miles from a birthplace, an older person carries their belonging within them –  in story, in song, in memory.

These Gaelic notions are not romantic relics; they are living truths. They teach us that belonging is layered: place, memory, relationship, voice, body, time, future, and spirit interwoven.

At its heart, profoundly so, belonging whispers the truth that is too easily lost in later years: you are still of worth. You are not surplus, not forgotten, not invisible. You are still part of the story, still part of the fabric, still one whose presence matters.

On this year’s Older People’s Day, belonging is the thread that binds memory, home, responsibility, relationship, voice, body, time, future, and worth. It is the story we tell together: of dùthchas that roots us, of cianalas that holds us, and of lives still rich with presence and possibility.

To end, a poem

Belonging

The hill remembers my step,

soft moss holds the echo of my name.

In the sea-salt air

I taste the prayers of those before me,

their breath woven with mine.

 

Belonging is not possession,

not walls, not stone, not door,

but the hearth that lights within the heart

when another calls you home.

 

It is the touch of a hand

that knows the story of your scars,

the laughter that lingers

like heather-scent on clothing,

the silence that rests between us

without demand or fear.

 

Belonging is the knowing

that even in the far room of frailty,

even in the chair by the window,

the self is not forgotten:

the river still flows,

the bird still calls,

the soul still knows its place.

 

Donald Macaskill