Aging

“I can see clearly now the rain is gone I can see all obstacles in my way Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind It's gonna be a bright Bright sunshiny day.”

I’m just as likely to visit the Lost & Found in my 60th year as I did in my 6th year when I was in kindergarten. Here’s what’s gone missing and what’s shown up on the verge of my big 6-0h...Oh...Oh.

I’m thinking about the ‘growing-up’ process, or rather the ‘growing-way-up’ process and how we name it. All of human culture necessitates naming; the act of naming makes ideas and forms manifest. Heraclitus turned ‘logos’ into a signifier connecting the structure of the cosmos and human reason. A primal ‘analogy’: as the universe creates, man creates. Naming has a generative effect. This is especially true of naming ourselves.

This month sixty years ago, Gloria Steinem moved to New York to pursue her fledgling journalism career and, a dozen years later at age 38, started the pioneering Ms magazine. Given how influential she was in co-creating the modern women’s movement, the 85-year-old Steinem has some words of wisdom to offer those of us who are in the early stages of creating a “Modern Elder” movement.

I am not afraid to die, I just don’t want to be there when it happens. – Woody Allen The widely promoted notion that we Americans are living progressively longer, healthier lives is inaccurate.

Nearly 2,500 years ago, Aristotle suggested that a good story must have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The 3-act play (or life) has existed ever since. Five hundred years ago, scientists started studying the epic 3-part metamorphosis of the caterpillar-cocoon-butterfly journey.

Adolescence, as we know it, didn’t exist as a word until psychologist G. Stanley Hall coined the term for a book he wrote in 1904. Today, we recognize adolescence as that time when we experience a major transition (puberty) in who we are and how we see the world.

This David Whyte gem describes the holiday season, parenthood, and what it means to be a Modern Elder who is more focused on being interested than interesting. Just beyond yourself.

It’s sundown Saturday on an unusually quiet Pescadero beach. I sit with Jamie, our dog, marveling at another technicolor sunset. Earlier today, I bid adieu to eighteen lovely women looking to manifest love after 50. Over the course of this MEA Mastery Week, I saw decades melt from their faces, while wisdom slowly injected into their spirit.

The Oxford Dictionary defines middle age as 45-65, so that was initially our age requirement at the Modern Elder Academy. But those linguistic scholars don’t live in Silicon Valley, Hollywood, or Madison Avenue, where people begin feeling old in their mid-30s, a fact that is compounded by a corporate culture that is obsessed with DQ (digital intelligence) over EQ (emotional intelligence).