Guest Post

...Unceremoniously stripped naked and laid bare for all to see (or so I thought). It doesn’t always happen in midlife. I’ve spoken to many who have themselves experienced this very same event in their thirties, some even in their late twenties, but for me and thousands of others all over the world, and my guess perhaps some of you reading this, it happened in midlife.

The demographics of our world are shifting. This is nowhere more evident than in the rise of caregiving in families. In the last five years, the National Alliance for Caregiving found that nine and a half million people in the US alone have become carers providing unpaid care to another adult. This growth trend shows no sign of slowing.

Like many Baby Boomers or GenXers, you are probably in the midst of major transitions. If you have retired (or are about to) you may have lost the identity and structure with which to organize your life and relationships that your job once provided. This can be an unsettling time (only magnified by the pandemic).

Chip’s Note: The irony of this post is Susie sent it to me just before we had a mama whale birth a baby directly in front of MEA a week ago. It was sublime and poignant experience as those of us on the Baja beach watching could feel a certain mammalian connection with the mama and her newborn.

I’ve known Eddie Dobbins for more than two decades and have admired his evolution from a savvy City Hall politico and activist to becoming a spiritual avatar who loves Bali as much as I do (and, in fact, he’s led and facilitated mindfulness retreats/ trips to Bali for friends and colleagues who are spiritual seekers).

I love that MEA holds curiosity as a core value and powerful transformation tool. Curiosity is certainly one of the things I CRAVE, and it has been accentuated during two weeks at our MEA Baja Sabbatical Session. Our workshops on forming developmental questions through Appreciative Inquiry, and Chip’s process of “Spying on the Divine” to cultivate awe both captivate my craving to explore what is new.

Thurgood Marshall once said, "None of us got where we are solely by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. We got here because somebody – a parent, a teacher, an Ivy League crony or a few nuns – bent down and helped us pick up our boots." This is just one quote that marks him as a Modern Elder.

I came across a piece of paper on my desk with words that referred to three personal memories: “Rear Window,” “Catcher in the Rye,” and Patti Smith. What had happened in each instance that I wanted to remember? Was there a connection? It took a while, but I figured it out - the theme is “discovery.”

Today is my 69th birthday and I am jolted in ways that continually serve as signposts along this path of modern elder-ism. Yesterday, a dear friend, who became a collector of my photographs over the last 12 years, informed me he was closing his office and wanted to return all the images he procured from me due to no space.

If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Conversely, if you open your mouth to speak and you can’t make a sound, do you still have a voice? For the past week, I’ve been living with the latter, not by choice and not knowing for how long I will exist this way.