Guest Post

My husband and I took a gap year at age 62, forty-four years after our respective parents forbade us from taking a timeout before starting university. The goal was to reinvent ourselves. We were determined to resist the tyranny of the three-stage life (learn, earn, retire). Our children were grown and launched. Why not, we thought?

I was twelve years old when I first heard this survival tip from a wilderness ed instructor. “If you’re ever lost at night and don’t have a compass, you can find your way back with a sewing kit and a magnet.”

For the first time in history, technology has evolved in a way that can allow us to become more human again. Our species is unique in that humans survive not just by passing on our genes, but also by passing on our wisdom before death. While our genome preserves our species, our wisdom evolves our human heritage. And just like DNA is a unique biological human marker, wisdom is unique to the body that accumulated it.

Herbert Nitsch is the free diving champion of the world (and at age 49 a certified Modern Elder) who managed to take a single giant breath and hold it for just under ten minutes as he dove down to 800 feet into the Aegean Sea. Brain cells begin to die at one minute of held breath. At three minutes most human would be dead. And yet many of us go through our daily lives unconsciously holding or restricting our breath.

For many, age brings up fierce resistance. We hide the fading of youth with hair dye and facelifts. We no longer have sleeveless tops in our closets. I do not judge that. I sought those “fixes” too. Until it occurred to me that acceptance of myself was at stake and up for grabs.

In our fast-changing world, it’s no surprise that even death has taken on a whole new reality. You might say death is being reinvented from the ground up—call it Dying 2.0. The facts speak for themselves. Since the 1900’s we have more than doubled our lifespan, adding almost 35 years to our lives. While exciting and re-energizing, it is stunning to watch as society does little to prepare for this new shift in reality.

Down in Baja, at the Modern Elder Academy, metaphors and waking dreams spread like wildfire. They’re in sunrises and sunsets, turtles and sticks, guacamole, margaritas, and frijoles. They’re in the dirt, water, and air—all buried into the skin like DNA. It’s an easy place to talk in metaphor—to describe the world in a way that isn’t literally true…where one thing always seems to be symbolic of something else.