MEA

For the past year, we’ve been pondering how we could take what we’ve created here in southern Baja and scale it within the U.S. as a means of catalyzing a new kind of community for the 21st-century. The message we’ve received from our 1,000 alums from 24 countries has been, “Please do this sooner rather than later as Covid has taught how much we’d like to be part of a community dedicated to regeneration and wisdom.”

The past few years have shown a marked plateau and even decline in longevity in the U.S. such that we’re quickly falling behind the developed world. Even so, I have confidence our long-term longevity will continue to rise like the rest of the world. We may have gotten the quantity (length of life) right, but now it’s time to give more attention to the quality (depth of life).

I started noticing something odd about our need to gather fifteen years ago. As our societal reliance on the internet became more pervasive in the early part of this new millennium, the annual percentage increase in the number of festivals worldwide grew at double the overall population growth.

History and anthropology reveal the human desire for gathering, expressed throughout the ages in ecstatic celebrations of worshipping, conversing, feasting, consuming, and dancing. It is intriguing how many well-known secular festivals were birthed from their sacred roots of “danced religion” with Carnival being the best known.

Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto” urged workers of the world to unite: “You have nothing to lose but your chains!” Today’s rally cry is a shout out to older workers, and it’s loud and clear: “We have everything to gain from your brains!”

It is exactly a month since my Sabbatical Sessions experience at MEA. And since my return from Baja, the last couple of weeks has provided the opportunity for perspective as the honeymoon charm has subsided.

The title says it all. "Don't You (Forget About Me)" is a song by Simple Minds and played during the opening and closing credits of the John Hughes film The Breakfast Club. For many of us, that movie was the Pièce De Résistance of films defining our generation - Generation X.

As discussed in yesterday’s post, one of the most valuable modern skills we can learn is how to master transitions in a world that is constantly changing. It’s not something that we learned in high school or college. It’s not something that your company formally teaches you.

Change is situational. Transition is psychological. If all you have to show from the trainwreck we refer to as 2020 is a desire for change, you may not be turning this past year’s crises into an opportunity. You can change a spouse, a boss, a friend, but - if you carry your baggage with you - you may find that you’re living “Groundhog Day” as your next spouse, boss, or friend just triggers you in all the same ways.

This is a question I’ve heard dozens of times in the past three years at MEA. People arrive at our beachfront campus on a dirt street with no name. They’re in a foreign country, and they’re a little cautious, like turtles whose heads recoil in their shell at the first sign of danger.