MEA

An MEA alum recently asked me, “What could be my most powerful resolution for 2021?” I told him that “learning how to learn” would offer him huge collateral benefits. The magic of our MEA workshop curriculum is just that.

When I allow myself to settle into feeling how I experience Sabbatical Sessions, or “SabSesh,” as we call it, the word is joy. All the normal Baja delights and distractions are here — the clarity of the light, the sunsets, the sun and shade, ocean breezes, the whales, the workaday magic, and gathering with like-minded community.

On our final day of our 7-day MEA workshops, we offer two journaling exercises, one of them called “The Box of Unlived Life.” This exercise may be relevant to those of you who are moving into the last act of your play but feel somehow incomplete. Here’s how it goes:

Re·tire·ment /rəˈtī(ə)rmənt/ “withdrawal from one’s position or occupation or from active working life; to be in seclusion”

"The developmental demands of this newly awakening self are enormous, but they are mostly overlooked in our culture. While the awakening of early adulthood, which are mostly about identity, are culturally supported with rituals and celebrations - weddings, graduations, ordinations, baptisms - the more subtle spiritual awakenings of the middle years are culturally invisible." Stephen Cope

I find progressions fascinating. It’s probably why I’m obsessed with our life stages: childhood, adolescence, adulthood, middlescence, elderhood. I also love the progressions of the four seasons, which can be a perfect metaphor for life.

I got my real estate license while in college at age 19. I was subsequently hired to work for my uncle’s commercial real estate brokerage firm in 1980, at a time when Silicon Valley was primarily fruit trees and vacant land.

I wrote this poem in Aug 2019 a few months after our 31st MEA cohort, nicknamed Hearts of Gold, finished our magical week at Modern Elder Academy. Everything in this poem is true and actually occurred. If you haven't attended MEA, it will seem improbable.

After what we’ve collectively been through in the past year, how do you prepare yourself for a completely different mindset for 2021? As evidenced in yesterday’s video, I had to dramatically shift my mindset to move from our 2020-21 workshop calendar and programming to our new Sabbatical Sessions.

“Wholly unprepared, they embark upon the second half of life. Or are there perhaps colleges for forty-year-olds which prepare them for their coming life and its demands as the ordinary colleges introduce our young generations to a knowledge of a world and of life? No, there are none. [...] that is not quite true. Our religions were always such schools in the past, but how many people regard them as such today? How many of us older persons have really been brought up in such a school and prepared for the second half of life, for old age, death, and eternity?”