MEA

“We all have an identifiable, though largely unconscious and unexamined, relationship with money that shapes our experience of life and our deepest feelings of ourselves and others. Whether you count your change in dollars, yen, rupees, or drachmas, money is one of the central, linchpin issues in all of our lives...

You came frozen brittle Punched and pinched from the cold Washed by a strange wind To the warm Baja shore.

Life is b-u-s-y. And that doesn’t change just because we become Middlescents—that stage of life when we question who we want to be when we are grown-ups—even though we are supposed to be all grown up!

The marking of time is a funny thing. 2020 feels more significant than 2019. We celebrate “special” milestone birthdays and feel drawn to take big, new steps during the “big” years. We wait to hit major work anniversary dates before changing jobs, launching new ventures or retiring.

Nobody has mastered curiosity more than a child. Give a kid a rock, and some bubble wrap and their imagination will light up with possibility. From a blade of grass to their own shadow, the whole world is a child’s playground, ready to be explored, investigated and questioned. Unfortunately, as we get older and busier, our curiosity narrows to what’s practical or will get us to the “next level.”

Last week I met someone I hadn’t seen for over two and a half years and they asked me what I’d been up to. I could have said so much.

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.

If we’re running a marathon, we better not be carrying extra baggage. Of course, this is easier said than done. The first half of our life is often about adding and accumulating, and not just possessions, or friends, or romantic relationships. Or even the size of our families.

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).

Plato suggested, “You can learn more about someone in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” One key lesson of our Modern Elder Academy is the value of letting our mirror neurons play dance together. The two-minute video below, shot at my home in Baja, outlines some of the reasons why I think midlife requires an openness to feel new and awkward. Click "Read More" to watch the video. Hope you enjoy it.