MEA

Wisdom is a tricky topic. You know it when you see it. So, we’ve always had a complex relationship with the proclamation that MEA is the world’s first midlife wisdom school. Anyone who professes they’re wise probably isn’t.

Since starting MEA in 2018, there are two articles that have described what we’re doing better than anything I’ve ever written and both of them appeared in The Atlantic magazine (I’d suggest you get a subscription).

Baja California Sur, where MEA is located in Mexico, is by far the least populated state relative to its land area in the entire country. Because we’re in such a rural place, we have so much beauty to behold.

I have just returned home from one of the most spectacular weeks of my life. I was given the incredible opportunity to be the guest teacher at the Modern Elder Academy (MEA) in Baja, Mexico, a place nothing short of exceptional, where people come to learn to navigate the difficult transitions that midlife presents us with.

“Our universities fail to guide us down the easiest paths to wisdom… Rather than teaching a sense of awe, they teach the very opposite: counting and measuring over delight, sobriety over enchantment, a rigid hold on scattered individual parts over an affinity for the unified and whole. These are not schools of wisdom, after all, but schools of knowledge, though they take for granted that which they cannot teach — the capacity for experience, the capacity for being moved, the Goethean sense of wonderment.” - Poet Hermann Hesse

First off, we’re proud that the Wall Street Journal featured MEA yesterday as the lead educational option for people who are exploring midlife pathways.

On the last morning of the annual MEA alumni reunion (now called “Homecoming”) in Santa Fe, I had a conversation with alum Lynn Ogden who was glowing from her weekend experience. Knowing that I was one of the first board members of the Burning Man non-profit, she asked me what MEA could learn from Burning Man.

If you're reading this, chances are you're a Bibliophile, someone who loves books, rather than a Bibliophobe, someone who fears books. Perhaps you're even a Bibliosopher, someone who gains wisdom from books.

I love teaching at MEA. My dream has come true. I walk ten minutes down the beach from my Baja home and, voila (“listo” in Spanish), I’m on campus ready to teach.

The Mexican people have a lot to teach us about resourcefulness and resilience. Despite the age-old stereotype of Mexicans being lazy and taking siestas on the job, the reality is that they typically work six days a week, not five.