Things are going better than I imagined. I am trying to keep my wits about me as this town is so seducing. Sarasota’s stark beauty, blue skies and mountainous cloud ranges are sneaky sirens calling me back. But this time, I know what lies beneath.

Coarse. Mean. Angry. For so many of us, it defines how U.S. society feels right now. Emotions are contagious and even more so on an island. And, let’s face it, the United States is a big island full of emotions, all in the ricochet mode. How do we change this” island fever?”

“The unfolding saga of life on all levels is one of constant transformation, constant changing of form,” says author, artist and playwright Julia Cameron. Nature illustrates this principle in countless ways. The chambered Nautilus, for example, is a deep-water mollusk that builds a spiral-shaped shell for a home.

One of my greatest regrets is never meeting management theorist Peter Drucker who died just before his 96th birthday in 2005. Why do I admire Peter? Let me count the ways:

How many actual books do people read these days? My study wall, which is my backdrop for Zoom calls, is lined with them, but lately I read on my laptop and on my phone more often than I pull a hardback or paperback off the shelf.

The human brain has been called “the world’s most complex pattern recognition system.” Pattern recognition is considered a proxy for wisdom, the theory being that if you recognize a pattern based upon past experience, you can forecast the future.

So, this is how my mind works sometimes. This morning I walked into the elevator after my dawn walk, and like every morning, the voice in my condo elevator says, “going up,” which sounded an awful lot like “growing up.” This got me thinking. What if growing up was like ascending a very tall building?

As we mature, many of us become attracted to the idea of cultivating the wisdom inside of us. This is a wonderful and noble pursuit. And yet there’s an essential part we might miss. Cultivating anything - whether a crop or something else - isn’t enough. We must harvest, too, if anyone is to enjoy the fruits of our labor.

Rumi said his life could be summed up in three phases, “I was raw. I became cooked. Then, I burned.” Learn, Earn, Burn. It’s the way many of us see the progression of life. But, what if, instead, it was, “Learn, Earn, Yearn, and then Learn again”?

This seems like an odd choice given how stationary we are these days. I’ve chosen this for Friday Book Club for three reasons: (1) “Travel porn” is big these days. We want what we can’t have; (2) While far-flung travel is in hibernation right now, the “digital nomad” trend is growing big as people decamp from their habitual world and seek refuge elsewhere for extended stays (this is part of the reason we created our MEA Sabbatical Sessions);