Saul, our local shaman (another way of saying “wiseman”) reminds us that the Earth is about 70-75% water, as is the human body (especially the brain and heart). According to our shaman, water and wisdom have much in common.

Once is chance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is a pattern. In that spirit, I’ve recently been asked three times about my morning routine. So, for better or worse, here it is: As I outlined in this earlier post, I wake up with monks and farmers.

“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...

Bald and bewildered, I was not in my natural habitat when I joined Airbnb in early 2013. I’d never worked in a tech company. I’d never heard of the “sharing economy.” I didn’t know what it meant to “ship a feature.”

Oprah once suggested we “turn our wounds into wisdom.” But one person’s wound may distill fresh insight while another’s might lead to hardened judgment.

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

Last summer, I celebrated turning 60 by taking an epic road trip. I dubbed it my #Tourde60. A few days into my 7,000-mile journey, I heard Tim Ferriss’s podcast with Chip Conley. Immediately, I downloaded the audio for Wisdom@Work, the Making of a Modern Elder.

Socrates wrote, “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” Well, that may be taking it a little far, but there’s no doubt the older I get, the less I seem to know...and it’s not due to failing memory.

I’m thinking about the ‘growing-up’ process, or rather the ‘growing-way-up’ process and how we name it. All of human culture necessitates naming; the act of naming makes ideas and forms manifest. Heraclitus turned ‘logos’ into a signifier connecting the structure of the cosmos and human reason. A primal ‘analogy’: as the universe creates, man creates. Naming has a generative effect. This is especially true of naming ourselves.

You probably didn’t know it, but “Yankee” was a derogatory term of the Brits to describe the new world upstarts but was soon adopted by New Englanders themselves (and many a baseball fan, centuries later).