At different life stages, we have opportunities to make new friends while also valuing and retaining long-term friends.

You may have noticed that Wisdom Well has been graced by a few consecutive guest posts from great MEA alum writers this past few days. That’s because I was blissfully offline for a week in mid-Baja, the Sierra de San Francisco mountain range where Baja’s only on-land UNESCO World Heritage Site exists.

During the first half of our lives, we refine our capacity to prove ourselves; then, around midlife, we realize that the only proving we need to do is to ourselves, not to others.

My transition into retirement started gradually, then was instantaneous. On March 13, 2020 I stopped going into the office—forever. Mind you, it’s not just “the office”, it’s the company I founded from a spare bedroom, leading since 2006. This leadership and success defined me, creating my personal brand.

As Americans become more and more drawn to traditional and integrative methods of healing as well as to altered states of consciousness, I believe we are poised to embrace a variety of dreamwork practices as methods for growth and healing.

As I look at my tattered, 1969 copy of “Man’s Search for Meaning,” I am reminded of Dr. Viktor Frankl’s influence on my life these past fifty plus years.

Growing up in Lubbock, Texas - some might say a small town - my childhood memories were overall good ones. I had a father who was in a MASH unit in Vietnam and became a nurse anesthetist in private practice and this brought my family to Texas from Washington DC when I was 5 years old.

Data in the 21st century is like oil in the 18th century. In 2006, Clive Humby, a British mathematician and data science entrepreneur, made a keen observation, “Data is the new oil!”

As I write this blog, I have the row to myself on a morning flight to Cabo for MEA Mastery Week with Carl Honoré 18 hours ago I had no idea I’d be here. It had been 3+ years since I’d been in MEA’s second public cohort - Soul Train - to become a Modern Elder.

“To love someone long-term is to attend a thousand funerals of the people they used to be. The people they're too exhausted to be any longer. The people they grew out of, the people they never ended up growing into."