Baja is famous for its treacherous roads with its stunning vistas. It’s heaven for anyone who loves to drive backroads. It’s hell for rental car companies. What an apt metaphor for life. We’re issued a vehicle at birth: our body. We’re offered expensive rental insurance (growing up with our parents), some driver’s education (school), and a roadmap (life lessons).

(Adapted from The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul - September, 2021 - by Connie Zweig, Ph.D.) I trained as a depth psychologist and spent my career exploring and writing about the shadow, a name for the personal unconscious coined by Carl Jung.

At least once a week, I meet a forlorn mid-lifer who whispers to me, almost embarrassed, “I don’t have a purpose.” It’s almost like they’re suggesting they don’t have a personality or a reason for living. Self-help gurus, like Tony Robbins, proclaim, “Activity without purpose is the drain of your life.”

At 15, I was a beanstalk of a kid, with shoulder-length, surfer-blond hair and a free-spirit that loved nothing more than dancing up a storm in my bedroom while listening to Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love.” If the rest of the family happened to be at one of my sisters’ sports matches, there was a good chance I’d light up a doobie and switch over to the Doobie Brothers. Such was my adolescence.

Chip’s Note: My two co-founders, Jeff and Christine, were recently in Santa Fe brainstorming how we might design our new 2,600-acre ranch there to become our first U.S. MEA Regenerative Community. The property is located in the Galisteo Basin which has a fascinating cultural history. While he was there, Jeff started conjuring up this poignant poem about the occasional “fantasies” many people have of Santa Fe.

I’m not sure of the exact date yoga went mainstream in the western world, but I know when Yoda went mainstream: 1980. Thanks to his starring role in Star Wars, Master Yoda helped us see the magic of practically applied wisdom. And, of course, Luke Skywalker would never be the same.

Australian author and rebel Bronnie Ware has spent much of her life offering palliative care and has conversed with hundreds of people on their deathbed. This led her to writing a book, “The Top Five Regrets of the Dying,” dedicated to helping more of us live a regret-free life.

Newsflash: Our linear progression of learning through a single, lifetime career died last century. What is more, your job will likely evaporate this decade. And you’re going to live longer. These two facts essentially mean you’ll need to swerve into new careers at unpredictable points throughout your life.

For the past quarter century, I’ve been on a journey to tend the soil and soul of communties by bringing community-supported agriculture and biodynamic farming to communities far and wide. It’s so clear to me that we should be more connected to the earth and each other and through those connections, we nourish ourselves, the land and society.

Dr. Laura Carstensen and the Stanford Center on Longevity are doing an in-depth, multi-disciplinary study on A New Map of Life. Here are their six principles to guide long lived societies: