What a treat it was to have TED speaker Ashton Applewhite (and her colleague Virginia Hamilton and husband Bob Stein) join us in Baja for Sabbatical Sessions the past couple weeks to converse about how we end ageism. Her book “This Chair Rocks” and her online clearinghouse Old School are foundational to our process of creating “cognitive liberation” around the subject of age.

One of my co-founders Jeff Hamaoui is a profound teacher, and I’ve been a fortunate student of his (Like Eddie who was profiled yesterday, Jeff was in our first MEA beta cohort the first week of January 2019). He’s a deep listener and a world-class facilitator.

I’ve known Eddie Dobbins for more than two decades and have admired his evolution from a savvy City Hall politico and activist to becoming a spiritual avatar who loves Bali as much as I do (and, in fact, he’s led and facilitated mindfulness retreats/ trips to Bali for friends and colleagues who are spiritual seekers).

Some of you have asked me, “How can I cultivate and harvest my wisdom beyond what I read here on Wisdom Well?” I’ve heard this question from members of five different generations as young as those in their teens and as old as a few people in their eighties.

It was exactly one year ago when MEA had to close for business. It all happened so abruptly, with the World Health Organization announcing that we’d slid into a global pandemic on March 11, 2020. We had our 50th MEA cohort of 18 mid-lifers on campus at the time, scheduled to leave on March 15, with another cohort scheduled to arrive that same day.

I love this TEDx UCLA talk from brand strategist Pash Pashkow, who humorously helps us see that a company rebrand isn’t all that different from the rebrand we might want to experience in midlife. He reminds us that many companies come out stronger on the other side of a rebrand based upon asking the following three questions:

For the past year, we’ve been pondering how we could take what we’ve created here in southern Baja and scale it within the U.S. as a means of catalyzing a new kind of community for the 21st-century. The message we’ve received from our 1,000 alums from 24 countries has been, “Please do this sooner rather than later as Covid has taught how much we’d like to be part of a community dedicated to regeneration and wisdom.”

I miss rocking with the Glide Memorial Gospel Choir in person when I’m in San Francisco. I miss volunteering there to help feed the homeless. I missed having my 60th birthday party in Big Sur.

The past few years have shown a marked plateau and even decline in longevity in the U.S. such that we’re quickly falling behind the developed world. Even so, I have confidence our long-term longevity will continue to rise like the rest of the world. We may have gotten the quantity (length of life) right, but now it’s time to give more attention to the quality (depth of life).

I love that MEA holds curiosity as a core value and powerful transformation tool. Curiosity is certainly one of the things I CRAVE, and it has been accentuated during two weeks at our MEA Baja Sabbatical Session. Our workshops on forming developmental questions through Appreciative Inquiry, and Chip’s process of “Spying on the Divine” to cultivate awe both captivate my craving to explore what is new.