I love Arthur Brooks’ regular column “How to Build a Life” in The Atlantic. In this recent piece, he writes about keeping score and checklists: “She who dies with the most checked boxes wins, right? Wrong.” We know that midlife and later can be a time ripe for fulfillment, the satisfying completion of a life well-lived; but what fulfillment means to one person may be completely different from what it means to someone else.

Our four MEA operating partners recently went on a strategic retreat to discuss our next five years. And one of the most profound messages we all took from this experience is that we want to live by the four words that make up today’s title: We want to live a life less ordinary.

Thanks to my friend Alain de Botton’s School of Life for this question. No disrespect meant to those who strictly follow an existing organized religion. We’re just dreaming a little here. If you were to start your own religion, what would be your commandments (or, at least, “suggestions” if “commandments” feels a little too commanding)? How can you start living those commandments today?

We live in a shut down time. COVID will eventually let up and we will again start to gather, with pent-up revelry and passion. Our Roaring Twenties await us, just as happened post-Spanish flu and World War I. Can the choices we make about how we gather help inform and unite us in addressing equity, sustainability, and the climate crisis?

We are more reliant than we know on an invisible industry that has been pummeled by the pandemic. They accommodate us, feed us, make us laugh, and feel a sense of connection. But, you’ve never heard of this gigantic industry before. 2020 was a year of cruel ironies for the American “gathering industry.”

“The very act of assembling is an exceptionally powerful stimulant. Once the individuals are assembled, their proximity generates a kind of electricity that quickly transports them to an extraordinary degree of exaltation.” - Sociologist Emile Durkheim

I started noticing something odd about our need to gather fifteen years ago. As our societal reliance on the internet became more pervasive in the early part of this new millennium, the annual percentage increase in the number of festivals worldwide grew at double the overall population growth.

History and anthropology reveal the human desire for gathering, expressed throughout the ages in ecstatic celebrations of worshipping, conversing, feasting, consuming, and dancing. It is intriguing how many well-known secular festivals were birthed from their sacred roots of “danced religion” with Carnival being the best known.

Just before throwing my every-five-year birthday extravaganza in 2015, my good friend Ben helped me to see one of my gifts. He called me a “social alchemist,” a mixologist of people. It probably comes from my upbringing being the “curious white boy” in an inner-city high school, throwing dance parties with my diverse set of multicultural friends.

Throughout history, coming of age ceremonies that celebrate a child’s rite of passage into adulthood have been woven into the fabric of societies the world over. From twenty-first celebrations, to Bar and Bat Mitzvah’s to the Amazonian bullet ant initiation, Ethiopian cow jumping and the Indonesian teeth filing ceremonies, coming of age is and always has been a milestone deserving of recognition.