If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Conversely, if you open your mouth to speak and you can’t make a sound, do you still have a voice? For the past week, I’ve been living with the latter, not by choice and not knowing for how long I will exist this way.

I tend to steer clear of the clickbait site BuzzFeed, but this particular listicle caught my attention. Their clickbait title was clearly a challenge: If You Recognize Any of These 35 Pictures, I'm Sorry, You're Officially Old. Well, I clicked. And, yes, I’m old.

It’s an honor and a ball of fun to interview my friend Jennifer Aaker and co-author Naomi Bagdonas and publish it here on Wisdom Well just two days after their new book, “Humor, Seriously,” has arrived on bookstore shelves...or, more accurately, in Amazon’s warehouses.

On the 20th anniversary of my boutique hotel company, Joie de Vivre, we invited 10,000 people with the name Joy from California to a “Joy Party” at our Hotel Vitale on San Francisco’s waterfront with the first 50 of them receiving a free room for the night (hence, a “Joy Slumber Party”). Tears of Joy streamed all night.

I’m often asked which cultures in the world most value elder wisdom. We all know that the western world sent their elders out to pasture long ago. But, even in places that have culturally respected elders - like Asia and Latin America - we’re seeing more and more young people seek out Google instead of Grandma when they want the answer to a question.

Two-time MEA alum Pat Whitty has been leading a 12-week course based on Julia Cameron’s book, The Artist’s Way. While doing his morning pages exercise, this poem just appeared, as Julia predicted, and I started writing it down.

Living in Baja, it’s easy to forget just how brutal the winter can be on one’s emotions. I recently read a New York Times review of “Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times” in which the author describes “wintering” as “a fallow period in life when you’re cut off from the world, feeling rejected, sidelined, blocked from progress or cast into the role of an outsider...However it arrives, wintering is usually involuntary, lonely and deeply painful.”

It is exactly a month since my Sabbatical Sessions experience at MEA. And since my return from Baja, the last couple of weeks has provided the opportunity for perspective as the honeymoon charm has subsided.

Curiosity can help us live richer, more vital lives. So how can we cultivate it? In this SuperAge podcast with my friend David Steward (founder of AGEIST), I discuss where curiosity comes from, how to fuel it, and what purpose it has in our lives.

Earlier this month, 51-year-old Peter Mel put himself in a club with only one member: riding the “Biggest Barrel” and the “Biggest Wave” at Northern California’s Mavericks winter surf break captured in this article.