Chip’s posts on midlife wisdom

Going back thousands of years, society has celebrated rites of passage as a means to show community support to people going through a pivotal life transition, whether that be puberty, commencing adulthood, marriage, welcoming a baby into the world, or death. Rituals provide a “rest stop for the soul,” recognizing the end of one thing often marks the beginning of an exciting new start.

There are many reasons we chose Baja and Santa Fe to be the locations for our Academies and Regenerative Communities. There's a raw realness to both places where nature is a profound teacher.

Jamie Lee Curtis recently said it’s time to delete the term “anti-aging” from our vocabulary and replace it with “pro-aging.”

I've long enjoyed Pash Pashkow's TEDx talk on why "the midlife crisis needs a rebrand." Is any other life stage saddled with such a rotten narrative as "a time of intense difficulty, trouble, or danger" (that's the dictionary definition of "crisis")?!

“Aren’t you spent?” I was recently asked after co-leading an intense MEA workshop week. Without thinking, my answer rolled off my tongue, “No, I’m invested.”

MEA alum Myra Lavenue's guest post yesterday about finding a new best friend in her fifties reminded me of a term I once used to describe how I felt when I'd met someone who instantly inspired me by their radiance. I called it "Spontaneous Admiration."

Growth requires death: old ideas, old branches, anything that needs composting and regeneration. It is that cycle of life and death that makes a forest feel so fresh and alive.

Being a midwife must be a glorious and strenuous calling, helping birthing mothers bring a precious, new life into the world. In conversations with my friend Richard Rohr, he told me that midlife is almost like our second birth, the time when an adult’s operating system shifts from the ego to the soul. Here’s an excerpt from something he recently wrote:

Ah, to live in a world of awe instead of judgment. It would be nice, wouldn’t it? Well, contrary to what cynics may say, I believe it’s possible. But only if we create the conditions for it to occur, which is precisely what we aim to create at MEA—a space where awe becomes our default response to life.

“Wholly unprepared, they embark upon the second half of life. Or are there perhaps colleges for forty-year-olds which prepare them for their coming life and its demands as the ordinary colleges introduce our young generations to a knowledge of a world and of life? No, there are none. [...] that is not quite true. Our religions were always such schools in the past, but how many people regard them as such today? How many of us older persons have really been brought up in such a school and prepared for the second half of life, for old age, death, and eternity?”