The most common emotion people feel about getting old is surprise. I remember reading this in my thirties and finding it hilarious. Surprise? About the single most predictable thing in life? Oh, those old folks, I thought. Those doddering darlings! How silly they are!
I’m pretty sure that was last week. Except now I’m about to turn sixty.
WHAT????
You have to understand: Turning sixty only happens to other people. It has literally never happened to me. It is not something I do. Every day, I have to wrap my boggled mind around the shocking, totally unforeseeable reality of my sixtyness.
In my defense—in defense [...]
I’ve never really had a job. I’ve worked my whole life. Hard. Year in, year out, night and day. But a job? Nah. Couldn’t do it.
Like you, I was raised to believe a job was synonymous with survival. But I couldn’t get one. In my “build-your-empire” years, I was too crippled by autoimmune diseases, too busy raising children, to follow conventional wisdom.
Lucky me.
Because I couldn’t do a job, I had to open up my imagination. Instead of “How can I get a job?” I learned early to ask, “How can I add value to the world, to other people’s [...]
There is a type of person known in every human tradition on earth—except ours—as a source of wisdom, guidance, healing, and insight. We don’t have a name for these people. We don’t know how to train them. And as a society, we’re suffering because we don’t know how to access and benefit from their gifts.
These people are born, not made. And they are all around us. Just as in every other society, all over the globe and reaching back thousands of years, there are individuals in our culture with a particular collection of traits and skills [...]
They say the night is always darkest right before the dawn. A flame rises just before it goes out. Dying creatures have a last surge of energy just before the end. And often, when life seems hardest, something good is about to break our way—I call it “the storm before the calm.” Psychologists call it an “extinction burst.” I’m writing this with a heavy heart at a point when outworn prejudices are spiking in my country. I’m finding the concept of extinction bursts comforting, and I hope you will, too.
Here’s how it works.
Somewhere, in a university laboratory, a rat [...]
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