ReSurfacing
Emerging from life moments where you are swimming deep underwater at levels of emotional intensity you aren’t used to isn’t simple. In the aftermath of what Bruce Feiler calls ‘lifequakes,’ you are hit with two competing forces: the desire to sit and be with what is (grief, loss, change, endings, familial restructurings) and the push to return to the world that hasn’t really noticed you disappeared - and hasn’t changed. The delicate balance between ‘being’ and ‘doing,’ ‘digesting’ and ‘returning,’ ‘remembering’ and ‘undoing’ have been this week’s themes.
Into the Fall Fray
I return from weeks and months managing my mother’s end to my second and final term at Harvard. Everyone is bristling with fall projects, new jobs and a tempting smorgasbord of classes. There’s a big social impact ‘hackathon’ this week, a cool concert and a debate on ‘generative’ board governance. I couldn’t do it.
I have a sense of whiplash. I feel like I’ve been swimming through the very depths of life’s questions and meaning. And that I must somehow propel myself back up to the surface and the light of rather more superficial normalcy. Also the million things that life-as-we-know-it calls out for. From executors and house sorting to classes and projects and podcasts. But I’m still trawling somewhere down along the ocean floor. There is an exhaustion that feels bone-deep.
I’m not alone, I know. Most of us feel unmoored in these moments. Emotional intensity feels isolating because we are all so used to hiding our hurts - and deaths. A flash of a funeral and then we are all supposed to return to life. And yet. We all, says Feiler, have an average of 3-4 ‘lifequakes’ per life. Illness, loss, divorce, personal and professional crises of every imaginable shape and hue. Sometimes they pile up into an overwhelming train wreck. Or leave you maimed and traumatised - physically and/ or emotionally. Every day, in Ukraine. In every life, for all of us, at some point. No matter how protected and privileged.
Just this morning, my yoga teacher shared that this time last year she and her best friend were climbing Kilimanjaro. Yesterday, she accompanied her to the hospital for chemo treatment. What was supposed to be a 3-hour appointment became an all-day emotional ordeal. From one year to the next, a life turned upside down. And a friend hanging on.
I’m a big believer that our bodies are regulators of our brains. So am a long-time devotee of the basics of resilience: yoga, walking (around Mt Auburn cemetery this week), meditation (via Sam Harris’ Waking Up) and sleep (what my husband claims is my greatest skill). At times like these, they become havens of calm, quiet and recovery - things every cell of my body is screaming for. Nourish the body and eventually the brain and soul settle back to some semblance of ‘normal.’ Not quite yet though.
I found it impossible to join my classmates for what sounded like a lovely evening of music and dancing Thursday night. Although I gratefully accepted a dinner invitation from another ALI friend who kindly pulled together a triumvirate of three compassionate women who were familiar with my tale and experienced in their own versions of it, for a gentle reinsertion. I felt nourished and held by compassion - and grateful for their support.
Support comes from many directions, wise souls who share their wisdom in the myriad channels we now have at our fingertips. Here are just a few of the nuggets I found helpful this week.
Philosopher Sam Harris always goes deep. But his 2-hour interview of the two authors of The Beginners Guide to the End: Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death, Dr. BJ Miller and Shoshana Berger, sets a new record. Miller is a palliative care doctor (who lost several limbs as a teen and has a wonderful TED talk on how that lifequake made him) and Berger a writer and design thinker with IDEO. Just their soothing, mature voices are a balm. They explore why death remains such a taboo topic, how desperately we seek to avoid it, and how embracing rather than denying it actually allows us to amplify and deepen our experience of life - our momentary blip on this “pale blue dot” of the universe.
On the dot, don’t miss this ever-inspiring excerpt of a speech by the admirable Carl Sagan (thanks Mark), about how tiny we are in the grand scheme of things and how senseless our angst and aggressions against one another and ourselves. Given how short our individual journeys are and how irrelevant our entire planet is to the universe it inhabits. He asked the NASA Voyager spaceship, back in 1974, to look back and take the first picture of earth from the far distance of our universe - a long view. Hoping that an image of our unimaginably tiny reality might contribute to a heightened self-awareness of our relative irrelevance. And calm us down. You know what happened to that.
Harris’ podcast reminded me of a wonderful, simple Hawaiian prayer of forgiveness that comes in handy after hubris large or small. It’s called Ho'oponopono, and may come in handy as we struggle for what to say at moments of peak-emotion. Including to ourselves:
“I’m sorry.
Please forgive me.
Thank you.
I love you.”
Its lovely simplicity covers a world of too-often-unspoken essentials.
And Amanda Gorman’s glorious poem on inequalities and climate, An Ode We Owe, to September’s UN General Assembly. It’s not, she explains, necessarily “that these issues are too large to be conquered. But they’re too large to be stepped away from.” She wants to be President one day. Amen.
More Depths & Decline!
My favourite pics often come from The Economist magazine whose brilliant covers (and zinger titles) are such great summaries of our time and mood. This week, Liz Truss features at the helm of a sinking little boat, three weeks after her election, under the cruel but concise title “How Not To Run a Country.” Since I call London home and am living this year in the US, I’m watching the UK pound dwindle abruptly to parity with a sinking heart - not to mention a similarly plummeting portfolio.
Watching the UK unravel since Brexit in 2016 in a prolonged period of adolescent-like self-harm feels like sinking into quicksand. You know it’s going to be bad, and it just keeps getting worse. What would the Queen have said? (Probably nothing). It feels like the highly emotional depths of a larger national end. The FT’s John Murdoch-Brown, quoted a report measuring the disconnect between the UK Tories and the British:
Until last week, the Conservative party looked like a relatively normal centre-right party on economics, scoring a 7 on the scale from 0 (far left) to 10 (far right)…
Under Prime Minister Liz Truss and chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng, the Tories now score a stunning 9.4….
While the average UK voter positions themselves at 3.1 and the average Conservative at 4.2.
So much unnecessary trauma and divisiveness - for nothing. Just lies and catastrophically bad leadership. On UK meltdown, friend Juliet recommends new podcast The News Agents, especially last Thursday’s episode.
Speaking of leadership, I’ve joined as a Founding Member of Ade McCormack’s new Intelligent Leadership Hub. Part of the group’s manifesto is to contribute to creating a world where organisations are:
optimised for people, communities and the planet.
built to thrive in a fast-moving and chaotic environment.
leaders are selected by their followers, rather than HR.
There is a great thirst for leaders with the resilience and vision to get us through what’s coming. Will keep you posted on developments.
Onward & Upward
This week sees the launch of my new podcast 4-Quarter Lives. I’ve been busy preparing this for months as part of my research project at Harvard. Coming soon to a platform near you - Substack, as well as Apple, Spotify, etc.
WHY 4-Quarter Lives?
You are likely to live – and work – longer than you think. The extra decades of our 100-year-lives impact everything – our careers, our couples, even our countries. The old 3-course meal of life (education, work, retirement) is morphing into a 4-quarter feast. The really new course – some might call it the piece de resistance – is the 3rd quarter, or what I call Q3, the 25 years after 50. Its arrival profoundly impacts all the other quarters.
4-Quarter Lives will explore how people are navigating this new longevity. How will we plan, digest and transition through each quarter? Who will be our role models? What do the experts say? What do we need to learn to become a skilled transitionist – at every age and stage? Pull up a chair, sit, and feast with other elderberries on the richness of our 4-Quarter Lives.
NEW: Old Schools
My latest FORBES article, Old School: Midlife Transition Programs Take Off, explains the recent explosion of new programs aimed at helping people prepare and navigate Q3. After Harvard and Stanford, a dozen other universities are now launching efforts aimed at older adults - and for the first time outside of the US (Oxford in the UK and Queens in Canada). The Nexel Collaborative was created to share best practices and get other schools on board. I’ll be working with them as an Ambassador to spread the word - and the idea across Europe.
Noteworthy
Sam Harris Podcast
A Beginner's Guide to the End: Practical Advice for Living Life and Facing Death
Free Book by Mike Drak on designing your later life and work, Lifestyle By Design, written by a longtime finance guy (and fellow Canadian) who admits to having initially flunked his retirement - and descended into what he calls ‘Retirement Hell.’ Now he speaks and writes about designing a more successful retirement (without wanting to use the word), and shares this practical guidebook, accompanied by worksheet, on how to prepare for it all. He wrote it with a bunch of friends, and it’s a great resource.
NYT Article by David Brooks on The Crisis of Boys and Men. “For every 100 middle-aged women who died of Covid up to mid-September 2021, there were 184 middle-aged men who died.” This is something I’ve been going on about ever since I started working on ‘gender balance’ rather than ‘women’s leadership’ 20 years ago. There will be no happy women without happy men. The continued over-focus and marketing of all things ‘women,’ including in the longevity space, ignores the challenges men face in this new era - and the backlash on display everywhere. The rise of women has had a predictable impact on men. One that needs to be recognised and managed - rather than ignored. So ladies, let’s step up to role modelling the change we want to see. No more ‘manels’ (panels of only men) but no more ‘wamels’ either (panels of only women). We’re only going to sort this world out together.
Thanks for the reference to Mike Drek and his free book. I downloaded it and read on the plane recently. In particular, I liked his chapter on 'what type of retiree' are you? It gave great food for thought when thinking of my peer group - many of whom are on that road at the moment - and helped me understand that people can want such different things from this next stage of their life.