May 29, 2023 • 47 mins
Midlife has a lot of messy stuff in it: divorce, the death of your parents, menopause, health scares, empty nests, career changes, feeling increasingly irrelevant - “midlife” has terrible branding, according to author, modern elder, hospitality expert, and CEO and co-founder of Modern Elder Academy Chip Conley.
What if midlife (and beyond) could include an ever deepening sense of self and more satisfying connections - right alongside all that cascading loss?
Chip and Megan start out talking about midlife, and wind their way to the power of telling the truth about your own life. In the middle, there’s grief: scary diagnoses, the deaths of friends, a near death experience, and some personal wake up calls to the meaning of life.
It’s Ok that You’re Not Ok in the mixed bag of midlife.
6 things you’ll learn in this episode:
- How “hospitality” manifests itself inside grief (and life)
- How suicide deaths in your friend group impact the rest of your life
- What it’s like facing a cancer recurrence *just* as you’re feeling yourself come back to life
- Why community is crucial to our survival
- Coming out as a gay man in the 1980’s, and what coming out to yourself might mean now
- Why you want multigenerational relationships, no matter how old you are now
Content note: this episode contains mention of suicide, along with brief mention of the method.
Related episodes:
Baratunde Thurston on the power of community
Notable quotes:
“One of the challenges with grief is the feeling like it will never end. If you can actually understand what it means to be in that messy middle, you can actually move through the grief more in a more natural, humane, and accelerated fashion.” - Chip Conley
“It is not required that you change the world because of what you've experienced in your life.” - Megan Devine
About our guest:
Chip Conley is a strategic advisor for hospitality and leadership at Airbnb, founder of the Modern Elder Academy, which helps people in their ‘third age’ find a new path forward, and author of Wisdom @ Work: The Making of a Modern Elder. He was a founder board member for Burning Man. Find him on social @ChipConley
About Megan:
Psychotherapist and bestselling author Megan Devine is recognized as one of today’s most insightful and original voices on grief, from life-altering losses to the everyday grief that we don’t call grief. She helms a consulting practice in Los Angeles and serves as an organizational consultant for the healthcare and human resources industries.
The best-selling book on grief in over a decade, Megan’s It’s Ok that You’re Not OK, is a global phenomenon that has been translated into more than 25 languages. Her celebrated animations and explainers have garnered over 75 million views and are used in training programs around the world.
Additional resources:
Want to talk with Megan directly? Join our patreon community for live monthly Q&A sessions: your questions, answered.
Chip’s book - Wisdom @ Work: The Making of a Modern Elder
Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl
The Rumi Collection: An Anthology of Translations of Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi
Check out Megan’s best-selling books - It’s OK That You're Not OK and How to Carry What Can’t Be Fixed
Books and resources may contain affiliate links.
Get in touch:
Thanks for listening to this week’s episode of It’s OK that You’re Not OK. Tune in, subscribe, leave a review, tag us on social with your thoughts, and share the show with everyone you know. Together, we can make things better, even when they can’t be made right.
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
It is so easy to feel like what we're experiencing
no one else's experienced before, nor could anybody imagine what
we're going through. And the reality is that is extremely
selfish thinking.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
This is it's okay that you're not okay, and I'm
your host Megan Devine. This week on the show, author
and modern elder Chip Conley on the losses of midlife
and the power of telling the truth for yourself and
as a beacon to the wider world subtly and everyone.
All of that and more coming up after this first break.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
Before we get started, one quick note.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
While we cover a lot of emotional relational territory in
our time here together, this show is not a substitute
for skilled support with a licensed mental health provider or
for professional supervision related to your work. Hey friends, Okay,
so this episode is like one of those spot all
the hidden items puzzles, you know what I mean? Like,
(01:05):
instead of a list of everyday items that you need
to find hidden in a drawing of a cute woodland
scene or something, today's episode is more like how many
losses can you spot inside midlife? Midlife is full of losses, divorce,
the death of your parents, menopause, health scares, emptiness, career changes,
(01:26):
feeling increasingly irrelevant. Midlife has terrible branding. According to today's guest,
Chip Conley, I love that midlife has terrible branding. I
will also say that midlife and you'll hear it in
our episode today, But midlife is not like it starts
at this age and like we're not defining it like that.
(01:49):
We're defining it more in the way of multiple cascading
things that happen as you enter into certain time periods
of your life, and as our guest says, midlife terrible branding.
Chip Conley is an interesting guy. He started out in
the hospitality industry, founding a successful luxury hotel brand, but
(02:09):
after the loss of several of his friends to suicide
plus his own near death experience in his fifties, he
sold that luxury hotel company, eventually joining Airbnb in their
early days as a strategic advisor for hospitality and leadership.
Speaker 3 (02:24):
These days, he's the.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Founder of the Modern Elder Academy, which helps people in
what he calls their third age find their path forward.
Now here's something that I love about this show, Like
the whole podcast itself, the entire arc but also this
episode in particular, when famous people get interviewed, it's usually
about their successes, right, It's like about their current project,
(02:45):
their new book, or their whatever. Now, obviously we talk
about Chip's current projects and we link them in the
show notes, but this episode is layered with grief, so
much of it that's rarely addressed, and that goes back
to my reference to those hidden image puzzles from a
minute ago. While we talk about generosity and hospitality as
(03:08):
a way of life, in this episode we also talk
about coming out as a gay man in the eighties
and what it means to keep coming.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
Out all through your life.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
We talk about the stacked losses of midlife, including watching
the machinery of business and success and loneliness destroy your friends. Now,
a content note on that this episode contains a mention
of suicide along with a brief mention of the manner
of death. You'll hear it coming if for some reason
you need just skip over just that little part of it.
(03:39):
And we also explore the grief involved in facing cancer
diagnoses not once but twice.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
For Chip.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
It's not the greatest hits of success and current projects
that you hear on like usual interviews or conversations where
we talk to famous and successful people. This episode, and
again the entire podcast, is about the human life behind
all of that. Now, even with all of this real
(04:06):
human life stuff, this conversation didn't leave me feeling down.
It didn't leave me feeling down about midlife, and it
didn't leave me feeling down.
Speaker 3 (04:13):
About the state of the world. There is both.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
Hope and meaning to be found inside all of these
difficult parts of life, and in using the truth of
your own life to encourage and empower others to build
lives that have meaning for them, no matter what age
they are. So if you need some hopeful stuff inside
the messy real human life, well let's get into it.
(04:37):
Here's my conversation with modern elder Chip calmly.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
Chip.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
I am so glad to have you here with me today.
We have friends in common, I feel like we have
relationships in common. There are a lot of things that
I actually want to explore with you today, but I
would love to start in midlife if we could, So
I'm going quote you here and then I want to
run with it. Like you wrote that midlife has a
(05:04):
terrible brand. It's all about crisis, and that if you
can survive your own midlife crisis. All you have to
look forward to is disease, decrepitude, and death, which you
know sometimes that's what it feels like. But could you
define for us what you mean by midlife and what
makes midlife interesting to you?
Speaker 1 (05:22):
Sure? So, the definition of midlife has evolved in the
last twenty five to fifty years. It used to be
perceived as forty to sixty, then went to forty to
sixty five. Sociologists now consider thirty five to seventy five
to be midlife, and in the era where people are
living to one hundred, I'd say the core of midlife, though,
is really around forty five to sixty five. I think
(05:44):
that that's to me. It can start earlier than that,
but I do think that's that's really the core of it.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
So it's less about the chronological age, because that is
some funky math. If seventy five is midlife.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
I agree, but it is the stage of life, and
I'll often societal definition of midlife relates to the end
of youth, including young adulthood and the beginning of what
it means to be an elder. Potentially, I really think
that the definition that we have the midlife crisis premise
was really based upon the idea that there's all these
(06:18):
transitions that are happening in midlife. You go, you know,
you might get divorced, You're going through menopause, your parents
are passing away, your empty nests with your kids, potentially
changing careers, you know, addictions going wild, maybe a diagnosis
that's scary. These are the kinds of things that happen
in midlife. So all that sounds bad, but it isn't
(06:39):
all bad, I think, you know, I like to think
of midlife as a crystalist not a crisis. So if
you think about the caterpillar to Butterfly journey, midlife is,
in fact the crystalis. It's where it's dark and gooey
and solitary, but it's also where the transformation happens. And
I deeply believe that midlife and I'm not the old
one to say this. Carl Young spoke very much about
(07:01):
this as a psychologist, and Richard Rhorr is a good
friend and has given me great tutelage on this as
maybe the best known Christianistic in the world. Midlife is
this time when all of your transitions give you the
opportunity to change your operating system of how you're living.
And we can talk more about that, but I do
(07:21):
believe that that's the opportunity of midlife.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
I love this, and as you're describing this, I'm thinking
about this a very popular meme of mine, where like
it's an image of a chrysalis, and the caption is like,
when you're grieving or when you're going through a hard time,
you're in that goo and you've got all of these
sort of cheerleaders outside of that chrysalis, outside of.
Speaker 3 (07:42):
That cocoon saying you got this. You're a butterfly, like
all of this hype.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
And I'm really interested personally and professionally in the goop
part of it. Yeah, you use the word liminality a
lot in your writing. How do you see if you
see grief related to that liminal part of life that
gu is there grief in there for you?
Speaker 1 (08:09):
Well, of course there is, and well I'm sure we'll
talk about some of my times that I've had grief
in my life. You will not let me leave the
show without that.
Speaker 3 (08:17):
I will not, No, but it's it's kind of required.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
It is if one can actually see grief as liminal. Wow,
that is beautiful because let's talk about what liminal means.
Liminal means is an in transition and in between space.
It's often the threshold between two eras, and so can
grief be the glue between those two eras. Absolutely, But
(08:43):
the beautiful thing about thinking of grief as liminal is
liminal is not a state that you last in for
very long. It's a transitional state. So one of the
challenges with grief is the feeling like it will never
end and the feeling of it's a lifelong diagnosis. And
I'm not saying that grief doesn't continue, it does, but
(09:06):
the pervasive nature of it being ever present and you know,
sort of all consuming. If grief is limital, it means
that that kind of all consuming nature of it can
actually start to be distilled down to a place where
it actually is more manageable and you get to the
(09:27):
other side of it. So I'm a big fan of
William Bridge's work. And you know, the three the transitions,
the idea of three stages of a transition, and the
first stage is the ending of something, the second stage
is the messy middle in the third stage is the
new beginning, and frankly, the caterpillar. A butterfly journey is
in fact that the ending of something, the messy middle,
(09:50):
you know, the beginning of something new. Often grief is
something that happens around stage one, in stage two, the
ending of something in the messy middle. And depending upon
how you have built up your TQ, your transitional intelligence
in such a way to understand how to navigate change
(10:13):
in your life, which is something that we teach at
the Modern Military Academy at MEU, which we'll talk about later,
if you can actually understand what it means to be
in that messy medal, you can actually move through the
grief in a more natural, humane, and accelerated fashion. And
when I say accelerated fashion, I don't mean in two
(10:33):
days or three days, I mean not ten years. So
I do believe that, you know, grief is liminality, and
illiminality and grief have luck in common.
Speaker 3 (10:43):
Yeah, they really do.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
There's something about the stillness there. And I talk and
teach and write a lot about how much we rush
the middle and you don't get to the next life.
I'm not talking about life after death here, but I'm
talking about like the next the next iteration of your
life when something ends without going through that transition and
(11:05):
that dissolution, And there's just there's just such emphasis on
like be a damn butterfly already, And I really love this,
Like what do we need inside that liminal space to
feel like we have all the time we need to
dissolve into that?
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Yeah, and I think, you know, let's also make sure
that we don't have performance anxiety in this process.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
What does that mean?
Speaker 1 (11:29):
Well, for some people it might take longer than for others,
may take longer to go through the grief. And depending
upon what the situation is and whether it's a surprise
or not, there's a lot of variables. Is this something
that will last forever, you know when someone passes that
is true? Is this something that feels personal to me,
(11:51):
you know, like it's a stain on me? That can
there's a grief in that of course. So there's a
lot of variables that you know, I think influence how
quickly you can go through something and if it's predictable.
Can I talk about my first brief one of my
brief experiences, my first brief experience, but it is a
grief experience that is really profound for me on so
(12:11):
many levels. Because it was someone who passed. It passed
by suicide and an enormous surprise. It happened at a
time that it felt very personal to me. So the
grief was deep and profound. So let me explain the story.
So in my speaking about midlife, there's something called the
U curve of happiness. You curve of happiness. Research is
(12:33):
fascinating around the world shows that generally, speaking from about
age twenty two till about age forty five to fifty,
we have a slow decline in life satisfaction. We bought
them out around forty five to fifty, and after that,
with each passing decade, we get happier and happier. Very interesting,
very much against the societal perspective that aging is aging sucks.
(12:53):
Actually frankly, as people get older, they get happier after
age fifty. But long story short is I was in
between forty five and fifty, and this was during the
Great Recession. This was, you know, two thousand and eight
ten approximately. I hit a bottom on every level in
my life, every single level. Everything was sort of everything sucked,
everything was not going well. Psychologically, I was having her
(13:14):
time with it also, So what I ended up happening
is I had a friend named Chip. Not let like
this is not my imaginary friendship.
Speaker 3 (13:23):
No, the real embodied.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
Chip, The real embodied Chip. Chip Hankins my insurance broker
and a good friend. And Chip was somebody I would
go to to just get advice on occasion, and there
were a lot of us who did that with Chip. Now,
Chip had some chronic back pain. He also had some
other things going on in his life. Emotionally, he had
depression that he really didn't talk about much. But long
(13:46):
story short is, when I was going through my dark
night of the soul, my friend Chip decided to hang
himself in the family tree. So his wife and two
sons came out and found him there in the morning.
And you know, to lose a friend to suicide, I
lost five friends to suicide during the Great Recession, on
all of them then, but to lose Chip in particular
(14:10):
was really hard because we have the same name. He
was somebody I saw as a bit of a mirror.
It came as a surprise. It happened in New Zealand.
He lived part time in New Zealand and part time
in the Bay Area, and I lived in the Bay Area.
He had lived in the Bay Area a long time,
but his wife was a Kiwi, so they split their time.
(14:31):
So I felt really distant from all of this and
including dissent from his wife. So going to his memorial
service where everybody got up and told their Chip stories
at a time when I was having suicide ideation myself,
it was crazy. It was I was crying uncontrollably at
the memorial and I don't cry easily in public. And
(14:53):
then I ended up having a flatline experience less than
two months later to allergic reaction to an antibiotic. So ultimately,
this whole little window of Chip leaving the planet, going
to his memorial service having a flatline experience was a
bit of a divine and adventure for me to really
accelerate my process through what was going to be a long,
(15:15):
deep grief period. But I still have a hard time
talking about this without getting a little broken up, because
we're all still finding it a bit of a mystery
as to why chose to leave the planet, And for me,
at the end of the day, I'm a big believer
in Despairic was suffering minus meaning if you were to
(15:36):
take man search for meaning. Victor Franco's book and distill
it down to quite an emotional equation. It would be
despairic was suffering nice meaning sufferings ever present. That's sort
of a Buddhist first noble truth of Buddhism, and meaning
and despair are inversely proportional. So what I had to
do during that time was trying to make some meaning
(15:56):
out of a time that felt really crazy and tragic.
And I actually ended up starting to teach my leadership team.
I was a CEO of a boutiquo toel company at
that time, and I started teaching my leadership team the
same thing, you know, during the Great Recession, how do
we find meaning? What is our individual meeting? What is
our team meaning? How do how do we come together
around meaning? So I did. I found meaning by actually
(16:20):
by helping to be a meaning maker for other people
as well. But the grief still is there. So it's
no longer in that you know, front and center in
my life, but it lingers.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
It's no longer in that sort of tight or And
thank you for sharing.
Speaker 3 (16:36):
That story with us. Hey, before we.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
Get back to the show, do you have questions about grief?
If you're like most people, I totally bet you do.
Like questions like is what I'm feeling normal? Or maybe
you'd like to know if there's a way to ask
for the help you need, if you're going through a
hard time without sounding ungrateful for the help you're already getting.
You have questions, and I have answers. Every fourth Thursday
(17:11):
of the month, come get your questions answered and meet
other people just like you in my live video call
in session. All of the details are at patreon dot com,
backslash Megandivine, and you can find the link in the
show notes. I'll see you this month. Now, let's get
back to my conversation with Chip Calmly, it's not easy
to revisit these things. These are like really intensely deep
(17:34):
events with so many layers and so many facets to them.
And you know, one of the many things that's interesting
about the story that you just shared, it's like there
are so many losses inside this sort.
Speaker 3 (17:47):
Of mid life time period. Right.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
Maybe you are taking care of aging parents, or your
parents have died, you are maybe getting life changing diagnoses,
you're aging out of your workplace. Recession was a really
big one, and also friends are dying.
Speaker 3 (18:07):
Right, This time period is so full of.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
My dad calls this the everyday grief that we don't
call grief. But like, I think that you hit a
point somewhere in midlife, depending on who you are, in
your life circumstances, and what you've experienced, but you hit
this point where you just sort of drop and look
at the accumulation of emotion and relationship and loss and
(18:34):
doors closed and opportunities lost and really start to do
that evaluation of what is this all for? And I
love how you've you've spoken about that. I mean, I'm
gonna put words in your mouth right now, but like
the way that you you speak about that, like you're
you're describing the grief of life assessment and how much grief,
(18:56):
how much grief is inherent in looking around in assessing
your life.
Speaker 3 (19:02):
I don't know. Meaning is such a tricky word for me.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
I love the way that you just described that. The
distillation of Frankel's work. What did you said, despare minus.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
Making you minus meaning?
Speaker 3 (19:13):
Okay?
Speaker 2 (19:13):
So meaning is another one of those things that people
are like, you have to find meaning in what you've
gone through or you can't survive, And like, I feel
like that's that's that same in the same vein of
cheerleading the chrystalist to hurry up and.
Speaker 3 (19:24):
Be a butterfly already.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
But like the way that you just describe that, I
don't hear meaning as in I found meaning in Chip's
death and in the other deaths of friends around me,
and I found meaning in what happened to me.
Speaker 3 (19:37):
But more like, if I have to.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
Live here, what meaning will I bring to this life
for myself?
Speaker 3 (19:42):
Does that?
Speaker 2 (19:43):
Does that feel like a more accurate description?
Speaker 1 (19:45):
That's definitely more accurate. Okay, It's not about actually, how
do I create this equation to take my pain away?
It is more about how am I in my pain
looking for lessons that will serve me in the future,
and so doing give me the feeling that this, even
(20:06):
though this is a difficult time, that there's something positive
that might come out of it. But I don't want
to be Pollyanna. I mean, I don't, I think, And
that's sort of for many people with their friends. It's like,
you know, you go and you just try to like
immediately put a you know, a smiling face on a
difficult situation, and you know that's not usually the best
(20:29):
way for someone to feel heard or seen. I had
a partner. I'm gay, and I had my partner I
was with that time, didn't know what to do with me.
He could see how difficult I was taking chips passing,
as well as my other friends who were taking their
lives and my own issues, and he just constantly wanted
(20:50):
to say, let's go out, Let's go out to dinner
with some friends. It's like, take your mind off of it.
That's what he would usually say, take let's take your
mind off of it. And there's some logic and trying
to take your mind off of it, But I think
the better way to do that is not to distract.
It's more to help a person see how can how
can they serve? You know, when you're in the state
(21:11):
that the liminality spaces, when you feel like the floor
under you no longer exists and you just don't you
feel like you're falling, what is it that can actually
help you get to get to the other side of that?
And sometimes it's actually learning how to serve At the
point when you need other people to serve you, how
can you step in and learn how to serve? And
(21:36):
I wouldn't say that in the first few days when
someone's in guilt and grief.
Speaker 3 (21:40):
But I do think make a foundation.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
Yeah no, no, but.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
That is I do think that there's some real value
in that. And Franco's work speaks to that as well.
Frankel's like, you know, he's said something to the effect
of like what's supposed to come through you? Like what
is you know? Not what do you here? What are
you here to get? It's what are you here to give?
Speaker 2 (22:02):
I love this And there's also sort of that cultural narrative,
that social pressure that's like, you know, if your kid
was killed by a drunk driver or killed in a
school shooting, it's like you have to become an activist
so that their death had meaning. How can you serve others?
How can you change things? And I want to mention
for everybody that, like, you don't have to do that.
(22:23):
It is not required that you change the world because
of what you've experienced in your life. If you do, yay,
that's awesome. But this is something I actually hear in
what you're saying, And because I spend so much time
reading your work the last few days, is like what
we're talking about is not these are the steps that
you have to take, These are the actions you have
to take to.
Speaker 3 (22:42):
Live this good life.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
It's more like, given what this life has been and
what this life is now in this liminal space, what
feels true for me, what feels nourishing and nurturing and
supportive to me? And can I hold on to those
things to build this next part of my life.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
Yeah. I'm a big fan of Roumy's Rumy's poetry, and
one of them called the guest House, a poem about
allowing the emotions to come through you, has always spoken
to me, partly because I'm a hotelier. So the idea
of being an innkeeper of emotions is interesting. And the
(23:23):
idea of the poem is that these emotions are going
to come through. Some of them are I'm going to
sweep in and be Maybe I don't want to say violent,
I think, but he might use that word in the poem,
but they're definitely going to come and sort of take
over your home. And the key is to welcome them
and serve them and then make sure that they know
(23:47):
there's a checkout time as well. And so as a
hotel youer the idea that our emotions are meant to
sweep through us, and we are meant to be emotionally
fluent enough to feel them and to under stand them,
but then to also see them to the door when
it's time, you know, for something else. Because the physical
(24:11):
manifestation of an emotion doesn't last very long in terms
of how how does it sit in your body, But
the shelf life of an emotion or on a particular
issue in woman's life, especially the shame, the guilt, the grief,
can last a lifetime. And it's almost like saying to
(24:32):
the hotel guests, I've just built another room in the
home for you to lodge yourself here for the rest
of my life. And I like to think of that visual,
that metaphor to sort of say no, that there's not
an extra room in the home for you. You're here. I'm
going to take care of you while you're here, But
my job is to be a hospitality person to help
(24:55):
support that emotion, but also to allow that emotion to
go on its journey beyond here.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
I don't know if it's roomy or if it's Jufez
who says that fear is the cheapest room in the house,
and I want better accommodation.
Speaker 3 (25:07):
For you, right.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
Right. There's such overlap there, but I wanted to bring
hospitality into this because it's so much at the root
of everything that you've done. Like for me, hospitality is
paying attention to detail and being thoughtful and using what
you see of the other in order to craft experiences
that feel like home to them or feel like you're
(25:32):
seeing And you just brought us through what you've called
the dark Knight of the soul for yourself, and that
as you began to emerge from that liminal space, you
looked around you and you were like, things need to change.
In twenty eighteen, you had a diagnosis of cancer. And
(25:54):
one of the things that I've read about how you
talk about that is like, one, you wanted to get
information out about prostate cancer, but you also and you
also want to talk about how we survive sort of
these big things that enter our lives. And what I
read was for you, that's about support and relationship. Can
(26:15):
we talk a little bit about the power of relatedness
and support and connection for you in light of everything
that we've just talked about.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
Sure well, big C community and small C community have
always been important to me, and yet I grew up
very much a loner with imaginary friends, and so the
idea as an adult that I have gotten to a
place where community is so central to how I live
my life is sort of curious to me. But what
(26:45):
I know is this. I know that whether it's being
one of the founding board members of Burning Man and
that kind of big global community, or at Airbnb when
I was there being in charge of all hosts and
that community globally, or more recently with the modern al
(27:06):
direct community, which is you know, small cohorts of twenty
to twenty four people in each workshop and then an
alumni community globally. What I know for sure is that
community and having a sense of belonging is the number
one variable that's correlated with living a long, happy, healthy life.
(27:28):
This is not just true of the Harvard Development study
which Bob Waaldinger's book The Good Life just came out.
It's true of the Blue Zones. Dan Butner, who started
Blue Zones Research, is coming to me to teach it's
a number one variable for Blue Zones, number one variable
for Stafford Medical School dean doctor Phil Pizzo's work. So
(27:50):
community isn't just something that makes you feel good, it's
actually something that helps you live a healthy life. And
for me, When I got my prostate cancer diagnosis in
twenty eighteen, it was very ill timed. It was the
day after my book Wisdom at Work came out. It
was the day before I was giving a TED speech
at TED headquarters. It was six weeks before we're opening
(28:13):
the Modern Alter Academy open to the public. So wasn't
you know, I wasn't prepared for it. But I had
a collection of people there to support me until it
love me, and then a new collection of people I
was getting to know who you know, have prosect cancer
and who could teach me a few things. My prossect
cancer has recently moved to my limps, so it's now moving.
(28:35):
It is in my body in more ways than it
used to be, so I'm having to, you know, again,
tap into community from a lot of my support there.
But I guess at the end of the day, the
most important thing I know is that it's so easy
to suffer along. It is so easy to feel like
what we're experiencing no one else's experienced before, or could
(29:00):
anybody imagine what we're going through. And the reality is
that is extremely selfish thinking. It is thinking that suggests
that the world revolves around us, and my experience is
that by being openly vulnerable about what's going on with me,
is I am welcoming people into my life who relate
(29:24):
to what I'm talking about. I'm giving them the opportunity
to talk about it as well. So in some ways,
my biggest fear, which is to come out and talk
about this stuff, is the antidote to the loneliness. It's
the antidote to feeling in a self imposed prison. So
(29:46):
that's what I do. So I write about it in
my blog, and I have a daily blog called Wisdom Well,
and of course I don't write about it every day,
but I do write about it. I don't hold it back.
Some people think I should hold it back, but I
grew up in a family held back way too much,
so you know, I don't hold it back.
Speaker 3 (30:04):
I'm glad you don't hold it back.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (30:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
There is something so powerful in the kind of community
that you build when everybody gets to be their entire self, right.
I mean, this is so much of the work of
this podcast and the work that I believe in the world.
Speaker 3 (30:20):
It's like.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
When you have to hide who you are for whatever reason,
for multiple reasons, when you have to hide that like
you can't you can't connect.
Speaker 3 (30:31):
We can't connect in the ways that we most need.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
And you know, as you're speaking, I have this image
in my head of life and how many difficult transitions
there are and how much difficult, impossible, fucking news that
we get at different points in our lives, and like
that there is a cleaving point there where we need
(30:54):
to look for the nets that can hold us, the
branch that can hold us when we go into the
goo of our own chrysalis. And how honest and how
generous can we be with our own truth so that
we can help I don't know, give permission to others
(31:15):
to be open and generous with their own truth. Like
I'm kind of getting mushed in my utopian vision of
the world here, but like I truly truly believe that
by building and finding communities where we can tell the
entire truth about our experience, like this is how we
thrive and find meaning and make change happen in our
(31:39):
smaller communities, in our larger communities. And so much of
the work that you were doing is about like that,
that permission giving and that mentoring and that generosity of experience,
even and including the experience of really difficult things and
what that allows for other people.
Speaker 1 (32:00):
Yeah, I don't see an alternative way. I came out
at age twenty two as a gay man, and that
was hard. I was Stephen Townshend Conley Junior. I was
chip off the old block, the only son and the
oldest child of two firstborn parents who are very motivated
for me to become president of the United States someday.
(32:23):
And coming out was really hard at age twenty two,
the summer of AIDS beyond the cover of Newsweek magazine.
So this is nineteen eighty three, and long story short
is it's exactly what I needed to do. So I
believe that our process of coming out. I've come out
as an elder now, you know, and no one wants
(32:46):
to be an elder. That sounds like you're old, like elderly.
But we'll come back to that, I'm sure, And being
an elder is a process of coming out. And I
just think there's a process of coming out as a
cancer survivor or you know. I can't imagine a world
in which I held this inside. I know how corrosive
(33:08):
that can be to my intestines, and I don't want
my intestines are talking to me right now, I'm saying, right,
no more storing of that kind of crap inside of us.
So yeah, it's my openness to being candid and vulnerable
just opens the door for someone else.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
Yeah, it's one of those both and equations, right, Like,
you do this because it's what you need and it
is your it's what you need, right, And it's also
how we build relationships where you get to do that
together and be seen in that and be supported and
it does make the world possible for those around us
who aren't really sure or it's maybe not safe, or
(33:50):
they don't think that the world will hear and see
them and support them in the ways that we most
long for. And so it's like it's just such a
win win win thing all around to be able to
speak to that stuff. So where I love that you
just said coming out as an elder as somebody who's
like turning fifty three this year, I'm like, do I
need to come out as an elder is a time
I'm not really sure, but like, where where does the
(34:13):
modern elder academy fit into this for you? We've been
talking about vulnerability and connection and mentorship and generosity and like,
how does this come together for you?
Speaker 1 (34:22):
So the story of what is a modern elder, let's
even go there. I sold my boutique hotel company called
Juada Viv in twenty ten. After that flatline experience and
all that, I just know I needed to change, and
at the bottom of the recession, at the worst timing,
I decided, Okay, I'm done with this. After twenty four years,
and then a couple of years later, I was asked
(34:44):
by the three founders of Airbnb to join them their
little tech startup. And this was over ten years ago,
and they wanted me to come in and help take
this little text start up and turn it into a
global hospitality brand. And so within the first couple of
months I was there, they started calling me the modern elder.
I was like, I want to be the modern elder.
You're being aged.
Speaker 3 (35:04):
I want to be hip and relevant.
Speaker 1 (35:06):
Yeah, But the truth was I was fifty two at
the time and the average age in the company was
twenty six. So elder is a relative term. It means
you're older than the people around you. Elder lee is
not relative. It's sort of like the last few years
of your life when you're frail and you really need
care and support and service. But elder. You could be
(35:27):
an elder in you know, what's his name, Tom Brady,
the football player at quarterback is an elder at forty five.
You know, in the NFL, no doubt, no one would
discount that. So I owned the term partly because of
what the AIRBB founders said to me. They said, a
modern elder is someone who's as curious as they are wise.
It's like, oh wow, I like that. I hope I
(35:49):
am both curious and wise, and so I owned the
idea of being the modern elder. I spent seven and
a half years with AIRBB, taking them up till just
about when IPO happened and it was, you know, became
the most valuable hospitality company in the world. And I
really am proud of being the mentor to the three
founders during that time in full time, four years of it,
(36:10):
three and a half years part time. But at the
end of my time there, I started writing a book
called Wisdom at Work, The Making of a Modern Elder.
And while I was writing that book down in Baja
Southern Baja, in Mexico, Baja California, I had a baha
aha I had an epiphany, and the epiphany was, why
don't we have midlife wisdom schools? Why don't we have
(36:32):
a place where Megan at fifty three could come to
reimagine and repurpose herself and to ask deeper and bigger
questions about how to reframe our relationship with aging, or
how to try on a growth mindset instead of a
fixed mindset, or how to navigate midlife transitions, how to
actually cultivate and harvest wisdom, so and how to regenerate
(36:54):
one's purpose and the planet. So those became the curriculum
pillars of MAA, the Modern Elder Academy, which has been
around now for about five years in Baja and we
have over three thousand alumni from forty two countries and
twenty six regional chapters around the world. We're opening two
huge campuses in Santa Fe, New Mexico over the next
(37:16):
couple of years as well, so we'll have a beachhead
in the United States. But what I've come to learn
is that wisdom is not taught, it is shared, and
so to create the world's first midlife wisdom school dedicated
to helping people to get to know each other from
the inside out, which is the opposite of how we
normally get to know each other and dedicated to helping
(37:37):
people to learn how to unlock their own wisdom. Is
the gift that I want to offer the world at
this stage in my life.
Speaker 3 (37:48):
I love that, and I love that.
Speaker 2 (37:52):
It seems like the modern Elder Academy is like, and
you use this word. We've used it a lot together,
but you use it a lot in the lifeguage on
the website is the it's like a space for liminality.
Like it is, it's a physical manifestation of a liminal
space in which it is safe to explore your edges
(38:13):
and your transitions and who and how you want to
be in the world in this next act for yourself.
And I love that because it's like it's tangible. Concrete
practices in the midst of a liminal experience are few
and far between, So I love that true you have
crafted that for people.
Speaker 1 (38:33):
Well also magat. I mean there are three life stages
that got introduced in the twentieth century, when was adolescence.
The word didn't exist until nineteen oh four, and once
we realized that, you know, puberty and your teen years
were just a transitional era. All of a sudden, we
started giving a lot of resources to kids in adolescents. Similarly,
(38:53):
retirement is a life stage that got sort of introduced
in the nineteen twenties and thirties and social security pensions
and all kinds of things. But midlife as a life
stage really didn't actually get popular un till the nineteen sixties,
and the one thing it got was a bad brand
midlife crisis. And we've done very little as a society
to help people to understand the liminal nature of going
(39:17):
through what some sociologists called middle lessence. You know, the
middle of your life and a transitional period. We're going
through emotional, hormonal, physical, and identity transitions just like you
did as an adolescent. So I do believe it. And
especially having had five friends taking their lives, all of
(39:39):
them in midlife, I was like, you know what, this
is something in the world needs.
Speaker 3 (39:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:44):
I love that you brought back the bad branding of midlife,
right like, And I think this is true for people, honestly,
regardless of age. If you receive some life altering news,
you know, if somebody dies or you get a diagnosis
or an injury that changes things it's like, well crap, right,
Like all I see ahead is my life without this
(40:07):
person or my life without the body the way that
I understood it before. Like, there is so much hopelessness
that can happen in those moments.
Speaker 1 (40:16):
And some of the and many of the most of
what we teach is relevant at any age. To be
honest with you, We've had people as young as twenty eight,
as old as eighty eight come to the program, and
sixteen percent of the people who come are millennials, even
though it's called the Modern Elder Academy. So I think
the principles involved here in terms of how do you
navigate transitions and how do you cultivate wisdom are relevant
(40:41):
at any age. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:43):
So here's the question that I ask everybody at this time,
as we're drawing to a close, and we've kind of
touched on this without naming it our whole time together.
But knowing what you know over your vast long careers
and life and everything and living what you've lived and
what you're living now, what does hope look like for.
Speaker 3 (41:05):
You right now?
Speaker 1 (41:07):
Well, hope is different than expectations. Let's be clear about that.
Expectation has an entitlement attached to it. Hope has optimism,
but in my definition of hope, hope also has a
game plan. You know, I'm a very active person in life,
so it's hard for me to just sit back and
(41:27):
I can have faith. But faith is different than hope.
Faith actually is really, I think, believing in something beyond
yourself to actually solve things. But hope is I think
a nice mixture of a little bit of faith and
a little bit of your own actions that you take
with an optimistic perspective that will allow you to have
(41:49):
an agency. And that's a very important word. It's a
word that isn't used a whole lot. Agency means that
you have the capacity to make a difference, and it's
one that it's easy to get lost, a word to
get lost in a world where we can feel completely
overwhelmed by all of the doom scrolling. That agency is
(42:11):
an important part of hope in my opinion.
Speaker 2 (42:13):
I love that you've hit two of my favorite words
in the English language in our time together, agency and liminality.
Speaker 3 (42:21):
So two for two for you.
Speaker 2 (42:23):
Thank you so much for being here. I've really enjoyed
our time together and talking about these things. We're going
to link to all of your work Modern Elder Academy
and your books and your ted talks and all of
the things. But is there anywhere you would like to
send listeners or where they should find you that you
want them to know?
Speaker 3 (42:40):
Right now?
Speaker 1 (42:41):
I have a daily blog. It's called Wisdom Well. It's
a microdosa wisdom every day and it's free. But you
can go to the Modern Older Academy website and look
for it, or just do a Google search for chip
Conly Wisdom Well, and you receive it early in the morning.
And it's a great way for people to start day
with just a little dose of both practicality and optimism
(43:05):
in terms of how do I help offer a little
hope and wisdom to you as you go on your day.
Speaker 3 (43:12):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (43:13):
Stay tuned, everybody. We will be back with your questions
to carry with you right after this break. Each week
I leave you with some questions to carry with you
until we meet again. Now you know what really struck
me in this conversation, Well, okay, one thing. I love
(43:36):
what he said about agency being an important part of hope. Like,
if you feel like there's absolutely nothing you can do
for yourself, or for your people, or for the world, like,
how can you possibly access hope? So finding the places
that you do have some power where you can make choices,
maybe that unlocks at least the potential for hope. I
(43:58):
love that also. I just love the concept of agency.
It's one of my favorite things in the whole world.
This conversation also has me wondering if I have personally
reached quote unquote elder status.
Speaker 3 (44:11):
I don't know yet. I mean, in my mind, I'm
still in.
Speaker 2 (44:14):
Like late thirties, early forties tops, but that is factually untrue.
If I am an elder, what does that bring up
for me? Could there be power and excitement in that
or some other collection of feelings. That's a question that
I'm going to carry with me, both whether I am
(44:34):
an elder and if I am, how do I feel
about that?
Speaker 3 (44:39):
How about you?
Speaker 2 (44:40):
What's stuck with you in this conversation? What questions are
you going to carry with you? Everybody's going to take
something different from today's episode, but I do hope you
found something to hold on too. If you want to
tell me how today's show felt for you, or you
have thoughts on what we covered, especially if you have
reached midlife or elder status.
Speaker 3 (44:57):
Let me know.
Speaker 2 (44:58):
Tag me at Refuge and Grief on all the social
platforms so I can hear how this conversation affected you.
Follow the show at It's Okay Pod on TikTok and
Refuge and Grief everywhere else to see video.
Speaker 3 (45:09):
Clips from the show, and use the hashtag It's Okay.
Speaker 2 (45:12):
Pod on all the platforms, not only so I can
find you, but others can too. None of us are
entirely okay, and it's time we start talking about that together. Yeah,
it's okay that you're not okay. You're in good company.
That's it for this week. Friends, Remember to subscribe to
(45:33):
the show and leave a review. Not only do your
reviews help make the show easier to find, like more
reviews the more often the show shows up in searches,
but also your reviews are really special to me personally,
and I read every single one of them, and when
I run out of new ones to read.
Speaker 3 (45:51):
I'm bummed out. So you know, help me out by
giving me your reading material.
Speaker 2 (45:58):
All right, coming up next week and incredibly joyful conversation
about mortality with death Doulah Alua Arthur. If you're like,
oh my god, why would I want to listen to
a show about mortality, especially if I'm already wrestling with
difficult things in my own life. Okay, we'll tune in
to find out because talking about death might just make
life infinitely better for you, for the people you love,
(46:19):
and for everyone. So follow the show on your favorite
platforms so you don't miss an episode. Want more on
these topics, Look, grief is everywhere. As my dad says,
daily life is full of everyday grief that we don't
call grief. Learning how to have these conversations is an
important skill for everybody, whether you're facing the end of
(46:40):
your own life or somebody you love, or it is
an ordinary Monday afternoon. These skills are important for everybody,
So get help to have those kinds of conversations. Get
the skills you need with training's professional resources and my
best selling book, It's Okay that You're Not Okay, plus
the Guided Journal for Grief at Megandivine co It's Okay
(47:02):
that You're Not Okay. The podcast is written and produced
by me Megan Divine. Executive producer is Amy Brown, co
produced by Elizabeth Fozzio, with logistical and social media support
from Micah Post Production and Very Patient editing by Houston Tilly,
music provided by Wavecrush, and background noise today provided by
the many tiny little bird feet tap dancing on the
(47:24):
metal awning outside my window.
It is so easy to feel like what we're experiencing
no one else's experienced before, nor could anybody imagine what
we're going through. And the reality is that is extremely
selfish thinking.
Speaker 2 (00:16):
This is it's okay that you're not okay, and I'm
your host Megan Devine. This week on the show, author
and modern elder Chip Conley on the losses of midlife
and the power of telling the truth for yourself and
as a beacon to the wider world subtly and everyone.
All of that and more coming up after this first break.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
Before we get started, one quick note.
Speaker 2 (00:44):
While we cover a lot of emotional relational territory in
our time here together, this show is not a substitute
for skilled support with a licensed mental health provider or
for professional supervision related to your work. Hey friends, Okay,
so this episode is like one of those spot all
the hidden items puzzles, you know what I mean? Like,
(01:05):
instead of a list of everyday items that you need
to find hidden in a drawing of a cute woodland
scene or something, today's episode is more like how many
losses can you spot inside midlife? Midlife is full of losses, divorce,
the death of your parents, menopause, health scares, emptiness, career changes,
(01:26):
feeling increasingly irrelevant. Midlife has terrible branding. According to today's guest,
Chip Conley, I love that midlife has terrible branding. I
will also say that midlife and you'll hear it in
our episode today, But midlife is not like it starts
at this age and like we're not defining it like that.
(01:49):
We're defining it more in the way of multiple cascading
things that happen as you enter into certain time periods
of your life, and as our guest says, midlife terrible branding.
Chip Conley is an interesting guy. He started out in
the hospitality industry, founding a successful luxury hotel brand, but
(02:09):
after the loss of several of his friends to suicide
plus his own near death experience in his fifties, he
sold that luxury hotel company, eventually joining Airbnb in their
early days as a strategic advisor for hospitality and leadership.
Speaker 3 (02:24):
These days, he's the.
Speaker 2 (02:25):
Founder of the Modern Elder Academy, which helps people in
what he calls their third age find their path forward.
Now here's something that I love about this show, Like
the whole podcast itself, the entire arc but also this
episode in particular, when famous people get interviewed, it's usually
about their successes, right, It's like about their current project,
(02:45):
their new book, or their whatever. Now, obviously we talk
about Chip's current projects and we link them in the
show notes, but this episode is layered with grief, so
much of it that's rarely addressed, and that goes back
to my reference to those hidden image puzzles from a
minute ago. While we talk about generosity and hospitality as
(03:08):
a way of life, in this episode we also talk
about coming out as a gay man in the eighties
and what it means to keep coming.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
Out all through your life.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
We talk about the stacked losses of midlife, including watching
the machinery of business and success and loneliness destroy your friends. Now,
a content note on that this episode contains a mention
of suicide along with a brief mention of the manner
of death. You'll hear it coming if for some reason
you need just skip over just that little part of it.
(03:39):
And we also explore the grief involved in facing cancer
diagnoses not once but twice.
Speaker 3 (03:44):
For Chip.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
It's not the greatest hits of success and current projects
that you hear on like usual interviews or conversations where
we talk to famous and successful people. This episode, and
again the entire podcast, is about the human life behind
all of that. Now, even with all of this real
(04:06):
human life stuff, this conversation didn't leave me feeling down.
It didn't leave me feeling down about midlife, and it
didn't leave me feeling down.
Speaker 3 (04:13):
About the state of the world. There is both.
Speaker 2 (04:15):
Hope and meaning to be found inside all of these
difficult parts of life, and in using the truth of
your own life to encourage and empower others to build
lives that have meaning for them, no matter what age
they are. So if you need some hopeful stuff inside
the messy real human life, well let's get into it.
(04:37):
Here's my conversation with modern elder Chip calmly.
Speaker 3 (04:42):
Chip.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
I am so glad to have you here with me today.
We have friends in common, I feel like we have
relationships in common. There are a lot of things that
I actually want to explore with you today, but I
would love to start in midlife if we could, So
I'm going quote you here and then I want to
run with it. Like you wrote that midlife has a
(05:04):
terrible brand. It's all about crisis, and that if you
can survive your own midlife crisis. All you have to
look forward to is disease, decrepitude, and death, which you
know sometimes that's what it feels like. But could you
define for us what you mean by midlife and what
makes midlife interesting to you?
Speaker 1 (05:22):
Sure? So, the definition of midlife has evolved in the
last twenty five to fifty years. It used to be
perceived as forty to sixty, then went to forty to
sixty five. Sociologists now consider thirty five to seventy five
to be midlife, and in the era where people are
living to one hundred, I'd say the core of midlife, though,
is really around forty five to sixty five. I think
(05:44):
that that's to me. It can start earlier than that,
but I do think that's that's really the core of it.
Speaker 2 (05:51):
So it's less about the chronological age, because that is
some funky math. If seventy five is midlife.
Speaker 1 (05:56):
I agree, but it is the stage of life, and
I'll often societal definition of midlife relates to the end
of youth, including young adulthood and the beginning of what
it means to be an elder. Potentially, I really think
that the definition that we have the midlife crisis premise
was really based upon the idea that there's all these
(06:18):
transitions that are happening in midlife. You go, you know,
you might get divorced, You're going through menopause, your parents
are passing away, your empty nests with your kids, potentially
changing careers, you know, addictions going wild, maybe a diagnosis
that's scary. These are the kinds of things that happen
in midlife. So all that sounds bad, but it isn't
(06:39):
all bad, I think, you know, I like to think
of midlife as a crystalist not a crisis. So if
you think about the caterpillar to Butterfly journey, midlife is,
in fact the crystalis. It's where it's dark and gooey
and solitary, but it's also where the transformation happens. And
I deeply believe that midlife and I'm not the old
one to say this. Carl Young spoke very much about
(07:01):
this as a psychologist, and Richard Rhorr is a good
friend and has given me great tutelage on this as
maybe the best known Christianistic in the world. Midlife is
this time when all of your transitions give you the
opportunity to change your operating system of how you're living.
And we can talk more about that, but I do
(07:21):
believe that that's the opportunity of midlife.
Speaker 2 (07:24):
I love this, and as you're describing this, I'm thinking
about this a very popular meme of mine, where like
it's an image of a chrysalis, and the caption is like,
when you're grieving or when you're going through a hard time,
you're in that goo and you've got all of these
sort of cheerleaders outside of that chrysalis, outside of.
Speaker 3 (07:42):
That cocoon saying you got this. You're a butterfly, like
all of this hype.
Speaker 2 (07:48):
And I'm really interested personally and professionally in the goop
part of it. Yeah, you use the word liminality a
lot in your writing. How do you see if you
see grief related to that liminal part of life that
gu is there grief in there for you?
Speaker 1 (08:09):
Well, of course there is, and well I'm sure we'll
talk about some of my times that I've had grief
in my life. You will not let me leave the
show without that.
Speaker 3 (08:17):
I will not, No, but it's it's kind of required.
Speaker 1 (08:20):
It is if one can actually see grief as liminal. Wow,
that is beautiful because let's talk about what liminal means.
Liminal means is an in transition and in between space.
It's often the threshold between two eras, and so can
grief be the glue between those two eras. Absolutely, But
(08:43):
the beautiful thing about thinking of grief as liminal is
liminal is not a state that you last in for
very long. It's a transitional state. So one of the
challenges with grief is the feeling like it will never
end and the feeling of it's a lifelong diagnosis. And
I'm not saying that grief doesn't continue, it does, but
(09:06):
the pervasive nature of it being ever present and you know,
sort of all consuming. If grief is limital, it means
that that kind of all consuming nature of it can
actually start to be distilled down to a place where
it actually is more manageable and you get to the
(09:27):
other side of it. So I'm a big fan of
William Bridge's work. And you know, the three the transitions,
the idea of three stages of a transition, and the
first stage is the ending of something, the second stage
is the messy middle in the third stage is the
new beginning, and frankly, the caterpillar. A butterfly journey is
in fact that the ending of something, the messy middle,
(09:50):
you know, the beginning of something new. Often grief is
something that happens around stage one, in stage two, the
ending of something in the messy middle. And depending upon
how you have built up your TQ, your transitional intelligence
in such a way to understand how to navigate change
(10:13):
in your life, which is something that we teach at
the Modern Military Academy at MEU, which we'll talk about later,
if you can actually understand what it means to be
in that messy medal, you can actually move through the
grief in a more natural, humane, and accelerated fashion. And
when I say accelerated fashion, I don't mean in two
(10:33):
days or three days, I mean not ten years. So
I do believe that, you know, grief is liminality, and
illiminality and grief have luck in common.
Speaker 3 (10:43):
Yeah, they really do.
Speaker 2 (10:44):
There's something about the stillness there. And I talk and
teach and write a lot about how much we rush
the middle and you don't get to the next life.
I'm not talking about life after death here, but I'm
talking about like the next the next iteration of your
life when something ends without going through that transition and
(11:05):
that dissolution, And there's just there's just such emphasis on
like be a damn butterfly already, And I really love this,
Like what do we need inside that liminal space to
feel like we have all the time we need to
dissolve into that?
Speaker 1 (11:22):
Yeah, and I think, you know, let's also make sure
that we don't have performance anxiety in this process.
Speaker 3 (11:28):
What does that mean?
Speaker 1 (11:29):
Well, for some people it might take longer than for others,
may take longer to go through the grief. And depending
upon what the situation is and whether it's a surprise
or not, there's a lot of variables. Is this something
that will last forever, you know when someone passes that
is true? Is this something that feels personal to me,
(11:51):
you know, like it's a stain on me? That can
there's a grief in that of course. So there's a
lot of variables that you know, I think influence how
quickly you can go through something and if it's predictable.
Can I talk about my first brief one of my
brief experiences, my first brief experience, but it is a
grief experience that is really profound for me on so
(12:11):
many levels. Because it was someone who passed. It passed
by suicide and an enormous surprise. It happened at a
time that it felt very personal to me. So the
grief was deep and profound. So let me explain the story.
So in my speaking about midlife, there's something called the
U curve of happiness. You curve of happiness. Research is
(12:33):
fascinating around the world shows that generally, speaking from about
age twenty two till about age forty five to fifty,
we have a slow decline in life satisfaction. We bought
them out around forty five to fifty, and after that,
with each passing decade, we get happier and happier. Very interesting,
very much against the societal perspective that aging is aging sucks.
(12:53):
Actually frankly, as people get older, they get happier after
age fifty. But long story short is I was in
between forty five and fifty, and this was during the
Great Recession. This was, you know, two thousand and eight
ten approximately. I hit a bottom on every level in
my life, every single level. Everything was sort of everything sucked,
everything was not going well. Psychologically, I was having her
(13:14):
time with it also, So what I ended up happening
is I had a friend named Chip. Not let like
this is not my imaginary friendship.
Speaker 3 (13:23):
No, the real embodied.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
Chip, The real embodied Chip. Chip Hankins my insurance broker
and a good friend. And Chip was somebody I would
go to to just get advice on occasion, and there
were a lot of us who did that with Chip. Now,
Chip had some chronic back pain. He also had some
other things going on in his life. Emotionally, he had
depression that he really didn't talk about much. But long
(13:46):
story short is, when I was going through my dark
night of the soul, my friend Chip decided to hang
himself in the family tree. So his wife and two
sons came out and found him there in the morning.
And you know, to lose a friend to suicide, I
lost five friends to suicide during the Great Recession, on
all of them then, but to lose Chip in particular
(14:10):
was really hard because we have the same name. He
was somebody I saw as a bit of a mirror.
It came as a surprise. It happened in New Zealand.
He lived part time in New Zealand and part time
in the Bay Area, and I lived in the Bay Area.
He had lived in the Bay Area a long time,
but his wife was a Kiwi, so they split their time.
(14:31):
So I felt really distant from all of this and
including dissent from his wife. So going to his memorial
service where everybody got up and told their Chip stories
at a time when I was having suicide ideation myself,
it was crazy. It was I was crying uncontrollably at
the memorial and I don't cry easily in public. And
(14:53):
then I ended up having a flatline experience less than
two months later to allergic reaction to an antibiotic. So ultimately,
this whole little window of Chip leaving the planet, going
to his memorial service having a flatline experience was a
bit of a divine and adventure for me to really
accelerate my process through what was going to be a long,
(15:15):
deep grief period. But I still have a hard time
talking about this without getting a little broken up, because
we're all still finding it a bit of a mystery
as to why chose to leave the planet, And for me,
at the end of the day, I'm a big believer
in Despairic was suffering minus meaning if you were to
(15:36):
take man search for meaning. Victor Franco's book and distill
it down to quite an emotional equation. It would be
despairic was suffering nice meaning sufferings ever present. That's sort
of a Buddhist first noble truth of Buddhism, and meaning
and despair are inversely proportional. So what I had to
do during that time was trying to make some meaning
(15:56):
out of a time that felt really crazy and tragic.
And I actually ended up starting to teach my leadership team.
I was a CEO of a boutiquo toel company at
that time, and I started teaching my leadership team the
same thing, you know, during the Great Recession, how do
we find meaning? What is our individual meeting? What is
our team meaning? How do how do we come together
around meaning? So I did. I found meaning by actually
(16:20):
by helping to be a meaning maker for other people
as well. But the grief still is there. So it's
no longer in that you know, front and center in
my life, but it lingers.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
It's no longer in that sort of tight or And
thank you for sharing.
Speaker 3 (16:36):
That story with us. Hey, before we.
Speaker 2 (16:47):
Get back to the show, do you have questions about grief?
If you're like most people, I totally bet you do.
Like questions like is what I'm feeling normal? Or maybe
you'd like to know if there's a way to ask
for the help you need, if you're going through a
hard time without sounding ungrateful for the help you're already getting.
You have questions, and I have answers. Every fourth Thursday
(17:11):
of the month, come get your questions answered and meet
other people just like you in my live video call
in session. All of the details are at patreon dot com,
backslash Megandivine, and you can find the link in the
show notes. I'll see you this month. Now, let's get
back to my conversation with Chip Calmly, it's not easy
to revisit these things. These are like really intensely deep
(17:34):
events with so many layers and so many facets to them.
And you know, one of the many things that's interesting
about the story that you just shared, it's like there
are so many losses inside this sort.
Speaker 3 (17:47):
Of mid life time period. Right.
Speaker 2 (17:51):
Maybe you are taking care of aging parents, or your
parents have died, you are maybe getting life changing diagnoses,
you're aging out of your workplace. Recession was a really
big one, and also friends are dying.
Speaker 3 (18:07):
Right, This time period is so full of.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
My dad calls this the everyday grief that we don't
call grief. But like, I think that you hit a
point somewhere in midlife, depending on who you are, in
your life circumstances, and what you've experienced, but you hit
this point where you just sort of drop and look
at the accumulation of emotion and relationship and loss and
(18:34):
doors closed and opportunities lost and really start to do
that evaluation of what is this all for? And I
love how you've you've spoken about that. I mean, I'm
gonna put words in your mouth right now, but like
the way that you you speak about that, like you're
you're describing the grief of life assessment and how much grief,
(18:56):
how much grief is inherent in looking around in assessing
your life.
Speaker 3 (19:02):
I don't know. Meaning is such a tricky word for me.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
I love the way that you just described that. The
distillation of Frankel's work. What did you said, despare minus.
Speaker 1 (19:11):
Making you minus meaning?
Speaker 3 (19:13):
Okay?
Speaker 2 (19:13):
So meaning is another one of those things that people
are like, you have to find meaning in what you've
gone through or you can't survive, And like, I feel
like that's that's that same in the same vein of
cheerleading the chrystalist to hurry up and.
Speaker 3 (19:24):
Be a butterfly already.
Speaker 2 (19:27):
But like the way that you just describe that, I
don't hear meaning as in I found meaning in Chip's
death and in the other deaths of friends around me,
and I found meaning in what happened to me.
Speaker 3 (19:37):
But more like, if I have to.
Speaker 2 (19:39):
Live here, what meaning will I bring to this life
for myself?
Speaker 3 (19:42):
Does that?
Speaker 2 (19:43):
Does that feel like a more accurate description?
Speaker 1 (19:45):
That's definitely more accurate. Okay, It's not about actually, how
do I create this equation to take my pain away?
It is more about how am I in my pain
looking for lessons that will serve me in the future,
and so doing give me the feeling that this, even
(20:06):
though this is a difficult time, that there's something positive
that might come out of it. But I don't want
to be Pollyanna. I mean, I don't, I think, And
that's sort of for many people with their friends. It's like,
you know, you go and you just try to like
immediately put a you know, a smiling face on a
difficult situation, and you know that's not usually the best
(20:29):
way for someone to feel heard or seen. I had
a partner. I'm gay, and I had my partner I
was with that time, didn't know what to do with me.
He could see how difficult I was taking chips passing,
as well as my other friends who were taking their
lives and my own issues, and he just constantly wanted
(20:50):
to say, let's go out, Let's go out to dinner
with some friends. It's like, take your mind off of it.
That's what he would usually say, take let's take your
mind off of it. And there's some logic and trying
to take your mind off of it, But I think
the better way to do that is not to distract.
It's more to help a person see how can how
can they serve? You know, when you're in the state
(21:11):
that the liminality spaces, when you feel like the floor
under you no longer exists and you just don't you
feel like you're falling, what is it that can actually
help you get to get to the other side of that?
And sometimes it's actually learning how to serve At the
point when you need other people to serve you, how
can you step in and learn how to serve? And
(21:36):
I wouldn't say that in the first few days when
someone's in guilt and grief.
Speaker 3 (21:40):
But I do think make a foundation.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
Yeah no, no, but.
Speaker 1 (21:44):
That is I do think that there's some real value
in that. And Franco's work speaks to that as well.
Frankel's like, you know, he's said something to the effect
of like what's supposed to come through you? Like what
is you know? Not what do you here? What are
you here to get? It's what are you here to give?
Speaker 2 (22:02):
I love this And there's also sort of that cultural narrative,
that social pressure that's like, you know, if your kid
was killed by a drunk driver or killed in a
school shooting, it's like you have to become an activist
so that their death had meaning. How can you serve others?
How can you change things? And I want to mention
for everybody that, like, you don't have to do that.
(22:23):
It is not required that you change the world because
of what you've experienced in your life. If you do, yay,
that's awesome. But this is something I actually hear in
what you're saying, And because I spend so much time
reading your work the last few days, is like what
we're talking about is not these are the steps that
you have to take, These are the actions you have
to take to.
Speaker 3 (22:42):
Live this good life.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
It's more like, given what this life has been and
what this life is now in this liminal space, what
feels true for me, what feels nourishing and nurturing and
supportive to me? And can I hold on to those
things to build this next part of my life.
Speaker 1 (23:02):
Yeah. I'm a big fan of Roumy's Rumy's poetry, and
one of them called the guest House, a poem about
allowing the emotions to come through you, has always spoken
to me, partly because I'm a hotelier. So the idea
of being an innkeeper of emotions is interesting. And the
(23:23):
idea of the poem is that these emotions are going
to come through. Some of them are I'm going to
sweep in and be Maybe I don't want to say violent,
I think, but he might use that word in the poem,
but they're definitely going to come and sort of take
over your home. And the key is to welcome them
and serve them and then make sure that they know
(23:47):
there's a checkout time as well. And so as a
hotel youer the idea that our emotions are meant to
sweep through us, and we are meant to be emotionally
fluent enough to feel them and to under stand them,
but then to also see them to the door when
it's time, you know, for something else. Because the physical
(24:11):
manifestation of an emotion doesn't last very long in terms
of how how does it sit in your body, But
the shelf life of an emotion or on a particular
issue in woman's life, especially the shame, the guilt, the grief,
can last a lifetime. And it's almost like saying to
(24:32):
the hotel guests, I've just built another room in the
home for you to lodge yourself here for the rest
of my life. And I like to think of that visual,
that metaphor to sort of say no, that there's not
an extra room in the home for you. You're here. I'm
going to take care of you while you're here, But
my job is to be a hospitality person to help
(24:55):
support that emotion, but also to allow that emotion to
go on its journey beyond here.
Speaker 2 (25:01):
I don't know if it's roomy or if it's Jufez
who says that fear is the cheapest room in the house,
and I want better accommodation.
Speaker 3 (25:07):
For you, right.
Speaker 2 (25:11):
Right. There's such overlap there, but I wanted to bring
hospitality into this because it's so much at the root
of everything that you've done. Like for me, hospitality is
paying attention to detail and being thoughtful and using what
you see of the other in order to craft experiences
that feel like home to them or feel like you're
(25:32):
seeing And you just brought us through what you've called
the dark Knight of the soul for yourself, and that
as you began to emerge from that liminal space, you
looked around you and you were like, things need to change.
In twenty eighteen, you had a diagnosis of cancer. And
(25:54):
one of the things that I've read about how you
talk about that is like, one, you wanted to get
information out about prostate cancer, but you also and you
also want to talk about how we survive sort of
these big things that enter our lives. And what I
read was for you, that's about support and relationship. Can
(26:15):
we talk a little bit about the power of relatedness
and support and connection for you in light of everything
that we've just talked about.
Speaker 1 (26:22):
Sure well, big C community and small C community have
always been important to me, and yet I grew up
very much a loner with imaginary friends, and so the
idea as an adult that I have gotten to a
place where community is so central to how I live
my life is sort of curious to me. But what
(26:45):
I know is this. I know that whether it's being
one of the founding board members of Burning Man and
that kind of big global community, or at Airbnb when
I was there being in charge of all hosts and
that community globally, or more recently with the modern al
(27:06):
direct community, which is you know, small cohorts of twenty
to twenty four people in each workshop and then an
alumni community globally. What I know for sure is that
community and having a sense of belonging is the number
one variable that's correlated with living a long, happy, healthy life.
(27:28):
This is not just true of the Harvard Development study
which Bob Waaldinger's book The Good Life just came out.
It's true of the Blue Zones. Dan Butner, who started
Blue Zones Research, is coming to me to teach it's
a number one variable for Blue Zones, number one variable
for Stafford Medical School dean doctor Phil Pizzo's work. So
(27:50):
community isn't just something that makes you feel good, it's
actually something that helps you live a healthy life. And
for me, When I got my prostate cancer diagnosis in
twenty eighteen, it was very ill timed. It was the
day after my book Wisdom at Work came out. It
was the day before I was giving a TED speech
at TED headquarters. It was six weeks before we're opening
(28:13):
the Modern Alter Academy open to the public. So wasn't
you know, I wasn't prepared for it. But I had
a collection of people there to support me until it
love me, and then a new collection of people I
was getting to know who you know, have prosect cancer
and who could teach me a few things. My prossect
cancer has recently moved to my limps, so it's now moving.
(28:35):
It is in my body in more ways than it
used to be, so I'm having to, you know, again,
tap into community from a lot of my support there.
But I guess at the end of the day, the
most important thing I know is that it's so easy
to suffer along. It is so easy to feel like
what we're experiencing no one else's experienced before, or could
(29:00):
anybody imagine what we're going through. And the reality is
that is extremely selfish thinking. It is thinking that suggests
that the world revolves around us, and my experience is
that by being openly vulnerable about what's going on with me,
is I am welcoming people into my life who relate
(29:24):
to what I'm talking about. I'm giving them the opportunity
to talk about it as well. So in some ways,
my biggest fear, which is to come out and talk
about this stuff, is the antidote to the loneliness. It's
the antidote to feeling in a self imposed prison. So
(29:46):
that's what I do. So I write about it in
my blog, and I have a daily blog called Wisdom Well,
and of course I don't write about it every day,
but I do write about it. I don't hold it back.
Some people think I should hold it back, but I
grew up in a family held back way too much,
so you know, I don't hold it back.
Speaker 3 (30:04):
I'm glad you don't hold it back.
Speaker 1 (30:06):
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (30:06):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (30:08):
There is something so powerful in the kind of community
that you build when everybody gets to be their entire self, right.
I mean, this is so much of the work of
this podcast and the work that I believe in the world.
Speaker 3 (30:20):
It's like.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
When you have to hide who you are for whatever reason,
for multiple reasons, when you have to hide that like
you can't you can't connect.
Speaker 3 (30:31):
We can't connect in the ways that we most need.
Speaker 2 (30:34):
And you know, as you're speaking, I have this image
in my head of life and how many difficult transitions
there are and how much difficult, impossible, fucking news that
we get at different points in our lives, and like
that there is a cleaving point there where we need
(30:54):
to look for the nets that can hold us, the
branch that can hold us when we go into the
goo of our own chrysalis. And how honest and how
generous can we be with our own truth so that
we can help I don't know, give permission to others
(31:15):
to be open and generous with their own truth. Like
I'm kind of getting mushed in my utopian vision of
the world here, but like I truly truly believe that
by building and finding communities where we can tell the
entire truth about our experience, like this is how we
thrive and find meaning and make change happen in our
(31:39):
smaller communities, in our larger communities. And so much of
the work that you were doing is about like that,
that permission giving and that mentoring and that generosity of experience,
even and including the experience of really difficult things and
what that allows for other people.
Speaker 1 (32:00):
Yeah, I don't see an alternative way. I came out
at age twenty two as a gay man, and that
was hard. I was Stephen Townshend Conley Junior. I was
chip off the old block, the only son and the
oldest child of two firstborn parents who are very motivated
for me to become president of the United States someday.
(32:23):
And coming out was really hard at age twenty two,
the summer of AIDS beyond the cover of Newsweek magazine.
So this is nineteen eighty three, and long story short
is it's exactly what I needed to do. So I
believe that our process of coming out. I've come out
as an elder now, you know, and no one wants
(32:46):
to be an elder. That sounds like you're old, like elderly.
But we'll come back to that, I'm sure, And being
an elder is a process of coming out. And I
just think there's a process of coming out as a
cancer survivor or you know. I can't imagine a world
in which I held this inside. I know how corrosive
(33:08):
that can be to my intestines, and I don't want
my intestines are talking to me right now, I'm saying, right,
no more storing of that kind of crap inside of us.
So yeah, it's my openness to being candid and vulnerable
just opens the door for someone else.
Speaker 2 (33:29):
Yeah, it's one of those both and equations, right, Like,
you do this because it's what you need and it
is your it's what you need, right, And it's also
how we build relationships where you get to do that
together and be seen in that and be supported and
it does make the world possible for those around us
who aren't really sure or it's maybe not safe, or
(33:50):
they don't think that the world will hear and see
them and support them in the ways that we most
long for. And so it's like it's just such a
win win win thing all around to be able to
speak to that stuff. So where I love that you
just said coming out as an elder as somebody who's
like turning fifty three this year, I'm like, do I
need to come out as an elder is a time
I'm not really sure, but like, where where does the
(34:13):
modern elder academy fit into this for you? We've been
talking about vulnerability and connection and mentorship and generosity and like,
how does this come together for you?
Speaker 1 (34:22):
So the story of what is a modern elder, let's
even go there. I sold my boutique hotel company called
Juada Viv in twenty ten. After that flatline experience and
all that, I just know I needed to change, and
at the bottom of the recession, at the worst timing,
I decided, Okay, I'm done with this. After twenty four years,
and then a couple of years later, I was asked
(34:44):
by the three founders of Airbnb to join them their
little tech startup. And this was over ten years ago,
and they wanted me to come in and help take
this little text start up and turn it into a
global hospitality brand. And so within the first couple of
months I was there, they started calling me the modern elder.
I was like, I want to be the modern elder.
You're being aged.
Speaker 3 (35:04):
I want to be hip and relevant.
Speaker 1 (35:06):
Yeah, But the truth was I was fifty two at
the time and the average age in the company was
twenty six. So elder is a relative term. It means
you're older than the people around you. Elder lee is
not relative. It's sort of like the last few years
of your life when you're frail and you really need
care and support and service. But elder. You could be
(35:27):
an elder in you know, what's his name, Tom Brady,
the football player at quarterback is an elder at forty five.
You know, in the NFL, no doubt, no one would
discount that. So I owned the term partly because of
what the AIRBB founders said to me. They said, a
modern elder is someone who's as curious as they are wise.
It's like, oh wow, I like that. I hope I
(35:49):
am both curious and wise, and so I owned the
idea of being the modern elder. I spent seven and
a half years with AIRBB, taking them up till just
about when IPO happened and it was, you know, became
the most valuable hospitality company in the world. And I
really am proud of being the mentor to the three
founders during that time in full time, four years of it,
(36:10):
three and a half years part time. But at the
end of my time there, I started writing a book
called Wisdom at Work, The Making of a Modern Elder.
And while I was writing that book down in Baja
Southern Baja, in Mexico, Baja California, I had a baha
aha I had an epiphany, and the epiphany was, why
don't we have midlife wisdom schools? Why don't we have
(36:32):
a place where Megan at fifty three could come to
reimagine and repurpose herself and to ask deeper and bigger
questions about how to reframe our relationship with aging, or
how to try on a growth mindset instead of a
fixed mindset, or how to navigate midlife transitions, how to
actually cultivate and harvest wisdom, so and how to regenerate
(36:54):
one's purpose and the planet. So those became the curriculum
pillars of MAA, the Modern Elder Academy, which has been
around now for about five years in Baja and we
have over three thousand alumni from forty two countries and
twenty six regional chapters around the world. We're opening two
huge campuses in Santa Fe, New Mexico over the next
(37:16):
couple of years as well, so we'll have a beachhead
in the United States. But what I've come to learn
is that wisdom is not taught, it is shared, and
so to create the world's first midlife wisdom school dedicated
to helping people to get to know each other from
the inside out, which is the opposite of how we
normally get to know each other and dedicated to helping
(37:37):
people to learn how to unlock their own wisdom. Is
the gift that I want to offer the world at
this stage in my life.
Speaker 3 (37:48):
I love that, and I love that.
Speaker 2 (37:52):
It seems like the modern Elder Academy is like, and
you use this word. We've used it a lot together,
but you use it a lot in the lifeguage on
the website is the it's like a space for liminality.
Like it is, it's a physical manifestation of a liminal
space in which it is safe to explore your edges
(38:13):
and your transitions and who and how you want to
be in the world in this next act for yourself.
And I love that because it's like it's tangible. Concrete
practices in the midst of a liminal experience are few
and far between, So I love that true you have
crafted that for people.
Speaker 1 (38:33):
Well also magat. I mean there are three life stages
that got introduced in the twentieth century, when was adolescence.
The word didn't exist until nineteen oh four, and once
we realized that, you know, puberty and your teen years
were just a transitional era. All of a sudden, we
started giving a lot of resources to kids in adolescents. Similarly,
(38:53):
retirement is a life stage that got sort of introduced
in the nineteen twenties and thirties and social security pensions
and all kinds of things. But midlife as a life
stage really didn't actually get popular un till the nineteen sixties,
and the one thing it got was a bad brand
midlife crisis. And we've done very little as a society
to help people to understand the liminal nature of going
(39:17):
through what some sociologists called middle lessence. You know, the
middle of your life and a transitional period. We're going
through emotional, hormonal, physical, and identity transitions just like you
did as an adolescent. So I do believe it. And
especially having had five friends taking their lives, all of
(39:39):
them in midlife, I was like, you know what, this
is something in the world needs.
Speaker 3 (39:43):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (39:44):
I love that you brought back the bad branding of midlife,
right like, And I think this is true for people, honestly,
regardless of age. If you receive some life altering news,
you know, if somebody dies or you get a diagnosis
or an injury that changes things it's like, well crap, right,
Like all I see ahead is my life without this
(40:07):
person or my life without the body the way that
I understood it before. Like, there is so much hopelessness
that can happen in those moments.
Speaker 1 (40:16):
And some of the and many of the most of
what we teach is relevant at any age. To be
honest with you, We've had people as young as twenty eight,
as old as eighty eight come to the program, and
sixteen percent of the people who come are millennials, even
though it's called the Modern Elder Academy. So I think
the principles involved here in terms of how do you
navigate transitions and how do you cultivate wisdom are relevant
(40:41):
at any age. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (40:43):
So here's the question that I ask everybody at this time,
as we're drawing to a close, and we've kind of
touched on this without naming it our whole time together.
But knowing what you know over your vast long careers
and life and everything and living what you've lived and
what you're living now, what does hope look like for.
Speaker 3 (41:05):
You right now?
Speaker 1 (41:07):
Well, hope is different than expectations. Let's be clear about that.
Expectation has an entitlement attached to it. Hope has optimism,
but in my definition of hope, hope also has a
game plan. You know, I'm a very active person in life,
so it's hard for me to just sit back and
(41:27):
I can have faith. But faith is different than hope.
Faith actually is really, I think, believing in something beyond
yourself to actually solve things. But hope is I think
a nice mixture of a little bit of faith and
a little bit of your own actions that you take
with an optimistic perspective that will allow you to have
(41:49):
an agency. And that's a very important word. It's a
word that isn't used a whole lot. Agency means that
you have the capacity to make a difference, and it's
one that it's easy to get lost, a word to
get lost in a world where we can feel completely
overwhelmed by all of the doom scrolling. That agency is
(42:11):
an important part of hope in my opinion.
Speaker 2 (42:13):
I love that you've hit two of my favorite words
in the English language in our time together, agency and liminality.
Speaker 3 (42:21):
So two for two for you.
Speaker 2 (42:23):
Thank you so much for being here. I've really enjoyed
our time together and talking about these things. We're going
to link to all of your work Modern Elder Academy
and your books and your ted talks and all of
the things. But is there anywhere you would like to
send listeners or where they should find you that you
want them to know?
Speaker 3 (42:40):
Right now?
Speaker 1 (42:41):
I have a daily blog. It's called Wisdom Well. It's
a microdosa wisdom every day and it's free. But you
can go to the Modern Older Academy website and look
for it, or just do a Google search for chip
Conly Wisdom Well, and you receive it early in the morning.
And it's a great way for people to start day
with just a little dose of both practicality and optimism
(43:05):
in terms of how do I help offer a little
hope and wisdom to you as you go on your day.
Speaker 3 (43:12):
I love it.
Speaker 2 (43:13):
Stay tuned, everybody. We will be back with your questions
to carry with you right after this break. Each week
I leave you with some questions to carry with you
until we meet again. Now you know what really struck
me in this conversation, Well, okay, one thing. I love
(43:36):
what he said about agency being an important part of hope. Like,
if you feel like there's absolutely nothing you can do
for yourself, or for your people, or for the world, like,
how can you possibly access hope? So finding the places
that you do have some power where you can make choices,
maybe that unlocks at least the potential for hope. I
(43:58):
love that also. I just love the concept of agency.
It's one of my favorite things in the whole world.
This conversation also has me wondering if I have personally
reached quote unquote elder status.
Speaker 3 (44:11):
I don't know yet. I mean, in my mind, I'm
still in.
Speaker 2 (44:14):
Like late thirties, early forties tops, but that is factually untrue.
If I am an elder, what does that bring up
for me? Could there be power and excitement in that
or some other collection of feelings. That's a question that
I'm going to carry with me, both whether I am
(44:34):
an elder and if I am, how do I feel
about that?
Speaker 3 (44:39):
How about you?
Speaker 2 (44:40):
What's stuck with you in this conversation? What questions are
you going to carry with you? Everybody's going to take
something different from today's episode, but I do hope you
found something to hold on too. If you want to
tell me how today's show felt for you, or you
have thoughts on what we covered, especially if you have
reached midlife or elder status.
Speaker 3 (44:57):
Let me know.
Speaker 2 (44:58):
Tag me at Refuge and Grief on all the social
platforms so I can hear how this conversation affected you.
Follow the show at It's Okay Pod on TikTok and
Refuge and Grief everywhere else to see video.
Speaker 3 (45:09):
Clips from the show, and use the hashtag It's Okay.
Speaker 2 (45:12):
Pod on all the platforms, not only so I can
find you, but others can too. None of us are
entirely okay, and it's time we start talking about that together. Yeah,
it's okay that you're not okay. You're in good company.
That's it for this week. Friends, Remember to subscribe to
(45:33):
the show and leave a review. Not only do your
reviews help make the show easier to find, like more
reviews the more often the show shows up in searches,
but also your reviews are really special to me personally,
and I read every single one of them, and when
I run out of new ones to read.
Speaker 3 (45:51):
I'm bummed out. So you know, help me out by
giving me your reading material.
Speaker 2 (45:58):
All right, coming up next week and incredibly joyful conversation
about mortality with death Doulah Alua Arthur. If you're like,
oh my god, why would I want to listen to
a show about mortality, especially if I'm already wrestling with
difficult things in my own life. Okay, we'll tune in
to find out because talking about death might just make
life infinitely better for you, for the people you love,
(46:19):
and for everyone. So follow the show on your favorite
platforms so you don't miss an episode. Want more on
these topics, Look, grief is everywhere. As my dad says,
daily life is full of everyday grief that we don't
call grief. Learning how to have these conversations is an
important skill for everybody, whether you're facing the end of
(46:40):
your own life or somebody you love, or it is
an ordinary Monday afternoon. These skills are important for everybody,
So get help to have those kinds of conversations. Get
the skills you need with training's professional resources and my
best selling book, It's Okay that You're Not Okay, plus
the Guided Journal for Grief at Megandivine co It's Okay
(47:02):
that You're Not Okay. The podcast is written and produced
by me Megan Divine. Executive producer is Amy Brown, co
produced by Elizabeth Fozzio, with logistical and social media support
from Micah Post Production and Very Patient editing by Houston Tilly,
music provided by Wavecrush, and background noise today provided by
the many tiny little bird feet tap dancing on the
(47:24):
metal awning outside my window.
Host
Megan Devine
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