Curiosity

In Malcolm Gladwell’s best-selling and widely discussed book, Outliers: The Story of Success he talked about the 10,000 hours rule. In the book he cites a paper from American Scientist, by Herbert Simon and William Chase, noting that it takes between 10,000 and 50,000 hours to master something difficult.

I’m not sure whether I vacated my old life or whether it vacated me ... but either way, I find myself here in this weird liminal space... betwixt and between two chapters of life, but not properly belonging in either.

One of my favorite books on learning is "A More Beautiful Question" by Warren Berger, which is in the MEA library here in Baja. Berger cites Paul Harris, a Harvard child psychologist and author, who says that a child asks about 40,000 questions between the ages of two and five.

Burning Man meets Lawrence of Arabia meets Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (maybe with a tad of Mad Max). That was my experience last week when I made the pilgrimage to the White Sands National Park in southern New Mexico. As you’ll see in the video at the end of this post, this is a luscious lunar landscape that’s as curvaceous as it is transient.

“A man ceases to be a beginner in any given science and becomes a master in that science when he has learned that...he is going to be a beginner all his life.” - Robin Collinwood

If you’re turning 60 this year, I can relate. I experienced my 60th turn last Halloween. As I wrote about the process of turning 60 in this post dated around my birthday, this is a venerable age as we’ve gotten five auspicious rotations of the Zodiac.

I love that MEA holds curiosity as a core value and powerful transformation tool. Curiosity is certainly one of the things I CRAVE, and it has been accentuated during two weeks at our MEA Baja Sabbatical Session. Our workshops on forming developmental questions through Appreciative Inquiry, and Chip’s process of “Spying on the Divine” to cultivate awe both captivate my craving to explore what is new.

Our four MEA operating partners recently went on a strategic retreat to discuss our next five years. And one of the most profound messages we all took from this experience is that we want to live by the four words that make up today’s title: We want to live a life less ordinary.

“The very act of assembling is an exceptionally powerful stimulant. Once the individuals are assembled, their proximity generates a kind of electricity that quickly transports them to an extraordinary degree of exaltation.” - Sociologist Emile Durkheim

I came across a piece of paper on my desk with words that referred to three personal memories: “Rear Window,” “Catcher in the Rye,” and Patti Smith. What had happened in each instance that I wanted to remember? Was there a connection? It took a while, but I figured it out - the theme is “discovery.”