Diversity

Women and midlife is often a lot more complicated than engaging a therapist, buying a sports car, and popping out the other side as a new person. There are a myriad of complex issues for women, and often multiple events that seem to have a compounding effect. The whole thing can be quite dramatic and go on for years.

As I write this blog, I have the row to myself on a morning flight to Cabo for MEA Mastery Week with Carl Honoré 18 hours ago I had no idea I’d be here. It had been 3+ years since I’d been in MEA’s second public cohort - Soul Train - to become a Modern Elder.

Chip’s Note: This guest post comes from one of MEA’s Activists in Residence, Evelyn Reynolds, who just spent a couple weeks with us in Baja. We first became aware of Evelyn through ageism activist Ashton Applewhite and Evelyn’s Huffington Post essay, “Aging While Black.”

Juneteenth (June 19) is a holiday celebrating the 1865 emancipation of those who had been enslaved in the United States. Last night, sculptor Dana King’s 350 ancestral sculptures were unveiled as a new work of radically inclusive art in the heart of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park as conceived in concert with MEA alum Ben Davis called Monumental Reckoning.

In 1980, Diana Ross released the song "I’m Coming Out." In 1980, I was 21 years old and just graduated from college. I moved from Illinois to San Francisco. That song became the LGBTQ anthem, about declaring who you were and being proud.

This recently-published study shows that many advocates for diversity and inclusion in the workplace have cognitive dissonance when it comes to age discrimination. The same progressively-minded folks who support more opportunities for women, people of color, LGBTQ employees and those with a disability often feel conflicted when it comes to keeping older people in the workplace longer.

Do women feel included in narratives about soul work when the loudest voices are from men? MEA alum Douglas Tsoi and Wisdom Well subscriber Jennifer Villeneuve are friends and colleagues at Challenge Success, a nonprofit affiliated with Stanford’s Graduate School of Education focused on kids' well-being and lifelong engagement with learning.

Isn’t it odd how our truth might elude our primary language? Sometimes you have to go halfway across the world to find the perfect word. I loved the French expression “joie de vivre” so much that I named my boutique hotel company after that exquisite phrase.

“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

Thurgood Marshall once said, "None of us got where we are solely by pulling ourselves up by our bootstraps. We got here because somebody – a parent, a teacher, an Ivy League crony or a few nuns – bent down and helped us pick up our boots." This is just one quote that marks him as a Modern Elder.