I was wearing a walking cast on my broken right foot toward the end of my tenure as an administrative assistant at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business. At work one day, when I knew I was tendering my resignation but had not yet announced it, I was clunking into our “hub” from my office down the hall. The hub was a room that had multiple functions: mail room, kitchen, copy room, and a place where people touched base, shared a greeting, or had a chat. On this day one of my co-workers walked in at the same time as I and greeted me with, “How long do you have?”
Posts filed under Life Transitions
Growing Older In America: The New Culture Wave
When I was a kid, my grandparents appeared to be permanently ancient in my eyes. Grandma smelled like cookies and mince pies. Grandpa (retired from working on the line at Chrysler at age 65) smelled of gardens and woodworking. The oldest person on TV in 1963 was Granny on The Beverly Hillbillies. She was portrayed as a cross between a beloved spry old chicken and your slightly demented next-door neighbor for whom you shovel the sidewalk each winter. Although this show presented a few progressive plot lines about class conflict, you still could not have made an episode about seniors and bathrooms 30 years ago for TV. Only when us baby boomers began to ride the cultural wave of aging in America did perceptions of what it meant to be an elder start to change.
Healing Writer's Block Through the Mystery School
The temptation to hang up the phone burnt my fingertips like I had touched a car bumper that had been sitting under a hot sun for hours. I did not call Lynn Andrews—a shaman healer, mystic, and an internationally best-selling author with 20 books to her name—to talk about my childhood as if I was sitting in front of a psychiatrist or a talk show host. I’d hoped that this one-hour phone session could resolve some issues I had been having with my writing career.
Rite and Recognition ~ A Crazy Wisdom Exploration of Rites of Passage
What are the significant milestones along a life’s path and how do we give them meaning? The deep human need for ritualization around life’s biggest transitions — most commonly at birth, coming of age, marriage, parenthood, and death — calls us to engage in personal and communal meaning making.
The ManKind Project — First Person with Callan Loo
The ManKind Project nonprofit (MKP) hosts a signature weekend retreat program called New Warrior Training Adventure. Callan Loo answers questions about his experience.
Abandonment Blues — An Adoption Memoir
I was adopted when I was six months old. My adoptive mother told me this when I was nine. Whenever I asked whom my birth mother was she said that she didn’t know. After she died at age sixty-one, when I was thirty-five, I found letters from my birth mother amongst her papers. I found her, we met her once, but she would never tell me who my biological father was.
Coffee with Chris Forte, Author of The Humble Warrior
Chris Forte is a Birmingham-based yogi, author, spiritual fitness coach, former Division I athlete, and creator of The Humble Warrior podcast and memoir. On Christmas Day, 2014, in the midst of his marriage dissolving, Chris hit his knees on the floor and heard, “Book, blog, podcast.” He spent two years doing yoga and meditation every day, attending Hay House writing and speaking conferences, and getting certified as a yoga teacher. His book, “The Humble Warrior: Spiritual tools for living a purposeful life” came out in June 2017.
