The word transformation came into vogue as a personal and social phenomenon in the 1970s principally through the success and notoriety of Werner Erhard, a friend I have admired and worked with for a decade. His est training touched the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and generated numerous books and a couple of films. The ‘training’ was a four-day intensive immersion into a smorgasbord of experiential exercises and intense lectures punctuated with engaging ‘coaching’ conversations
Monthly Archives: February 2007
Riverboats and Bone Yards I
By Stu Whitley
Bio
This is the first post in a five-part series.
As a young boy growing up in England, I was consumed with tales of the ‘Dark Continent’. The memoirs and descriptions of Burton, Speke, Livingston and Stanley enthralled me, especially their references to the fabled graveyard of elephants, where the fading behemoths of the Serengeti went to die. Trying to conceive of a place like this was such an effort that it faltered on the steps of my young imagination. The African elephant can live as long as 70 years or more: the idea that this intelligent beast should know its time nears and be drawn to a resting place with its kin seemed fantastic.These thoughts eventually released their hold on me
till nearly half a century later. I was on a canoe trip down a stretch
of the Yukon River known as the ‘Forty-Mile’, where the broad Teslin
River has its confluence. Suddenly, on the riverbank, there loomed the
enormous remains of several paddlewheel steamers. It was still easily
possible to imagine these vast engines of commerce, now in various
Vanity
A middle-aged woman had a heart attack and was taken to the hospital. While on the operating table she had a near death experience. Seeing God she asked "Is my time up?"
God said, "No, you have another 43 years, 2 months and 8 days to live."
Upon recovery, the woman decided to stay in the hospital and have a facelift, liposuction, and a tummy tuck. She even had someone come in and change her hairstyle and color. Since she had so much more time to live, she figured she might
The Great Retirement Race
I saw this picture and began to wonder how many of us are racing toward
retirement with the same sense of urgency to ‘get it right’ that drove
us to get through college, find the best job, raise that great family
and participate in all those community groups and projects. Now, as we
turn down the home stretch, are we continuing to accelerate or are we
slowing down? Like Verna said over at Out of the Cube, we’re supposed to spend the first half of life acquiring everything and the second half letting go. So what’s the big hurry?
The whole phenomenon of the mid-life crisis really has little to do
with speed and everything to do with direction. The real question to
ponder: “Why are we moving so fast if we don’t know where we’re going?”
Couple this with the fact that a bunch of us are still working on the
question of ‘who we are’ and you have more of a midlife mystery than a
straightforward inquiry into velocity.
I like the metaphor of a racecar track for life because it seems to me
that, at the end of the