I don’t know about the rest of you, but I was hooping and hollerin’ when I heard Ted Lasso announced a 4th season will be premiering. That Apple TV+ show is all about moral beauty, the #1 pathway to feeling awe globally, according to our MEA guest faculty member Dacher Keltner in his book AWE.
After I spent a half-day with Maria Shriver and Hoda Kotb for the first time, I finished by telling both of these single, older women that they were “moral beauties” as I felt a sense of awe in their presence. The logjam in our collective tear ducts broke free and we all shed a few tears.
I’m honored and excited to be joining Maria Shriver on stage in San Francisco on April 14 at the Great American Music Hall for the launch of her book “I Am Maria: My Reflections and Poems on Heartbreak, Healing, and Finding Your Way Home.” The book officially launches on April 1, but I’ve been fortunate enough to receive an advance copy. It’s a beautiful meditation on how to shed an identity – in this case, a Kennedy, a Shriver, a Schwarzenegger – while doing an archeological dig to find one’s soul. Maria survived the death of her mother, Eunice, who had a profound impact on her, and two weeks later, the death of her uncle Teddy. And, that was just the start of what was to become. Here’s an excerpt from the Introduction:
“Then a year and a half later, all hell seemed to break loose. My First Lady job came to an end. My father died two weeks later. And then came another devastating, life-altering blow: my twenty-five-year-long marriage blew up. It broke my heart, it broke my spirit, it broke what was left of me. Without my marriage, without my parents, within a job – and with two of my kids already moved away to college and a third on his way out the door – the dam of my lifelong capital-D Denial just blew apart. I can only describe it as a sitting alone in the ruins after a tornado whips through.”
Maria goes on to wonder “Who is Maria anyway? Who am I apart from all my identities – a Kennedy, a TV anchor, the governor’s wife?” She said she’d “spent a lifetime running away from the authentic me” and she succeeded. She continues, “Now when I looked in the mirror, I had to acknowledge that the woman staring back at me was someone I had built from the outside in, layer upon layer. I didn’t know that woman and I had lost respect for her.”
Based upon her life story and what she’s experienced during her “midlife chrysalis,” Maria is a huge fan of MEA and will be in our upcoming Emerging Elders Masterclass April 17-18. I can’t wait to join her on stage April 14 so we can talk, quite courageously, about the painful life lessons of midlife that are the raw material for our future wisdom. You can come for the book signing or the event and there are a precious few spaces left for the intimate dinner after the event. At the Great American Music Hall, Maria will recite some of her raw, authentic reporting of life in the form of poetry like this one:
Picture Perfect
I thought I had it all
Or so it seemed to me
The picture I painted in my head looked beyond perfect to me.
I’ve come to understand that there is no such thing
Perfect is what we tell ourselves
What we long to project
Perfect is just an illusion that covers up the cracks
So afraid are we of what we cannot see
That we attach to picture perfect
And just let it be.
Perfect is what we tell others
So they look and wonder why
Why they don’t have perfect in their eyes.
The truth is no one ever lives a perfect little life
We all have cracks and fissures
Life is just like that
But I must say for me
I thought I had it all
Or at least enough to suffice
That is
Until my perfect ran out of time.
-Chip