In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a man takes his son on a seventeen-day trip from the American Midwest to the California coast. He tells the son the trip is just a vacation, but reveals to the reader that he thinks of the journey as something called a chautauqua.

The basic idea of a chautauqua is to create a kind of “meeting of minds”, an educational travel experience where people gather at some geographical destination, usually in a natural setting, with the goal of exchanging ideas about how to live better lives. Typically, a few speakers give presentations on lifestyle, health, work, personal well-being, or other big-picture topics to get the discussions going, and the rest of the time everyone gets to know each other well enough to talk about what’s important to them, in a relaxed and supportive setting.

Two years ago I was invited to speak at a modern-day chautauqua in Ecuador, and it was a fantastic experience. The event was organized by Cheryl Reed, who started holding these retreats in Ecuador a couple of years ago. Cheryl’s an American who fell in love with Ecuador when she first visited in 1997. She bought a small farm there in 2002 and spends half the year living there.

We’re having another chautauqua this Fall (from October 29th to November 5th) and we’d love to have you if you can make it. The overall theme is “Happiness, Mindfulness, and Living a Full Life”.

There will be four presenters. Aside from Cheryl and myself, award-winning personal finance blogger J.D. Roth will be returning to talk about creating confidence and personal freedom. And this year we’re thrilled to have Leo Babauta from the enormously popular blog Zen Habits. I’ve been a fan of Leo’s for years and I’m excited to meet him.

After everyone meets up in the capital city of Quito, we’ll spend the retreat at a secluded little resort called El Encanto. It’s set into the side of a mountain in the cloud forest, the temperate rainforest at the foothills of the Andes. A dozen or so dwellings surround a main courtyard, where there’s a pool, hot tubs, and a big balcony that overlooks the valley. We’ll eat together at a big long table every night, have wine on the balcony, relax, chat, and go for hikes down to the river, spotting toucans and some of the craziest looking insects you’ve ever seen.  Read More

I keep having this idea, not that I think it’s true, that when you die you appear in a talk show studio, and everyone is clapping. A host shakes your hand and asks you to sit down, and the both of you go over how you think you did.

On a large screen, they play a long montage containing some of the more significant moments in your life. You and the host, along with the audience, look on as you make pivotal choices, overcome dilemmas, and meet the people who would become your friends and partners.

The film includes a lot of personality-defining moments, such as when you made the choice to embrace what became your art or your calling, if you had one, or when you took on a long-term responsibility that became a part of who you were. You also get to see, for only the second time, the moments in which your most important relationships went from superficial to true. Everyone in the studio is moved.

The members of the audience have seen many episodes of this show, and were once on it themselves. The overall tone of the production is quite pleasant and earnest. Clearly everyone is happy for you, celebrating your life rather than judging it, and probably remembering similar moments from their own reel.

The montage also covers things you missed—many of of the experiences and relationships that didn’t happen, but could have, if you had accepted or extended a particular invitation, if you had made a particular effort at small talk instead of sinking into another painful silence, if you had bought that piano after all, if you had attended the indoor climbing center’s open house instead of telling yourself you’d go next year.

Of all the missed possibilities, the missed human connections stand out above the other kinds—the missed career and travel opportunities, cultural experiences, even the creative achievements—because by the end of your life the only thing that seemed relevant was the people you loved, or ended up loving. When you died all the value in your world resided there, in the simple and all-important fact that you really knew other people and other people really knew you.   Read More

The other day my friend noticed aloud that she probably knows my face a lot better than I do. I suppose it’s true—I only see it a few minutes a day in the mirror, or occasionally in a photograph. But she sees it almost every time either of us says anything to each other.

Of course, I’ve been seeing my face my whole life, much longer than any of my friends have been around. But our faces are constantly changing, and we only see them in certain contexts: primping, shaving, examining blemishes, checking for cars behind us. A person’s direct experience of their own face is surprisingly limited.

Yet, if you’re like me, you think you see your face all day long. Somehow, I feel like I know what mine looks like at nearly every instant. It seems like I can actually see it when I’m conversing with someone, or when I’m sitting at a computer typing, even though I’m not sure I’ve ever actually seen myself doing those things.

It’s a strange hallucination, this impression that I’m always seeing my face. I’ve tested it by making a face and then checking it in a mirror against what I think it looks like, and it’s always wrong. Try it yourself.

Our faces seem like an essential part of who we experience ourselves to be, yet they’re much more familiar to the people who know us than to ourselves.

And we see our own faces much more often than most of history’s human beings. With the exception of the last two hundred years, there were no cameras, and few households had mirrors. Unless you were a debutante, or had Narcissus’s habit of gazing into a ponds and rain barrels, it’s hard to see how your face would become a big part of your experience.  Read More