A comprehensive 6-month interactive online course led by Richard Eyre
How to live physically
How to live mentally
How to live emotionally
How to live socially
How to live spiritually
How to live communally (particularly in your family)
We asked Richard to give us a personal introduction to the course. Here is his reply:
Let me start with a confession and an admission: As I closed in on the frightening title of “Octogenarian,” I was only recently feeling like I had truly learned how to live.
How is it that it takes 80 years to move from treading water on the surface of life to deep diving into the clear depths of what our days and weeks and months are really about.
How can I find myself starting the fourth quarter or the fifth set and only now feel like I have my game where I want it to be?
How is it that no one told me, or that scripture and other wisdom did tell me, but I didn’t hear, that there is a paradigm in which life’s purpose as well as life’s pattern becomes clear and where we maximize both our identity and our joy?
How does one explain that most of the world, and most of our spiritual siblings who inhabit it, believe that happiness comes from the very things that rob us of it?
How?
“How” is the key word and the key question. How is what we are here to learn. How is what we so often complicate when we should be simplifying. How is the point and the pivot of this course.
Most of us, as we pass mid-life, have realized that the second half of life is very different from the first half. If the first half is “broadening,” the second half is “contributing.” If the first half is doing, the second half is being. If the first half is Work and Plan, the second half is Watch and Pray, and if the first half is about Achievements, the second half is about Relationships.
The danger is never making the transition and just continuing to live with first-half habits and perspectives. Another danger is trying to make the transition without acquiring the tools that it requires.
Most of those who are attracted to this course are in the “first half of the second half” of their lives, though there are some who are further along than that (never too late) and some who are still living in their first half but wanting to make the transition a little early, or at least be ready for it when it comes.
The irony is that most people who do learn how to live the second half learn it late in that second half and don’t have very long to relish it. My core motivation for doing the course is a hope that I can help others learn the best approaches and obtain some of the tools earlier in their second half than I did.
You will receive a questionnaire at the start of the course that will have questions like this:
Do you feel the need to live the second half of your life differently than the first?
Do life-relationships feel more or less important to you now than they did 10 years ago?
Do achievements, wealth, and recognition feel more or less important to you now than they did 10 years ago?
I can’t wait to get to know you better, and to explore the second half of life together…I will never claim to have all the answers, but I will promise to help you ask the right questions.
All best,
Richard
Register For Free
- Registrants who sign up as members will be added to the Marco Polo class roll, and Richard will occasionally post an update or some kind of preview there before the class officially begins.
- Members will have several weeks and dozens of Marco Polo posts to decide if they want to shift their registration and membership from “exploratory” (free) to the full membership.
How will the course be taught, and how will subscribers receive it?
All the teaching and discussion will take place on the Marco Polo app, among a closed group of registered members and teachers. Once you register for free as a HTL (How to Live) member, you are included in a Marco Polo group that posts Richard’s ongoing instruction and discussion daily or almost daily, in video form. Content will be sent instantaneously from wherever Richard is and whatever he is doing. And although it will all fit into the general curriculum and sequence of the course as outlined, most of the posts will be spontaneous and serendipitous.
After several weeks on the overview and general paradigm of the course, Richard will begin the actual classes by focusing for a full month on how to live physically. The next month will be on how to live mentally, etc.
Members can watch and listen to each of Richard’s Marco Polo posts whenever they want, perhaps immediately when it is available, or perhaps when they are in a place (externally and internally) where they feel tuned-in and receptive. Whenever they feel prompted, members can react and respond verbally and visually, right on Marco Polo.
While Richard will often draw from his 80 years of experience and insights*, his posts will never feel like egotistical top-down dispensing of advice; on the contrary, they are offered humbly from one who is a little embarrassed that it took him 8 decades to figure it out. Linda will join Richard at least once a week, usually on Fridays, to add her perspective.
The Eyres make no effort to hide their spirituality or their religiosity, staying totally transparent about what they believe and how it influences them–but you will find that they have a gift for doing so in a way that is inclusive and that allows each HTL member to integrate the ideas and principles into his or her own personal belief and faith.
Timing and Timetable:
For the last several months, and in some cases years, Richard (and his colleagues and adjunct teachers who will contribute) have been working on the outlines and contents of this course, deciding what will be included (what is truly relevant) and what will not. Registration for HTL is now open for free and registrants who sign up as members will be added to the Marco Polo class roll…and Richard will occasionally post an update or some kind of preview there before the class officially begins. Then, in when the class reaches critical mass, general introductory (and still completely free) classes will begin.
HTL members will have several weeks and dozens of Marco Polo posts to decide if they want to shift their registration and membership from “exploratory” (free) to the full membership (either by paying the full $10,000 fee, or by paying the first monthly $2,000…or by applying for a scholarship or partial-scholarship membership).
Why should I get involved in this Course?
That is exactly the question you should be asking.
Because the course is expensive, and it takes a great deal of mental energy. In other words, it costs a lot–both in money and in time and effort.
And Richard is the first to admit that “how-to-live” for him may not be the optimal “how-to- live” for you.
So why invest the time or the money?
Well, first of all, you don’t have to pay anything now. Registration is free, and you will have plenty of time to decide and plenty to consider and think about during your free membership. Participate for free in those first few weeks, and we predict that you will know intuitively and empirically whether you want to continue.
And second of all, consider this: How to live the second half of life maximally and joyfully in our physical, mental, social, emotional, spiritual and communal realms is the core quest of our lives. And the best pursuit of that quest is in learning from others rather than rediscovering the wheel or trying to figure it all out for yourself. Richard has spent four decades contemplating questions that many of us may have just begun to ask.
As a New York Times #1 Bestselling Author and Global Speaker, Richard’ lifetime pursuit of “Prioritized Lifebalance” has taken him to more than 100 countries, put him on most national talk shows, and factored into the authoring of more than 50 books. But his more important qualification is that he is thoughtfully critical of the way most of us live our lives, and believes that the very things we pursue as happiness sources–control, ownership, and independence–are actually the very things that block and undermine the joy we were sent here to find.
Backstory
Richard has essentially been working on the big question of How to Live for nearly fifty years, starting with his 1979 book LifePlanning, a book he now thinks got it all wrong. His “apology book,” aimed at undoing the presumptions ego-approach of that earlier book, is called Lifebalance and was published in 1987, followed by books like Serendipity of the Spirit and Stewardship of the Heart. Then came The Book of Nurturing and LIfe in Full; followed recently by The Turning and The Happiness Paradox. Interspersed with these Lifebalance books were Richard and Linda’s best-selling parenting and family books including their New York Times #1 bestseller Teaching Your Children Values.
The Public Speaking and Book Tours connected to these books have taken the Eyres around the world a dozen times, and landed them on Oprah, Donahue, the Today Show, Prime Time Live, CBS This Morning and virtually every other national talk show. Through it all, Richard claims that he was learning as much as he was teaching…even as he was putting together the course How to Live in his mind.
Synopsis
The scope and sweep of ideas and topics covered in this ongoing, 6-month, virtually daily discussion-course are broad as well as deep–as suggested by these teasers:
How to Live Physically
New approaches to how to eat, how to sleep, how to exercise. The free gifts and proper use of Air and Water. How to relax instantly, at will. How to reduce your psychological age by 10 years. The two productive body-sets of Lightning and Waves. Easy monitoring–becoming your own physician and knowing enough to avoid health surprises.
How to live Mentally
Fresh perspectives on how to think, how to imagine, how to read, how to transition from “work and plan” to “watch and pray.” Artificial Intelligence vs Authentic Intelligence. Viewing Nature as an Inspirational Mother. Reading and listening differently. The art of Anti-planning. Relationship Goals. Enlightened Observing. The visual magic of foam-core boards. Thinking freely. Noticing what others miss.
How to live Socially
Reinvented Awareness on how to listen and how to ask the right question at the right moment. “Crystal-ball heads.” Forming a Trust Group. Discovering Compound questions. Making vertical relationships horizontal. The joy of being inconvenienced. Making friends with your own adult children. Disagreeing agreeably.
How to live Emotionally
Surprising alternative paradigms on how to chill, how to make the hard easy , how to find deliberate calm. Answers to whence cometh peace. Feeling deeply. Enjoying simple. Trading control for serendipity. Trading ownership for stewardship. Trading Independence for Synergicity, Loving More. Seeing the beauty of truth and the truth of beauty.
How to live Spiritually
Enlightened insights on how to meditate, how to receive. The real Spirit You. The counterintuitive power of under-preparing. A powerful can’t-do attitude. The secular and spiritual meaning of Grace. Taping into the Divine. Seeing yourself from above. The three things you can take with you: People, Places, and Purpose. Self-correcting prayer.
How to Communnally
Shared secrets on how to be vulnerable, how to trust, how to sail the relationship. Three-generation family management. Grandparenting and empty-nest parenting. The eight myths of marriage. The Emerson/Thoreau bounce. Oneness partnership.
Socrates himself was a “senior” when he said “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Expand and Examine your Second Half within the stimulation of this course. Nothing to lose and lots to gain. Get signed up for free here.