Building an Autumn Season centered on Family, Relationships, Contribution, Growth and Faith
A comprehensive and on-going 7-month interactive online course led by Richard Eyre
Enroll at any time to begin with the current unit and continue through the other six.
How to live the second half physically
How to live the second half mentally
How to live the second half emotionally
How to live the second half socially
How to live the second half spiritually
How to live the second half familially
How to live the second half financially
Registration is now open. Register here.
What is the point and the purpose?
The central thesis of this course is that the later seasons of our lives (fall and winter) present us with a different kind of challenges and a different set of opportunities than what we each faced in our first half (spring and summer).
All of us change in the second half (and especially in the fourth quarter) of our lives, and making the best of it all, and finding the most joy within it, requires new approaches, new attitudes, and a fresh kind of thinking.
Remember: Socrates himself was an old guy when he said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” The challenge is to expand and examine our life’s second half within the stimulation of this course.
Members of the course sometimes call themselves “Socs” in homage to Socrates and to their own commitment to continually examine their lives, especially in the second half.
The online course is taught by Richard Eyre with ample help from Linda and from an adjunct faculty of twenty friends whose intellect and insights the Eyres love and respect. But before we get into the details, here is Richard’s personal response when we asked him to spell out the reasons and rationale for the course in his own words:
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.
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
How is the course be taught, and how do HTL members receive it?
All the teaching and discussion takes place by email, podcast, Instagram, and Zoom, among a closed group of registered members and teachers. Once you register as an official How to Live (HTL) member, you are included in a private Instagram group that posts Richard’s ongoing instruction and discussion several times each week in short video clips. Richard posts content from wherever he is and whatever he is doing. While it will always fit into the general curriculum and sequence of the course, most of the posts are spontaneous and serendipitous. You do not have to be an Instagram or social media user–just do a free registration on the Instagram app or at instagram.com and then as an HTL member you can join the private Instagram page and will be able to go directly to it and see only Richard and Linda’s Posts and those of their adjunct faculty.
There is a weekly summarizing email each Sunday, a weekly podcast each Saturday called Eyres on the Road featuring both Richard and Linda, (found on any podcast app), and an end-of-month Zoom meeting to which all members are invited.
Members can respond to any email or Instagram post, either to ask questions or to make comments.
While Richard often draws from his books and long-term life-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.
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 beliefs and faith.
For a brief overview of the Eyres’ family centric career, take a look at the cover story in America’s only national grandparenting magazine.
Why is it beneficial to mentally separate the “two halves of our lives?”
Most people live their entire life on one continuous spectrum, essentially living and thinking the same way for all of their 50 or more adult years, and approaching life and its goals and challenges pretty much the same way when they are 70 as they did when they were 40. The problem is that they have changed, and their circumstances have changed, and their mental and physical capacities have changed—and they have not re-invented their approach to life or altered their paradigm of life to match who and what they are now.
Again, the core belief of the How to Live the Second Half of Life online course is that there are new ways of approaching our lives physically, mentally, socially, emotionally, spiritually, familially, and financially that we are better suited for now, and that can increase our abilities to contribute and to enjoy in remarkable new ways.
As the years pass, we lose some of our physical capacity but compensate for it with new effort and regimens; and in the words of Arthur Brooks, our “fluid intelligence” declines a bit even as our “crystalized intelligence” incorporates our experience and wisdom to form a whole new level of mental ability.
While aging suggests the need to “manage” and minimize our hopefully very gradual physical and mental decline, we can continue to grow and expand and “ascend” in our social, emotional, spiritual, familial and financial lives (and hey…five out of seven isn’t bad!).
If we fail to make important adjustments in the second half, we will just keep on doing the same old things in the same old ways—but we will do them less and less well and will find decreasing satisfaction in them.
But if we consciously and deliberately shift our paradigm, and re-design how we live all seven facets of our lives, the second half can be incredible, and the second half of the second half (the all-important “fourth quarter” when all games are decided) can be the best part of all.
What is the timing and timetable? Can one become a member at any time?
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, and it began with the first of its seven facets or months (how to live physically) on September 1, 2025. But the course is ongoing, rotating through the seven facets or units and then starting over. Thus, you can join at any time, starting with the current month or facet, and complete the whole course over the following seven months. It does not matter which facet you start with, so you can register at any time.
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.
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, when you decide whether or not you will register, consider this: How to live the second half of life maximally and joyfully in our physical, mental, social, emotional, spiritual, familial and financial realms should now be the core quest of our lives. 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 decades contemplating questions that many of us may have just begun to ask.
As a New York Times #1 Bestselling Authors and Global Speakers, the Eyres’ lifetime pursuit of “Prioritized Lifebalance” has taken them to more than 100 countries, put them on most national talk shows, and factored into the authoring of more than 50 books. But their more important qualification is that they are thoughtfully critical of the way most of us live our lives, and they believe 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.
Richard will lead the course, as Linda takes the lead on other Eyre projects, but everything presented will be their joint effort. You will hear from Linda every week in the HTL podcast, every month on the HTL Zoom, and often on HTL Instagram posts.
What is the 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.
More than a dozen of the Eyres’ books will be used as optional reference texts during the 7 months of this course.
How about a brief synopsis?
The scope and sweep of ideas and topics covered in this ongoing, 7-month discussion-course are broad as well as deep–as suggested by these little teasers: (Note that we number the seven parts or “facets” of the course, and that they each last a full month, but each stands alone, and it does not matter which month or facet you begin with, because you can progress on through all seven.)
Month 1 or “facet” one of seven: 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, and becoming your own physician and knowing enough to avoid health surprises. Richard’s books The Half Diet Diet, and Tennis and Life; and Richard and Linda’s book Life in Full will be sources and “texts” for this unit.
Facet 2: 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. Trading control for serendipity. Trading ownership for stewardship. Trading independence for synergicity. Richard’s books Free to be Free, Lifebalance, and The Happiness Paradox will be the optional texts.
Facet 3: HTL 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. Loving more. Seeing the beauty of truth and the truth of beauty. Discovering the four portals to the peaceful power of the spirit. Optional texts will be the Eyres’ books The Discovery of Joy, The Secret of the Sabbath, Daily Thanks, Selected Poems, and Serendipity of the Spirit.
Facet 4: HTL 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. Texts will be Linda’s I Didn’t Plan to be a Witch, Richard’s Don’t Just Do Something Sit There, Relationships, and The Three Deceivers, and the Eyres joint-authored book The Turning.
Facet 5: HTL 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. Tapping into the divine. Seeing yourself from above. The three things you can take with you: people, places, and purpose. Self-correcting prayer. Eyre books that will come into play as optional texts include: The Birth that we call Death, What Manner of Man, The Awakening, Life before Life, Family Revelation, and Five Spiritual Solutions.
Facet 6: HTL Familially
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 partnerships. The T.E.A.M. approach to proactive grandparenting–4 roles that every grandparent should play. Texts for this unit include more than a dozen Eyre books on family and parenting, including their national bestsellers like Teaching Your Children Values.
Facet 7: HTL Financially
Achieving generosity without entitlement. The beautiful principle of financial matching. Helping intelligently with loans instead of gifts and through Roth IRAs and 529 education funds. Adding a “testament” to your will. Achieving it all in tandem and teamwork with your children-the-parents. Fitting your strategy to your resources. Optional texts will be the Eyres’ The Entitlement Trap and 3 Steps to a Strong Family.
How can I “get oriented” once I have joined?
You will receive a welcome letter and introduction when you register, and while you really do not need any prerequisite study, you might enjoy sampling a couple of things:
1. Go to the HTL Instagram page, and you will instantly access all the posts that the Eyres have done thus far. You can do this from your phone or on a computer. Go from bottom to top to view the posts in sequence. Each one is short, and you can watch all of them in a couple of hours. (This is important to give you the flavor of why we think it is so important to make a deliberate and committed shift into a new kind of thinking for the second life (and particularly for the decisive fourth quarter).
2. Listen to a few of our recent HTL episodes on the Eyres on the Road podcast. You can pick the ones that interest you by title. Again, this will give you just a taste or sample of the course. We recommend Spotify as your podcast provider because they break down each episode into chapters–one for each part of the content covered.