Excerpted: Ageing Young
Dwight Whitney (Co-Author)
By Julian Macfarlane
Dwight is more of a man of the earth than I am. I live in a tiny apartment in Tokyo. For many years, until his wife died, Dwight lived close to nature in a house on farmland in Auckland with horses and dogs and a cat. He’s in solid rebuild mode now, but essentially homeless. Truly a “rootless cosmopolitan”.
If I am a “polymath”, Dwight is clearly an “omnipath”. What’s that? Think of the word “telepath”; an “omnipath” thinks on several levels at the same time, divergently. In the corporate world, people are expected to think in linear form, convergently — and creativity or innovation are regarded as “suspicious”. So, Dwight, like me, “haunts” the periphery, selling his skills as a writer to companies and individuals that need to somehow frame what they have to offer in a way that distinguishes them from their competitors.
I write a lot about the core of our evolved being as hunters and gatherers. Dwight is a modern hunter and gatherer in our contemporary social jungle.
Somebody once called him the “Hunter S Thompson of the Southern Hemisphere”, which might tell you more about Down Under than about Dwight himself. No, he is not an alcoholic. He doesn’t do drugs or hang with bikers. Or have random sex with skanky women. He is a man of the earth, rooted and centered in a way that Hunter S was not — cosmopolitan yes — , not gonzo.
That said, Dwight shares Hunter S’s openness to ideas that might seem ‘different’. Like Hunter S, he is fond of “down and outers” and agonizes about the vulnerable. He shares Hunter S’s creativity, with a lot of humor but without the agony and the fury.
Like Hunter, Dwight gets his point across by telling stories. He’s been a writer, editor, and contributor to a wide range of national and international publications and platforms, particularly magazines.
He has been a brand communication adviser to all sorts of companies from small entrepreneurial startups to global behemoths.
He has written or co-authored several books including Reality is Crazy (a study of entrepreneurship).
His spirituality is simultaneously influenced by Christianity, Zen Buddhism and, naturally, since he lives in New Zealand, Maori culture. Yet, he is “cosmopolitan”. Dwight does not see things as “either / or”. He tends to see things in threes — or fours and fives — believing that contradiction shines the way to deeper understanding. Hence, the name of his company is Trinity Communications.
In this book, I write a lot about the importance of empathy and altruism. Dwight has these qualities in spades. Severely traumatized as a youth, and later by the too-early passing of his life partner, he now talks and writes about resilience and belonging — in a way that resonates: it’s heart to heart, and you cannot go away unmoved. He’s inspirational . In this age of uncertainty is insights are needed more than ever — for people of all ages.
