By Shae Hadden
Bio
I’ve always been aware of the distances between people…ever since my
first childhood remembrance of being a being separate from my mother.
Vivid memories of being the last one chosen to be on the team in gym
class translated into a story about being the one assigned to sit on
the sidelines of life while others got to play. I thought I had left
that all behind when I got married at the ripe old age of 28. I was
ready to dive in and live full
I’ve asked a lot of people how old they would be if they really had a choice. In a recent essay entitled Complaint and the Blind Men,
Laurence Platt, who writes from his experience of Werner Erhard’s work,
wrote about the idea of choice as a creative act as opposed to a
conclusion based on some analytical reasoning. The message is that
happiness is the result of choosing ‘what is’, what some disciplines
call ‘profound acceptance’ or ‘surrender’.
There
aren’t many areas of
The word “Elder” is becoming the vogue term for people over 60 or,
in some cases, even younger. I think it is a mistake as well as
inaccurate to make “Elder” synonymous with having reached a certain
age. First of all, being an Elder is a role, not a fact of biology.
Moreover, it is a role that exists in the context of community. The
word itself distinguishes a relationship between the Elder and members
of their community.
I see several criteria that must be met before one can assume the
The BBC recently ran a piece on new anti-age discrimination laws
in the UK. Although anti-age discrimination laws aren’t new in the USA,
the statistics show that, while age is on the same list with sexual
preference, race, gender and the handicapped, the practices that limit
opportunity for people
On Friday I had the pleasure of listening to a speaker in his late
60s articulate a compelling and challenging scenario for all of us to
get very serious about our choices and our role in the world in coming
years. David Korten, a fellow with an impressive pedigree of worldly
accomplishments and currently board chair of YES! Magazine,
wove a number of familiar themes of coming disaster—peak oil, climate
I guess everything starts somewhere. This is my first ‘blog’. I’m
still getting used to the local jargon in these here parts. I see the
‘blogosphere’ as the perfect place to share my ideas about age and
aging.
Actually, this isn’t the beginning of my interest in and commitment
to do something about the culture of aging that we all share. It has
been a kind of hobby of mine for a long time. And now, as I approach
65, it has become more of a mission.
I
am clear that, in North America
By Shae Hadden
Bio
At the starting point to serenity.
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Serene Ambition is about what we can do, and more importantly, who we can be as we grow older.
In 1979, I was designing a marketing seminar targeted to ‘seniors’.
I believed that everyone at every age is basically afraid of dying and
was working within that assumption. I interviewed a number of people,
mostly in their 70s and 80s, and began to see that, after a certain
point, they weren’t afraid of dying at all. They were, however, afraid
of dying without