Monthly Archives: April 2008

Fearless Aging

Choice and Trust

By Shae Hadden | Bio

My life is my game—no one else’s. And I create the rules. What freedom, what choices, what responsibility! Playing ‘by the rules’ means playing according to choices I’ve made about what’s ‘best’ for me. And that’s left me in a quandary, because many ‘old rules’ don’t fit anymore. It’s time to examine them, keep the ones that still suit me and replace any unworkable ones. So here I am, wondering how to pick and choose from the rules I have been playing by.

Yet is it possible for us to know what choices, what rules will be ‘right’? We may very well be blind to possible consequences and dangers of what we’re choosing for our game. We may have committed to creating many new things, things that aren’t real yet. We can’t predict others’ reactions to these creations or what might happen with them based on past experience, because they have not existed in the world before. We may place ourselves in new situations, in circumstances

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News

Sageing Conference

The Sage-ing Guild, an organization created in 2004 to promote and support conscious aging, will be holding their first national conference in Dayton, OH from June 13 to 15th at the University of Dayton.Changing the Paradigm from Aging to Sage-ing will focus on creating a "vital, conscious Elderhood". The event will feature sessions with Richard Leider, author of

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The Great Turning

Alcoholism and the Canary

In the late 80s, Anne Wilson Schaef and Diane Fassel wrote a book called The Addictive Organization. While I have a very different experience and theory than what they were proposing, I think their metaphor was perfect. For me, the idea that an organization or society can become ‘addicted’ is not a metaphor. I believe, like Charles Horton Cooley, that “Individuals and organizations

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Wisdom in Action

The Shift

I came across an extraordinary six-minute YouTube video called ‘The Shift’—a presentation that blows one’s mind with factoids about the rate of change in the world. The Shift they are talking about is a ‘paradigm shift’, meaning our entire worldview, indeed our whole reality, is being turned upside down and inside out by virtue of technology, population and the exponentially accelerating rate of change. Whether

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Personal Empowerment

Guilt

I was speaking with a friend recently about age in general, how we ‘remember’ our lives and the power of memories to affect our day-to-day experience. From one perspective, I think that living in the present is the point of living—experientially at least. When we are present, our memories are just memories and don’t affect us either positively or negatively. Our memories are our ‘story’, and we can relate to our past as just that—a story. On the other hand, our moods and our memories

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Wisdom in Action

Journeyman

The word ‘journeyman’ has always conjured up two images in my mind: first, of a young apprentice learning from an experienced, older person and second, of a young man just beginning to undertake his own personal journey into adulthood. The recently released one-hour documentary Journeyman is an inspiring exploration into mentoring, rites of passage and male culture in the U.S. Featured experts, including Michael Gurian

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Fearless Aging

Resignation

I have written about resignation on several occasions. I think we need to remember this is a condition in which we give up, but do so in a way that hides the fact that is what we are doing. Resignation is a big part of what we think of as the ‘human condition’ and, in my opinion, it can become more pervasive as we age. I frequently speculate on what will happen if enough of us become resigned about something at the same time. My view is that the resignation becomes the reality when this happens.

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Fearless Aging

Angst

I like this word. I don’t know why…perhaps because it is one of those words that seems to express itself in speaking of it. The word means ‘anxiety’—a kind of generalized anxiety with being alive.

The existential philosophers talked a lot about angst. In fact, we normally associate angst with existentialism—existential angst. The word is usually associated with a negative mood such as depression or what Thomas Merton characterized as “the dark night of the soul”. I think that Heidegger

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Leadership

Energy as a Way of Life III

By Charles E. Smith | Bio

During the second year in my transition from a static world to an
energetic-based point of view, I took a training program with a Mexican
teacher, Victor Sanchez, who had studied and lived with the Toltec
Indians in northern Mexico. Victor had developed a coherent conceptual
framework that was very much based on energy. Lorin Smith didn’t have a
lot of explanation for what he did. He just did it, and I saw that he
was working with

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Fearless Aging

Foolishness

Today is the day for fools, foolishness and merry pranks played on friends, colleagues and neighbours. Because of the abundance of April Fools’ hoaxes in the media, many people distrust news reports and advertisements launched on this day. No such luck here at Serene Ambition…although, as in some countries like Britain, we do believe that jokes pulled after noon turn the prankster into the ‘fool’. Instead, we’d like to share a few famous insights into learning how to live wisely.

Life

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