By Jim Selman | Bio
I was talking to my neighbor today about the book that Shae and I are working on. It is about retirement and we’re engaged in the question of ‘when’ does retirement occur. Is it merely an ‘event’ that happens at the end of our last job? My thinking is that it is whatever is left of our lives when our primary concern in life is no longer about earning a living. In this context, a trust fund baby could be born retired just as a person who is ‘retired’ could still
The Fairness in Nursing Home Arbitration Act was passed by the House Judiciary Committee in July, moving it one step closer to becoming law. This bill prohibits the signing of an arbitration agreement as the only method of dispute resolution prior to nursing home admission, restoring a citizen’s right to seek justice in a law court once they have been admitted to a facility. These pre-admission agreements protect long-term care facilities from the consequences of allowing abuse
By Jim Selman | Bio
There is an amazing website called The Brave Nation that is showcasing people who’ve made a difference. Many of these examples of human vision, commitment and perseverance are boomers who challenged ‘the system’ in the ’60s and ’70s and are now sharing their experience with the current generation of ‘change agents’. It is inspiring to remember and reconnect with the idealism of our youth and perplexing to wonder what happened to so many of us who have drifted into complacency about (or in some cases complicity with) current events.Personally, I think the idealism is still there, perhaps under a cloak of resignation and lost dreams. So much has happened in the past 35 years or so that it is difficult to imagine, let alone remember, who we were. It seems so long ago that I can’t even remember how it felt to live in the possibility of a “world that works for everyone”. Civil rights marches and protests aside, the world of my youth was a heady time—a time when ‘the best and the brightest’ went
By Elizabeth Russell | Bio
As soon as I got over thinking of myself as an oddity in the environment and began looking around, I discovered some very interesting people.
One of the early people I met had been a detective (a Private I!) for over 35 years and had some hair-raising stories to tell, including her gathering evidence against an East Bay union boss who was using sexual coercion against women seeking work. Another resident had been an FBI man and there is a woman who worked with the Joint
By Jim Selman | Bio
I have been talking about ‘completion’ a lot lately. It is basically that state of being where we can let the past be in the past and not try to control everything to make the future turn out the way we want it. Completion is a necessary state if we want live in the present. One of the things that keeps us from being complete is guilt. Guilt is a waste of time. It is blaming ourselves for whatever we think we’ve done wrong. As far as I can tell, it is also a cover-up for not being responsible for whatever we did that we’re feeling guilty about.If we’re responsible for our actions and we do something wrong, then we can learn from our mistake and not do it again—end of story. However, when we are guilty, we always have an explanation about why we did it and why we didn’t really want to do it, accompanied by all sorts of sorry intentions not to do it again. Have you EVER felt guilty (probably over and over) about something that you didn’t repeat?
Guilt makes us feel better about all the bad stuff since remorse
By Jim Selman | Bio
Nathan Oates, a Christian minister who writes a very thoughtful blog called “Theologically Speaking”, did a nice piece on loneliness. His point: how we seem to fragment our society into all kinds of niches and end up not relating to or connecting with most of the people around us. Even in the churches that one would imagine to be the most community-oriented institutions, the norm
The Journal of Positive Psychology recently published the results of a multi-year study of 818 people between the ages of 18 and 94 into the origins of life satisfaction throughout adulthood. The research team’s findings indicated that:
Lead author Karen Siedlecki, a post-doctoral research fellow in the cognitive neuroscience division at Columbia University, stated that, "The really key components of successful aging may be how happy you are
and how satisfied you are with your
Companies and organizations across North America are looking to retirees as part-time or temporary workers. Hewlett Packard is reaching out in a different way to capitalize on the power of its former employees. In this year’s annual gathering of HP retirees, chief executive Mark Hurd asked people to get involved
By Elizabeth Russell | Bio
I had enormous resistance in moving into what I thought of as “an old folks’ home.” For years I had said to my children, “I’ll never live in one of those places!” When circumstances conspired to make such a move wise, I spent much of the first few months in my new home looking at San Francisco apartment ads, traveling to the city to look at those apartments. As I did, I began to notice the difference it would mean to me living in one of those apartments as
By Jim Selman | Bio
Since Alvin Toffler published Future Shock in the 1970s, futurists have been speculating what will happen in the coming decades. As with most attempts at long-range predictions, the proof is in the pudding. Most turn out to be somewhat accurate, along with lots of unpredictable ‘surprises’. No one, for example, anticipated the Internet, globalization, Google, global terrorism, cell phones or the unimaginable cost of energy. The future continues to be a fickle mistress and pretty much does what she wants to do, regardless of our prognostications.Behind our fascination with future scenarios is our belief that if we know what will happen, it will inform our actions and choices and we will be more successful, happier or merely survive. In the Michigan Citizen last week, environmental leader Maynard Kaufman was quoted as having predicted that we are going to again become an agrarian society. In another piece in the same paper, Shae Howell is speculating on the future of globalization following the recent collapse