According to research recently announced in the April issue of Heart, women who live in multigenerational households have double the risk of experiencing a coronary event as women who only live with a spouse. Iso of Osaka University in Japan studied 91,000 Japanese men and women between 40 and 69 years old for 11 years. They examined the incidence of coronary heart disease (CHD) in relation to living arrangements, and found that men were not affected by living in multigenerational households.
Monthly Archives: March 2009
People and Places
By Jim Selman | Bio
I am coming to the conclusion that I am a travel-aholic. Like most ‘isms’, travelaholism is the product of thinking we control something that we don’t control and, therefore, are controlled by it. One of the primary symptoms of an ‘ism’ is that we say we want to change something—usually our behavior—but continue in whatever pattern it is that we want to change. I protest that I am traveling too much, while at the same time filling in my calendar with airports and connections and hotels around the world. So far this year I have been to Buenos Aires, Geneva, Madrid, Sao Paulo, Paris, Amsterdam and am on my way to Tanzania before leaving for New Zealand, the Ukraine and New York City. While this may sound exotic, I rarely have time to fully appreciate the uniqueness of these far-flung locations.It is also true that I love my work and am very happy and engaged when I am speaking with people in different cultures. The more I travel to different parts of the world, the more I appreciate that the ‘human family’ are pretty much all in the same conversations and have the same concerns. While the languages and the scenery may vary, we are more alike than we are different.
I am also always a little amazed by how informed and current people are about events and politics
Nothing to Fear
By Jim Selman | Bio
To continue our discussion about fear and how to master it…. There are distinctions between coping with fear, transcending fear and transforming fear. Coping is our normal relationship with just about everything in our contemporary world. Our relationship to circumstances is that ‘the world’ is real and, more or less, whatever we think it is. We interact with our circumstances based on our point of view, and our actions reinforce our point of view. The result
Serve America
What made America strong in the past (citizens actively helping their neighbours) could possibly make America strong again. There is a bill moving through the Congress, the Hatch-Kennedy
Serve America Act, that is bringing Republicans and Democrats together.
The Act puts a whole new perspective on national and community service: government
would provide infrastructure support to community groups recruiting and
training volunteers. This has the potential
Uprooted and Looking for Answers
By Shae Hadden | Bio
There are times we know what we’re doing, and times we don’t have the foggiest idea what our lives are about. There are days when we feel ‘grounded’, and days when it’s as if our roots are torn out from under us. There are choices we make easily, and choices we avoid making at all costs.
These days it seems as if many of us are uprooted, challenged to look at what our lives are about, and faced with choices we’ve been running away from. There
Markets and Mindfulness
By Jim Selman | Bio
Sandra, my financial advisor and friend, and I were talking about the ‘meltdown’ the other day. I was asking how my retirement investments were doing and she shared that I probably don’t want to know. She is a believer that markets go up and down and, over the long-haul, reasonably conservative investing will pay off. Historically this may be true, but somehow knowing that doesn’t help when you are afraid of ‘losing’ your life’s savings or having to live off your friends and children when you are old. Sandra’s advice was to relax and don’t read the newspapers. I think she is right.When I think about it, I
have been a long-term investor for the past twenty years or so. For
most of that time, I didn’t think about my investments or ‘follow’ the
market. My relationship with the financial world was about like my
relationship with the weather—I was vaguely aware when it was raining,
but mostly it didn’t affect my life one way or the other. So what
happened? Now I read the financial section in the newspaper first
Fear and Risk
By Jim Selman | Bio
Our relationship to risk and our fears is closely related. Most of our lives we’ve made decisions based on some formal or informal process for assessing ‘risk’. In our conventional way of thinking, this means trying to predict what will or will not happen and with what probabilities based on some scenario or course of action. It is a ‘forward looking’ posture and, as with all predictions, draws on historical data or experience and projects it into the future. In other words, we take our past, project it into the future and then make our choices and commitments based on what our predictions (the past) tell us will probably happen.Anyone who is even mildly
paying attention can easily grasp that the predictions are wrong more
often than they are right. Particularly now, when the world is changing
around us so rapidly, we can no longer rely on this mode of
decision-making. At best, we maintain the status quo and, more often
than not, we are completely blindsided by something unexpected that
wasn’t taken into account when we were assessing risk and making our
decisions.
The Yin and Yang of Living with Seniors
By Kevin Brown | Bio
Many of you are experiencing firsthand what it means to be living with someone older than you. Perhaps you are a teen or young adult living with your parents, or perhaps you are an adult who has a parent or older relative living with you. Experience reveals that at some point in our lives we will be sharing an intergenerational relationship while under one roof. Most of us have the experience of living with our parents while we grow up. But the experience of taking on a caring role is very different.I myself had this experience while my mother lived with my wife and I until her untimely death, followed a short while thereafter with my mother-in-law living with us for a period of time. We considered active adult housing for my mother, but in the end, we decided to have her in our home. I’m so glad we did. I found myself in a situation where I needed to not only accommodate our son but now also integrate an aging parent. While
The Stimulus Plan: Spending Proposals
President Obama’s Economic Stimulus Plan includes four key spending proposals that may impact seniors.
- =&0=&. The creation of 3 million new jobs (including ‘green jobs’) over the next two years in construction and new energy production will not only provide opportunities for people to work longer, but also to salvage their retirement
Learning from Experience
By Rick Fullerton | Bio
Over the past few months I have been an absentee blogger, a consequence of having accepted a full-time work assignment that I expected to last two years or more. I was enticed by a personal request for my services to lead a strategic initiative that would call on my experience and skills. So after nearly 10 years as a freelance consultant, I returned to work inside an organization at age 62.
Any major decision like this comes with many implications. Besides the desire to