By Mariette Sluyter | The Foundation Lab
Read the first part of this article here.
As the project began we hit many roadblocks. (Blessedly, none of them were from funders or supportive agencies, but from individual human beings.) Shock, laughter, denial, repulsion and silencing. This came from youth, middle-aged people, professionals and, most heartbreakingly, seniors themselves. The attempts we made to overcome the roadblocks came from every angle. When one approach failed, we, our tireless
By Mariette Sluyter | The Foundation Lab
Seniors Sexual Health was not an area I was particularly drawn to as a 40-something community developer until a staggering statistic was pointed out to me: oositive HIV tests among those over 50 have risen from 7.5% between 1985 and 1998 to 13.5% in 2005.
After some thinking about the statistic, my colleague Nicole Hergert with The Calgary Sexual Health Centre and I explored some theories. It was clear that public health campaigns remain largely focused
By Jim Selman | Bio
Perhaps the most pervasive and omnipresent aspect of being alive is our moods. We are always in one mood or another. Moods are either positive or negative and they ‘color’ our experience of living, affect how we relate to others and our circumstances, and have extraordinary power to open or close possibilities. If we examine this phenomenon, we can see that our moods are portable—we take them with us wherever we go. I can be angry at home and find that mood affecting me at work or even on the golf course.Moods are also contagious. Have you ever been in a meeting where everyone is in a good mood and then the boss or someone enters the room in a different, perhaps negative, mood and it isn’t long before everyone has ‘caught’ the new mood?
Moods constitute the contexts in which we normally live and experience our lives. But most importantly, they are almost always involuntary—they happen to us. We rarely choose what mood we will be in, especially when we get our ‘buttons
By Jim Selman | Bio
Socrates said that we don’t really have wisdom until we learn to die. Cornell West said the same thing in the acclaimed documentary Examined Life by Astra Taylor. When I first became interested in aging and how our culture views ‘growing older’ many years ago, I learned that, beyond a certain age, very few people seem to be afraid of death. Some may be afraid of dying with unfinished business, but we eventually reach a point when the fact of our death is no longer
By Jim Selman | Bio
The following thoughts were shared by a friend of mine on the question of what it is like to ‘be’ older and wiser. I think they express something we can all learn from if we haven’t already."What’s it like to ‘be’ my age? Besides the obvious physical changes, there is a kind of release—a gentle meltdown—a relaxation that goes beyond where any mere massage could take me.
And much wisdom…
Most of all, I’m amazed with myself…that life can be so enlivening—deliriously luscious—and that I am a being of such limitless possibility. And I’m infinitely grateful that I may be able to ‘really’ serve others now…without
By Kevin Brown | Bio
I was reading Ken Dychtwald’s With Purpose recently, and was struck by a comment in the introduction. He noted that "in a single generation, sixty-two went from ‘such a long life’ to ‘he died so young’." Being 57 myself, I have a personal interest in the subject
By Jim Selman | Bio
There is a widely understood belief in Argentina’s culture that “the way we are is a big part of the problem … and one of our characteristics is that we’re always waiting for a leader to come along and save us.” The first time I heard this I was giving a talk to a large event in Buenos Aires. A man stood up and challenged my ‘American optimism’, suggesting that I just didn’t understand the way things really were in ‘their’ country. My response was to acknowledge that this may be true and to suggest that, since they were all waiting for the leader to appear, perhaps he could take the job until the leader came along. That got a chuckle or two and drove home my point. We live as if the causes and the solutions to our problems are somehow outside of ourselves and that they are beyond our ability to resolve. This view of the world inevitably leads to resignation—giving up—and has us drift into a kind of spectator relationship to life and the future.I make the same point in a different way in my Leadership in Action workshops. I usually begin by asking participants what they would to say to a ‘Genie’ if that magical being promised to grant them one wish to change something in their organization. I am always a little surprised to hear people’s innocuous and tiny wishes (such as better communication, more cooperation between departments, more straight talk, more trust and so on). Not that these aren’t
The Pope’s Love in Truth, his third letter to the bishops of the world, is written in the context of the current global economic crisis. The Pope views the current crisis as an opportunity for us to discern and to create a new vision for our future. In his latest encyclical, he doesn’t focus on specific systems of economics or reconstructing the global economy. Instead, he reminds us that our markets are shaped by our culture, and that it is up to us to focus on the common good
By Jim Selman | Bio
I spent the weekend in California, hanging out with my children and visiting old friends. I was in both Los Angeles and San Francisco and picked up on the current mood from both ends of the State—at least based on my small sample of conversations. The consensus is that California is a great place to live, but a fiscal and political mess.The deficit is staggering (over 25 billion and rising). The governor has been terminated politically speaking and can’t get the politicians or the public to go along with his well-intended proposals to fix the problems. Most of the money that is around is tied up and pre-allocated by a system of arcane initiatives that make the democratic process look and feel like a straightjacket. I am told that the famously inept and unworkable politics of Sacramento look more like “politics
By Jim Selman | Bio
The conventional wisdom in Alcoholics Anonymous is that alcoholism is a ‘disease’ of the ego—self-centeredness. Basically the alcoholic becomes trapped in his or her own point of view and denies any other perspective on ‘reality’. The alcohol is a symptom of a loss of control and choice—a condition of cognitive blindness and a self-destructive pattern of behavior. I have distinguished that culture works the same way. That is, the ego is to the individual what culture