All posts by Jim Selman

Body Breakdowns

By Jim Selman | Bio

You hear about it and know it is true—the body breaks down as we grow older. Naturally there are lots of exceptions. If you take really good care of yourself, you might make it to the end of the game without any major physical impairment. However, for most of us we’re going to encounter some life-limiting change in our bodies. I encountered my first this week.

I showed up for a meeting with an orthopedic surgeon to have what I expected to be routine work done on a torn tendon in my shoulder, only to learn that it was inoperable and that I would need to accept the fact that, for the rest of my life, I will have limited functionality. That means I’ll probably not play golf or anything else that requires mobility or power in the left arm. The good news is that my right arm can still be repaired.

What was interesting to me was to watch

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Staying Engaged

By Jim Selman | Bio

I’ve been thinking about aging and
observing the human phenomenon for a long time and I know that most of
the chatter in my head isn’t ‘me’—it’s just the tapes of my past and my
ego playing the tune to which my culture expects me to dance. For
example, I believe and know from experience that the key to health and wellbeing is “participation”—staying
engaged in whatever games I choose to play. Yet, that little voice

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Site Down

Serene Ambition will be unavailable for an hour on October 23rd, sometime between 12 am and 6 am Central Time, while our web hosting service performs system upgrades. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

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Where are the Boomers in a Bust

By Jim Selman | Bio

It’s getting hard to stay ‘upbeat’ in the face of all the economic news. The line between a recession and depression is blurring more and more each day. It seems pretty obvious that we’re entering what will be a long road to some sort of prosperity. The old joke about a recession is when your neighbor loses his or her job and a depression is when you lose your job isn’t so funny anymore. I learned today that China is embarking on an official policy of selling directly

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The Wisdom to Know the Difference

By Jim Selman | Bio

Think about the positive attributes of growing older, and ‘wisdom’ will always appear near the top of the list. Until recently, I had assumed ‘wisdom’ was a kind of ‘right knowledge’. Every time someone says the Serenity Prayer, I am reminded of this attribute again.

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things that I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

I wonder if I do know the difference.

On one level, I have learned a degree of serenity and think I am more or less accepting of most things in life. Yet I still fret about our political leadership, the drift toward corporate oligarchy, the environment, TV programming, traffic and a hundred other things that I think should be

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We Are Hard-Wired to Care and Connect – Part IV

By David Korten | Website

Reprinted from  "Purple America," the Fall 2008 YES! Magazine
284 Madrona Way NE Ste 116, Bainbridge Island, WA 98110.  Subscriptions: 800/937-4451  

Read the first part of the article here.

=&0=&Getting out of our current mess begins with a conversation to change the shared cultural story about our essential nature. The women’s movement offers an instructive lesson.

In little more than a decade, a few
courageous women changed the cultural story that the key to a woman’s
happiness is to find the right man, marry him, and devote her life to
his service. As Cecile Andrews, author of Circles of Simplicity,

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Political Leanings

By Shae Hadden | Bio

Today is the day after the Canadian federal elections. It’s also Blog Action Day on Poverty. Admittedly, poverty is an important issue, and so are politics. Since Canadian Falun Gong activist Caylan Ford was forced to resign after lamenting there was a double standard for white supremacist terrorists, some may say that the Canadian federal elections have now become more

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Exercising Our Right

By Shae Hadden | Bio

With elections today in Canada and next month in the U.S., this is a good time to remind all the women we know to exercise their right to vote–a right which we’ve only had for less than a century.

In July 1917, a group of 33 women picketed outside the White House, asking for the right to vote. They were rounded up by 40 police wielding clubs, brought to Occoquan Workhouse in Virginia and imprisoned for "obstructing sidewalk traffic". One of the women, Lucy

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