The ServiceNation campaign kicked off with a Summit in New York City on September 11th. This grassroots national movement aims to enrol increasing numbers of Americans in committing a year of their lives to national service and, by 2020, to engage 100 million citizens (up from 61 million today) in volunteering each year in schools, workplaces and community organizations. The movement launches tomorrow with a
All posts by Jim Selman
National Unmarried and Single Americans Week
The third week of September in the U.S. is a time to celebrate the role all 92 million unmarried Americans–whether they are widowed, divorced, separated or ‘single’–play in our society. Organizations like Unmarried.org (the Alternatives to Marriage Project) are active in changing current stereotypes and addressing legislation and policies that deny an unmarried individual’s equal rights in terms of healthcare access and taxation.
Bella DePaolo, a UC Santa Barbara
Acceptance
By Jim Selman | Bio
I don’t think that age is personal. I know it feels like it is ‘me’ that is getting older, but I don’t experience myself as older. If anything, I experience my ‘self’ as being ‘better’ than at any time I can remember over the past 66 years. I feel more ‘alive’, more engaged, more present and more satisfied than ever. It is true that my body can’t run, wrestle or climb as easily as in the past. I make love more often
International Peace Day
September 21st was International Day of Peace. Every year since its inception by the UN in 1982, this holiday has grown to mobilize millions of people around the world to
call for the end of conflict and the creation of a culture of peace among all nations and
peoples. In 2002, the UN officially declared September 21st to be the permanent date for the Day of Peace. Anyone, anywhere can celebrate Peace Day. It can
Purpose and Meaning
By Shae Hadden | Bio
The official arrival of fall always surprises me. It’s never the change in weather so much as the passage of time that draws me up short—what happened to the last few months of my life? This year I feel as if I’ve been lost in a time warp while the rest of the world runs ahead at its crazy pace…and as if I’m only just beginning to rejoin the rest of the human race. And no, I didn’t go on an extended vacation or take a leave of absence. All I did was connect to my
Full of Life
The theme of the UK’s Older People’s Day (which will be October 1st this year) is bringing generations together. The U.K.’s Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) released figures late last month that indicate people from different generations are spending more time with people outside their own age group. Research conducted through the British Marketing Research Bureau for the DWP’s "
We Are Hard-Wired to Care and Connect – Part II
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.
Wired to Connect
Scientists
who use advanced imaging technology to study brain function report that
the human brain is wired to reward caring, cooperation, and service.
According to this research, merely thinking about another person
Rate of Change
By Jim Selman | Bio
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 we like it or not, our ‘new reality’ challenges our commonsense and conventional wisdom with ideas like “Knowledge is becoming obsolete before you learn it”.Joel Barker sold a videotape in the 1980s called “Discovering the Future: The Business of Paradigms™” in which he showed that the world is always a function of our interpretation of it and that, from time to time, for a variety of reasons, the world transforms in ways that are difficult to impossible for people to fathom when it is happening. He is generally upbeat about these periods of dramatic change and asks
Angst
By Jim Selman | Bio
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 talked about it as the inherent tension between
‘being’ and ‘non-being’. I think that angst underlies the ‘suffering’
that Buddha associated
Conversations about Palin
By Shae Hadden | Bio
Since Sarah Palin’s Gibson interviews, I’ve been hearing a lot of people saying that she reminds them of George Bush—even more so than John McCain does. Some of the similarities they’re seeing between Palin and Bush include:
- Divisiveness and undignified, confrontational expressions toward other countries and their leaders
- Ability to boldly state untruths over and over again
- Cocky demeanor and foolish pride in being decisive even when they don’t have