Today is International Women’s Day—a day to celebrate the political,
social and economic achievements of women around the world, a day to
promote political and human rights in countries where violence and
inequity still make life a struggle for women, and, in an increasing
number of countries, a day to express love and sympathy to the women in
your life. The theme for 2007 is “Ending Impunity for Violence against
Women and Girls”.
The
concept of an IWD was established in 1910 at
I visited my Mother this week. She is 87 and not well. A lifetime of smoking has caught up with her and she is fighting emphysema every day. For the first time in a while, I came face to face with the reality that she is dying. Her comment to me is that “I don’t mind dying but don’t like dying this way”. These thoughts aren’t about not smoking, although as an ex-smoker, it is remarkable how that addiction can warp our judgment. My mother continues smoking to this day—now protesting
By Stu Whitley
Bio
This is the fifth post in a five-part series.
Is there any joy to be found in sadness? I believe there is.Sadness is almost always about loss. If we are able to examine in a
serious way the nature of that loss, I think we would find a validation
of what we took to be good. In other words, sadness can be a
reaffirmation of the virtues we hold dear. This can be a bit tricky
though. For example, if one regrets the passage of youth for its own
sake, enormous and ultimately futile effort is needed to ignore the
By Marilyn Hay
How much do we miss in non-verbal communication just in passing? Do we respond to what other people are telling us about themselves unconsciously, simply responding to their words? Or do we check what they’re saying against the non-verbal cues they are unconsciously projecting? I call these unconscious messages ‘heartsongs’.I
wonder if we so often don’t pay attention to, or address, heartsongs
because we feel we’d somehow be intruding in another’s privacy, or
that ‘it’s none of our business.’ Or perhaps we think we’re too busy to
get into something that doesn’t really pertain directly to us. But …
we are all part of this great community of life, not separate and
apart, isolated from one another, unless we choose to be. There is
I want to create a new organization to stamp out stupidity and indifference and restore common decency and good will into society. I think I’ll call it the National Organization of Pissed-Off Elders (N.O.P.E.).
What’s pissing us off?
A lot more than just ‘aging’ issues like Social Security, pharmaceuticals and our sex lives.
First, it pisses us off that the people in charge are squandering away the
opportunities they had to make the world work, or at least be a better
place.
I was talking to a friend recently who was suggesting I commit this blog to defeating ‘ageism’ in all of its often subtle and insidious forms. I said, I don’t want to make this about being ‘against’ ageism for three reasons. First, if there is one thing I have learned in life it is that we get what we resist. Even Martin Luther King wasn’t so much against discrimination as he was ‘for’ equality. Secondly, I want to be ‘for’ the possibility of aging and that is as much about
I’m getting ready to take a long trip—five or six weeks, five time zones and two continents. I do this 3 or 4 times a year, something like a musician or standup comic going on tour except I will be giving lectures and talking to people about changing their organizational cultures and transforming the way they observe the world. I have traveled like this pretty much for my entire career and even used to enjoy it when airlines cared about customers and airport security was personal and inspectors
By Stu Whitley
Bio
This is fourth in a five-part series.
The end of anything must be at least as interesting as the beginning of it, even if we think it’s not a particularly happy ending. As a novelist, the end of a story I’m writing doesn’t always present itself to me initially, and even if I think I’m working toward a particular conclusion, the climax consistently turns out to be quite different than that which I have conceived somewhere along the way. Oddly, I’m as interested in the outcome as I hope a reader might be.The point is not that every story ends: it is that every story has a surprise ending that has everything to do with the way a life has been lived.
As
I contemplate the decline of those once-grand and now-ancient
paddlewheel steamers on the Yukon River, it occurs to me that, in not
many more years, they will be gone almost completely, leaving only a
few rusted pieces of machinery to mark their passing. I wish there was
I was having dinner the other night with my partner, a lawyer with the Canadian Government. The conversation got around to the subject of ‘equality’, particularly in relationships. The conventional wisdom, we concluded, is that for two people to be equal, they need to respect and regard each other as having equally valid points of view (as in “my way of looking at a particular situation is just as valid as yours…”). However, most people, we felt, don’t normally relate to each other
By Lauren Selman
Bio
When do you start to get older? After reading the comments about aging,
I ask, “When does aging begin?” Aging is placed in the context of those
entering their thirties and beyond, but for me, I believe the process
of aging began the day I was born.
When I was a little girl, I
was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up and I simply responded, "I
don’t want to grow up." But the truth was I was growing up as I was
saying those words.