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Category Archives: Fearless Aging
Moods
By Jim Selman | Bio
Moods ‘color’ our experience of living. They are all encompassing interpretations of the world—especially the future—and tend to determine the quality of our lives. When we are in a positive mood, the world is bright and we ‘feel’ great. When we are in a negative mood, we typically want to withdraw from or strike out at everyone around us. One of the most useful things we can learn as we grow up (at any age) is that moods aren’t personal.First of all, they are involuntary. No one I know decides they will be in a bad mood (although there are a few who more or less equate their mood with ‘the way I am’, which can become a kind of self-fulfilling story and can justify just about anything). For example, I know a man who believes that he is, more or less, permanently doomed to procrastinate and put off what he knows he needs to do until the last minute. He then begins to become annoyed with himself weeks before
The Secret: Serenity AND Ambition
By Jim Selman | Bio
New Year’s is a time to reflect and remember. I was reviewing some old ‘resolutions’ and came upon one that has served me well over the years. It may be one of the most useful and relevant bits of wisdom I have to share with people.“The important thing is to choose what we have and give up our attachment to what we don’t have—so we can have the space to create our dreams and manifest our intention.”
This says a lot and can boggle the mind a bit. Most of us think we are attached to the things we have, not the things we don’t have. This statement also challenges our commonsense notion of how we relate to what we do have—especially if you are thinking that what you have ‘is not enough’.
The New Year
By Jim Selman | Bio
The last 10 years seems to me to have been a long decade. I know that time is supposed to ‘speed up’ as we get older, but the “Millennium” celebrations, Y2K and all the hype about the 21st century seems like ancient history. A decade ago, we still weren’t at war in two countries, 9/11 hadn’t happened, George Bush was still promising a bipartisan administration, climate change was still a bit of an arcane scientific debate for most of us, New Orleans was still having a non-stop party and Google was a minor start-up. YouTube didn’t exist at the turn of the century, eBay and Amazon were still babies, and the real estate bubble was just beginning. Steve Jobs had recently returned to Apple after spending 13 years with NeXT, the iPod and iTunes were concept just beginning to be developed and the iPhone wasn’t even in sight.We were all younger and, I think, generally more optimistic than we are today. We’ve lost a lot of our innocence in only 10 years. From Al Qaeda to Bernie Madoff, we’re waking up to the realization that the world is not our oyster and that the American Dream is just a dream if we aren’t responsible for it and act upon it.
Personally, I think the saddest thing that has happened to us in the past decade is the political and ideological polarization of our nation. I don’t
Our Aging Population
The fact that our global population is aging is becoming a topic of major concern. Julia Moulden wrote in her Huffington Post article "The Aging Population: A Silver Tsunami" about the conversations at the Business of Aging Summit in Toronto, Canada earlier this month. It was hotly debated whether this age wave should
The Dance of the Generations
“Mentors and apprentices are partners in an ancient human dance . . . the dance of the spiraling generations, in which the old empower the young with their experience and the young empower the old with new life, reweaving the fabric of the human community as they touch and turn.”
—Parker J. Palmer
American author, educator, activist
Starbucks Love Project
Enjoy this video, and consider submitting one of your own to the project. Starbucks makes a contribution to AIDS projects in Africa for each video submitted.
Dreaming of a Dark Christmas
By Jim Selman | Bio
I am one of the folks who love Christmas. I am not particularly sentimental, nor am I into elaborate decorating or gift-giving. I just like the music and the general shift in mood that seems to come with the season. I recognize, however, that not everyone is ‘happy’ around Christmas time. This is the season for lots of ‘relapses’ in 12-Step programs, a ‘blip’ in suicides, and (of course) the usual problems associated with too many parties and too much alcohol. Whatever the reasons, there is definitely a dark side to Christmas.As I’ve grown older, I see more clearly how difficult this time of year can be for many people. For many families, Christmas is about children and ‘Baby Jesus’. But for some, there is a sense of failure and defeat in not having ‘enough’ to participate in the economic gift-giving juggernaut: for others, a kind of ‘reactivation’ associated with family reunions and memories of Christmas past. Some experience a kind of generic depression associated with too many people
A Taste of One’s Quality: 3 Rules for Good Temperament (Part 2)
By Stuart James Whitley | Bio
Continuing on from yesterday’s post….
2. Be patient
As the Biblical injunction provides, all things good come to those who wait. This precondition for good temperament has two elements to it: time and wisdom. Part of wisdom is the understanding that active listening is a form of generosity, a key element in a mature temperament. Waiting for the other point of view, the various possible perspectives, or even the depletion of emotion, takes discipline.
Deferring
A Taste of One’s Quality: 3 Rules for Good Temperament
By Stuart James Whitley | Bio
Always a fan of pith & substance, when I wrote out the three rules for a good living in my last post (Wolf’s Theorem), it occurred to me that the same formula might apply to the development of good temperament. In common parlance, ‘temperament’ is the kind of person we are. One supposes it’s what Shakespeare had in mind when he bid Hamlet say: “Come, give us a taste of your quality.” (Act II, Scene ii)
Temperament is more formally defined in the Oxford