By Theodore Tilten
Once in Persia reigned a king,
Who upon a signet ring
Carved a maxim strange and wise,
When held before his eyes,
Gave him counsel at a glance,
Fit for every change and chance:
Solemn words, and these were they:
‘EVEN THIS WILL PASS AWAY."
Trains, of camel through the sand
Brought him gems from Samarcand;
Fleets of galleys over the seas
Brought him pearls to rival these,
But he counted little gain,
Treasures of the mine or main;
‘What is
By Jim Selman | Bio
I’m on a two-week adventure to Africa, spending time with Elders from the Hadza tribe, one of the oldest hunter-gatherer clans on the planet. The trip is billed as an "inventure" led by Richard Leider to shine a light on the opportunity and intentions of this trip to touch us personally and focus on our development as Elders in the context of our society and our times. More about that later….
We’re about half-way through the trip, most of which has
By Kevin Brown | Bio
Recently I was speaking with a friend about his bright four-year-old son. During the conversation, my friend noted how he was amazed at the ability of his son to recall events and details that had occurred many months prior. He marveled that his son could so easily and effortlessly recall information that for most adults would have long since been forgotten. Upon hearing his comments, I rather jokingly gave my normal response when confronted with similar comments about smart children with great memory. “It’s not that children have such great memory, they just have not experienced enough of life to have the mass of information stored in their brains that adults do!” I was clinging to my story that adults would have a similar ability to recall distant facts if their brains were not so cluttered with information built up over the course of their lives. Children, I was thinking, have a vast majority of their brains cells empty, just waiting to be filled. I like to think of memory in the context of a hard drive on a computer. When the hard drive is new, there is seemingly an infinite amount of space to store information. However, once it is full (assuming you don’t buy additional memory), you just have to delete some information to make room for new information. Simplistic, I am sure, but you get the point. Adults it seems, just have too much information they have amassed and therefore it gets challenging to recall bits of information stored somewhere in our memory bank. Now, as I sit at my computer I am looking back on my own childhood playing in my backyard. I can recall how every little thing held my attention. It did not seem to matter whether it was toys in my pool, the playfulness of my cat, or the homing pigeons above the neighbor’s garage. And in the evenings when my parents had friends or relatives over to our home, you would find me right in the middle of the room clinging to every word that was being said and observing the goings on during the evening with keen interest. I had an unquenchable curiosity about everything. Every event, every bit of information, every experience was all so new and each one held my undivided attention. It seemed I too could instantly recall information and experiences that had occurred months, sometimes years, earlier. And now, well, I like many other adults am challenged to recall the name of someone I met just minutes earlier at a party. What gives? Could it be that perhaps the challenge for adults in recalling names, portions of discussion, and other such information is that there is just too much noise occurring in our listening? Might that noise in fact be generated by that silent voice in our heads that just seems to have an opinion, a judgment, an assessment, or some other errant thought right in the middle of every moment we experience? “What silent voice?”, you ask as you read this. Well, the one that is busy judging the article so far. The one that is recalling your childhood as you read this article! What if we could just remove that noise and be truly present in every conversation, in every experience of life? Is it possible that we might find when we enter into conversations or into new experiences in life that without that internal noise, we seem to be fully present and, as a result, take in and process more information so that we can recall that information with relative ease? That has been my experience of late. It just seems that when I enter into conversations with an intention to be fully present, I seem to hear everything that is being said and my interactions with people are richer for it. Perhaps not surprisingly, my ability to recall information from those conversations and previous experiences is much more successful. It may be that the only difference between the ability of children and adults to recall information is that children are naturally present in the moment with an intense curiosity about everything of life. As adults, we must put aside our inner voices that tells us, “Been there, done and heard that!” Let us consider that every new moment is just that … a new moment in our precious life and fully worthy of our complete attention and interest. © 2009 Kevin Brown. All rights reserved.By Jim Selman | Bio
I am coming to the conclusion that I am a travel-aholic. Like most ‘isms’, travelaholism is the product of thinking we control something that we don’t control and, therefore, are controlled by it. One of the primary symptoms of an ‘ism’ is that we say we want to change something—usually our behavior—but continue in whatever pattern it is that we want to change. I protest that I am traveling too much, while at the same time filling in my calendar with airports and connections and hotels around the world. So far this year I have been to Buenos Aires, Geneva, Madrid, Sao Paulo, Paris, Amsterdam and am on my way to Tanzania before leaving for New Zealand, the Ukraine and New York City. While this may sound exotic, I rarely have time to fully appreciate the uniqueness of these far-flung locations.It is also true that I love my work and am very happy and engaged when I am speaking with people in different cultures. The more I travel to different parts of the world, the more I appreciate that the ‘human family’ are pretty much all in the same conversations and have the same concerns. While the languages and the scenery may vary, we are more alike than we are different.
I am also always a little amazed by how informed and current people are about events and politics
By Jim Selman | Bio
To continue our discussion about fear and how to master it…. There are distinctions between coping with fear, transcending fear and transforming fear. Coping is our normal relationship with just about everything in our contemporary world. Our relationship to circumstances is that ‘the world’ is real and, more or less, whatever we think it is. We interact with our circumstances based on our point of view, and our actions reinforce our point of view. The result
By Shae Hadden | Bio
There are times we know what we’re doing, and times we don’t have the foggiest idea what our lives are about. There are days when we feel ‘grounded’, and days when it’s as if our roots are torn out from under us. There are choices we make easily, and choices we avoid making at all costs.
These days it seems as if many of us are uprooted, challenged to look at what our lives are about, and faced with choices we’ve been running away from. There
By Jim Selman | Bio
Our relationship to risk and our fears is closely related. Most of our lives we’ve made decisions based on some formal or informal process for assessing ‘risk’. In our conventional way of thinking, this means trying to predict what will or will not happen and with what probabilities based on some scenario or course of action. It is a ‘forward looking’ posture and, as with all predictions, draws on historical data or experience and projects it into the future. In other words, we take our past, project it into the future and then make our choices and commitments based on what our predictions (the past) tell us will probably happen.Anyone who is even mildly
paying attention can easily grasp that the predictions are wrong more
often than they are right. Particularly now, when the world is changing
around us so rapidly, we can no longer rely on this mode of
decision-making. At best, we maintain the status quo and, more often
than not, we are completely blindsided by something unexpected that
wasn’t taken into account when we were assessing risk and making our
decisions.
By Kevin Brown | Bio
Many of you are experiencing firsthand what it means to be living with someone older than you. Perhaps you are a teen or young adult living with your parents, or perhaps you are an adult who has a parent or older relative living with you. Experience reveals that at some point in our lives we will be sharing an intergenerational relationship while under one roof. Most of us have the experience of living with our parents while we grow up. But the experience of taking on a caring role is very different.I myself had this experience while my mother lived with my wife and I until her untimely death, followed a short while thereafter with my mother-in-law living with us for a period of time. We considered active adult housing for my mother, but in the end, we decided to have her in our home. I’m so glad we did. I found myself in a situation where I needed to not only accommodate our son but now also integrate an aging parent. While
By Jim Selman | Bio
A few weeks ago, I posted my musings about Blackberries and other gizmos that seem to have taken over our minds and that are becoming the focus for much of our attention (to the point of almost being amusing to see folks pulling them out). The media has dubbed these devices “crackberries’ in view of their seemingly addictive hold on us.
Well, in spite of my protests to never get hooked, I bought one and am now one of ‘them’—sneaking glances, trying to look nonchalant
By Jim Selman | Bio
I just finished reading a piece in the Jan/Feb issue of the Utne Reader called Overcoming Fear Culture and Fear Itself by Julie Hanus. It is a great commentary on how our society has become wracked with all sorts of fears. She points to the fact that fear is a major fuel for lots of politicians and businesses, but that we pay a very large price