Category Archives: Personal Empowerment

Personal Empowerment

What if We Really Paid Attention?

By Don Arnoudse
Bio

We live in a culture that has truly gone mad with “multi-tasking”. I confess I’m guilty too. Even as I write this blog, I have my Bose earphones on as I listen to Neil Young singing “Helpless” in his uniquely plaintive style. OK. I’ve turned Neil off for now. At the same time, I believe most of us crave receiving the undivided attention of someone we care about. Attention that is completely focused on us with no distractions. No TV, no laptop, no cell phone, no thoughts of “What’s for dinner?”, or what I wish I had said in my last conversation this morning, or what I need to do before I go to bed tonight.

Just me completely present, wide awake, and paying attention to you. Attention that is full of interest in you, infused with compassion, alive with good humor, energized by the mere fact of our being together and having this conversation. Attention that comes with no judgment about good or bad, right or wrong, do I agree or disagree. Just pure mindfulness of this precious moment together.

When was the last time you experienced this with someone? When was the last time that you

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Personal Empowerment

Time and Temporality

Lately I have been thinking about the future and the distinction between time and temporality. Our relationship to time can vary depending upon our culture and the era in which we are living. If I imagine living 300 or 400 years ago in what was primarily an agricultural ‘reality’, time was cyclical—we measured it in terms of seasons and lived in the certainty that life didn’t change much from one generation to the next. I can contrast that to today when time

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Personal Empowerment

Funk

I was having a cup of coffee with a very good friend of mine the other morning. He was feeling down—actually, he said he was feeling a little ‘crazy’. On one level, his life has never been better, his work is satisfying and, best of all, according to him, he has a new Porsche that is requiring he move to the next level of performance in driving. Life is good.

Yet, amidst all his success (which includes a loving, happy marriage and new grandkids), he was in a deep ‘funk’. I say funk because

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Personal Empowerment

Participation

One of the concerns ‘older’ people share with us is how important it is to keep our health. Hypochondriacs aside, the majority of us still hear and believe that the older we get, the more difficult maintaining good health will be. It doesn’t take a genius to realize that if we lose our health, we lose most—or all—of our other options. I confess I am not a health expert: the latest developments in nutrition, dieting and exercise are not my key concerns. Yet I am healthy and, while I could

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Personal Empowerment

Balance

Finding balance in life has been a concern of mine for a long time.
From the number of times it comes up in conversation, it appears to be
a major concern for many others as well. My struggle for balance came
to a head recently with a series of inexplicable dizzy spells.
Admittedly, I’ve been running non-stop since my mother passed away
suddenly two years ago—abandoning a work situation where I felt
inspired but unappreciated, leaving a 20-year relationship

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Personal Empowerment

Angst

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

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Personal Empowerment

Travels

I am officially on holiday. Darlene and I are in Granada seeing what is perhaps one of the two or three top tourist destinations in Europe—The Alhambra. Aside from this site being a unique and spectacular complex of ancient fortifications and Arabic palaces, it also tells the story of how temporal our lives and our civilizations really are. This one had a pretty good run (about 800 years) before it was conquered in 1492, the same year Columbus set foot in the ‘New World’.

Our visit has

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Personal Empowerment

What Do I Want?

It seems to me that we spend an inordinate amount of time thinking
about what we want in our lives. Last week I was working with a group
of people—mostly in their forties—and they shared that this was the
prevailing question in their lives. It got me thinking that this is the
question for all ages. At 65 I still ask it, although with less of a
need for an answer than at other times in my life.

What do I want? Simple enough question, but one that we seemingly don’t
answer or we wouldn’t

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Personal Empowerment

Nostalgia and “What Might Have Been”

I am happy to be home, even when it’s only for a couple of days. Home is where we are when we feel most ourselves. It is, I think, a deep connection to a place, to people and one’s familiar surroundings. Growing up in the military meant we moved a lot and I think I associated home more with our furniture and my family than a particular place or even my friends—people who would, after all, be left behind next time we moved.

This current respite from my schedule is relaxed and enjoyable as

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Personal Empowerment

Forget Me Not

Memory is an interesting and strange phenomenon. I think (as most of us do) that what I remember is more or less what happened. This came home to me a number of years ago when I was dating a woman I had dated twenty years previously and whom I had not seen in the intervening period. We ‘connected’ like old friends and more or less fell into the kind of comfortable conversation that old friends do. As we began to recall our earlier relationship (which was pretty intense and lasted for more

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