As you may know, I am traveling and working in South America and, as luck or bad planning would have it, I am away on my mate’s 60th birthday. So rather than just sending flowers or waiting until I get home, I want to send this special birthday greeting and let you all know what a special lady Darlene is.
As you can see from this recent picture, Darlene is a beautiful and vibrant woman. What you might not know is that she is one of the most emotionally intelligent, serene and self-confident
“I just don’t have the energy I used to”. I hear this a lot from
colleagues and friends. I even feel like that myself from time to time.
While I think I know what they are saying, I don’t actually know what
‘energy’ is. At least, I don’t know what the term means in the context
of growing older. I can definitely distinguish the feelings I associate
with moods as a kind of ‘energy’. When I’m excited, challenged,
interested or committed, I seem
I spent a few days with 9 of my men “best friends” last week. We get together three times a year as a group to share our life experiences and offer mutual friendship and support to one another. Like many men’s and women’s groups, it’s important and nurturing to us in one way or another. This is my group. A few of us have known each other most of our lives, but mostly we’ve
come to know each other deeply in the context of the group. We call
ourselves “the Souls”,
By Shae Hadden
Bio
I’ve been looking at myself and my life from the perspective of ‘new’ for the last while…(see my post on the Mirror of Old)
and the view has freed me. Each morning, I’ve taken an extra moment to
really look at myself in the mirror, to take in the woman staring back
at me as if she is someone I’m creating anew each day. The signs of age
are still visible, but I see something else I hadn’t noticed before.
I
can see my mother in my
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
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 Don Arnoudse
Bio
After our discussion was over, I
found myself thinking about the energy of the conversation. Sara was
bemoaning her uncertainty in the face of so many choices. She was
feeling the fear of, perhaps, making some wrong ones. She was hungry
for life, with an appetite for tasting many things, but knew that not
all of them were possible. She was exhilarated at the prospect of
working in Washington, DC with a non-governmental agency that’s focused
Thanks to Google, I’ve learned that Valentine’s Day is so old a tradition that we’re not even sure how it began. It probably goes back to pagan rituals that were later “Christianized” around the time of Claudius and probably “commercialized” by Hallmark. Whatever its origins, it is about romance and love and letting the special men and women in our lives know how we feel about them.
For me, Valentine’s Day is extra special because it comes right after my birthday, which for
I guess one’s 65th birthday is a kind of milestone, though I am not sure why. Perhaps this is the line between being ‘almost 65’ and ‘approaching 70’! As far as I can tell, like most of my other significant birthdays—21, 30, and 50—they are more symbolic than anything. At 21, I could drink and vote. At 30, I reached my goal of earning as much as my age. At 50, I was officially ‘middle-aged’. This one was supposed to be the moment I ‘retired’, but the fact is I am just getting
I recently saw the film I’m Your Man, an acknowledgement concert for Leonard Cohen with a lot of great singers singing some of his best songs interspersed with an interview with the man himself. A nice tribute that gave me a bit more of a sense of him as a human being and the full extent of his contribution. One of the best parts of the film was his sharing that, for him, there were few or no regrets and very little concern or self-congratulatory thinking about what he has accomplished.
Not everyone