By Jim Selman | Bio
Assuming you’ve been to the museums a couple of times and don’t speak Spanish very well, what can you do in Madrid on a cold and wet winter day except find an English-speaking film? I did, and finally caught up with everyone else and saw The Strange Case of Benjamin Button. Put me down as a fan, but the funny thing is that it is one of those films that you’re not quite sure if or why you like it.
First of all, it is about age. Brad Pitt is born ‘old’ and gets progressively
By Shae Hadden | Bio
Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat Pray Love contains an interesting perspective on aging. For the Balinese, it is more important what day of the week you were born on than the year you were born in. One of the characters, a Balinese medicine man named Ketut, knows only that his birthday is on Thursday and that he was an adult in WWII. His estimates of his age vary daily, depending on how tired or upbeat he’s feeling.
Imagine what life might be like if you didn’t
By Jim Selman | Bio
The word “Elder” is becoming the vogue term
for people over 60 or, in some cases, even younger. I think it is a
mistake as well as inaccurate to make “Elder” synonymous with having
reached a certain age. First of all, being an Elder is a role, not a
fact of biology. Moreover, it is a role that exists in the context of
community. The word itself distinguishes a relationship between the
Elder and members of their community. More than
By Jim Selman | Bio
I don’t think that age is personal. I know it feels like it is ‘me’ that is getting older, but I don’t experience myself as older. If anything, I experience my ‘self’ as being ‘better’ than at any time I can remember over the past 66 years. I feel more ‘alive’, more engaged, more present and more satisfied than ever. It is true that my body can’t run, wrestle or climb as easily as in the past. I make love more often
The Journal of Positive Psychology recently published the results of a multi-year study of 818 people between the ages of 18 and 94 into the origins of life satisfaction throughout adulthood. The research team’s findings indicated that:
Lead author Karen Siedlecki, a post-doctoral research fellow in the cognitive neuroscience division at Columbia University, stated that, "The really key components of successful aging may be how happy you are
and how satisfied you are with your
By Jim Selman | Bio
I heard someone remark that the best thing about getting older is they don’t have to be afraid anymore. While I think that is one of life’s ‘truisms’, it falls into the same category as your mother telling you “not to worry”—it doesn’t help much to know that when you are worried! From what I can see, most people get more fearful and anxious as they age. This anxiety takes various forms: fear of not having enough money, fear of being homeless, fear of being alone, fear of becoming dependent or of losing one’s faculties. The list could go on.I am not of the opinion that there is nothing to fear. There are lots of things to fear. A person would have to be naïve not to pay attention to what they are doing and what’s going on around them. I am reminded, for example, of getting mugged last year. Just this spring, my son was attacked by a vicious street gang while walking home; fortunately, he got through it without any lasting harm. The point is that lots of bad things can happen and most of us are not well prepared
The idea that our brains decline as we age is in itself in decline. Studies reported in a new edition of the neurology book Progress in Brain Research suggest that for most of us as we age, our attention widens in focus. This, combined with the fact that we have more information to remember, makes it more difficult to recall small bits of information like a phone number or name. Yet it is this very accumulation of information that helps us become "wiser" as we age: by transferring
I don’t think that age is personal. I know it feels like it is ‘me’ that is getting older, but I don’t experience myself as older. If anything, I experience my ‘self’ as being ‘better’ than at any time I can remember over the past 66 years. I feel more ‘alive’, more engaged, more present and more satisfied than ever. It is true that my body can’t run, wrestle or climb as easily as in the past. I make love more often than in the best
I have written about resignation on several occasions. I think we need to remember this is a condition in which we give up, but do so in a way that hides the fact that is what we are doing. Resignation is a big part of what we think of as the ‘human condition’ and, in my opinion, it can become more pervasive as we age. I frequently speculate on what will happen if enough of us become resigned about something at the same time. My view is that the resignation becomes the reality when this happens.
I was having a conversation today with the Board of a not-for-profit organization and one of the participants noted that they “needed to have more younger people” on the Board. I asked “Why?” Her response was that she was at an age (which I judged to be around 60) when she had a lot of commitments, she needed to keep earning money and just didn’t have as much time and energy to give. She went on to say that younger people had more time, less need for money, and lots more energy