By Kevin Brown | Bio
My lovely wife has spent her day=&0=&Tag Archives: choice
Uprooted and Looking for Answers
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
Elegy
By Jim Selman | Bio
I saw the movie Elegy last night
starring Sir Ben Kingsley and Penèlope Cruz. It was an exceptionally
intense love story between a man and a much younger woman. He is a
professor and she his student. What begins for him as a casual romp is
true love for her and soon he too is in love, but is tortured and
insecure because of their age difference. Patricia Clarkson is his
stable ‘partner/wife’ who has her own career, is exceptionally
Africa
By Jim Selman | Bio
I am getting ready to fulfill one of my dreams. I have always wanted to go to Africa, but for one reason or another it was always too expensive, too far away or the opportunity just didn’t click at the right time. In March, I will be going and I am both excited and a little anxious since I am not quite sure what to expect. As I watch myself preparing, I realize that the best part of getting ready is that I don’t know what to expect—and that is the good news.
Bag Lady
By Jim Selman | Bio
I was recording a podcast recently in response to the question of how ‘elders’ should be dealing with money these days given the current and projected economic mess. The woman I was speaking to was clearly ‘worried’ about her financial future. I started my response by sharing that over many years of coaching I sometimes chuckle when speaking with women because they all seem to have a generic fear of becoming a ‘bag lady’. There was an interesting article in the Toronto Globe and Mail in December titled, “Why women look in the mirror and a bag lady looks back”. It seems this archetype pervades a lot of women’s deepest fears of failure and becoming destitute.To be sure it isn’t funny if it happens; however, for the vast majority of women this isn’t going to happen. Yet the fear of it lingers on. My response to the question was that, while I have no particular expertise in money management, I do have something to say about how we relate to money—however much we may have or not have. People should consult qualified financial advisors at as young an age as possible and responsibly invest in their financial future.
With respect
How Can They Do That…?!
By Jim Selman | Bio
I got another shot of what has been a curiosity to me for a long time: the growing practice of ‘texting’. This practice was highlighted for me when I read that Barack Obama has to kick his Blackberry habit in his new job and again when I was at the theater earlier this week with an audience of mostly 20 and 30-year-olds. Both before the curtain and at the intermission, I counted about 30 folks fixated on their ‘mobile communication devices’. Several were even covertly ‘peeking’ during the performance.I don’t think I am a Luddite, yet somehow this seemed to me to be not only rude, but also a bit ludicrous. I watched myself falling into a kind of judgmental ‘old person’s’ conversation along the lines of “Don’t these kids know that they are missing the point of going out for a pleasant evening…blah blah blah.” I clearly had a point of view based on my experience of growing up and was looking down my nose at this new practice in much the same way my father probably
Life at the Growing Edge
By Shae Hadden | Bio
Several years ago, a wise 93-year-old man named Hayden shared with me his principles for living life “at the growing edge”. He had printed them on cards, in the shape of a bookmark, and distributed them to everyone who engaged in meaningful conversation with him. Today, as I’m recovering from the first major surgery I’ve ever had, I was drawn to reflect on a couple of them again. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind if I shared them with you now:- I may accept life, just as it is, here and now, observing it and experiencing it without judging it and without becoming its victim, or trying to control it. The past year has been an interesting experiment in developing this ability. Health challenges are often an opportunity to practice surrendering while being responsible. We are constantly making choices in life, and some of them support health. Others don’t. When the ones we make don’t turn out to be in our favor, we can be responsible for them or we can blame ourselves for making ‘bad’ choices. Sometimes, that blame gets pushed out onto others, or surfaces in unrelated expressions of frustration. When we can step back and treat ourselves with compassion, we can see that oftentimes our ego (our ‘self) tries to control how we relate to our health (for example, by telling us we’re fine and to keep operating as normal or by making a big deal out of something inconsequential). Either way, our Higher Self (the ‘I’ that chooses and is aware when we are ‘un-conscious’) knows there is another way of relating to our health that doesn’t involve control. Which leads to …
The Wisdom to Know the Difference
By Jim Selman | Bio
Think about the positive attributes of growing older, and ‘wisdom’ will always appear near the top of the list. Until recently, I had assumed ‘wisdom’ was a kind of ‘right knowledge’. Every time someone says the Serenity Prayer, I am reminded of this attribute again.“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things that I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
I wonder if I do know the difference.
On one level, I have learned a degree of serenity and think I am more or less accepting of most things in life. Yet I still fret about our political leadership, the drift toward corporate oligarchy, the environment, TV programming, traffic and a hundred other things that I think should be
Guilt
By Jim Selman | Bio
I have been talking about ‘completion’ a lot lately. It is basically that state of being where we can let the past be in the past and not try to control everything to make the future turn out the way we want it. Completion is a necessary state if we want live in the present. One of the things that keeps us from being complete is guilt. Guilt is a waste of time. It is blaming ourselves for whatever we think we’ve done wrong. As far as I can tell, it is also a cover-up for not being responsible for whatever we did that we’re feeling guilty about.If we’re responsible for our actions and we do something wrong, then we can learn from our mistake and not do it again—end of story. However, when we are guilty, we always have an explanation about why we did it and why we didn’t really want to do it, accompanied by all sorts of sorry intentions not to do it again. Have you EVER felt guilty (probably over and over) about something that you didn’t repeat?
Guilt makes us feel better about all the bad stuff since remorse
Circumstantial Drift
By Jim Selman | Bio
One of the biggest questions most of us have is “Why do we do what we do?”, particularly when what we do isn’t what we want to do or think we should be doing. My answer is that, for most of us, most of the time we’re not actually choosing what we do. We are living our life according to our historical patterns within some narrowly proscribed personal and cultural ‘story’ about what is and is not possible and what our options are in any given situation. In effect,