By Jim Selman | Bio
I was listening to a lecture today on the philosopher Martin Heidegger. He is pretty difficult to understand at the best of times, even though I have been a student of his thinking for many years. The lecture today spoke of the distinction he made between ‘tradition’, which he felt was a bad thing, and ‘heritage’, which he thought was a good thing. In fact, he felt heritage was essential to understanding the true nature of ‘Being’.
I won’t pretend to grasp it
By David Korten | Great Turning website
Read more posts in The World We Want series.
How does it happen? It starts with a conversation. A while back, Cecile Andrews, our local Seattle author of The Circle of Simplicity, explained to me how the women’s movement changed the story on gender and unleashed the long suppressed power
My neighbor and good friend is moving to an apartment without stairs in another city where there’s a better environment for retirees and a more laid-back lifestyle. She tells me that she is ‘slowing down’. I am sure she is making the right decision for her—stairs have become difficult following hip surgery last year. And I am sure she knows that our choice of wording reveals
some of the bias hidden in our cultural predisposition to the
future.
To be sure, we hear a lot of people declaring
By David Korten | Great Turning website
Read more posts in The World We Want series.
Wouldn’t it be nice if it turned out the choices we must make together to survive together are the same choices we must make to create the very world most of all the world’s people want? If that were case, then we should be able to just get together and make it happen. Wouldn’t that be cool? Maybe we should start a conversation to find out what people truly want…
Actually, that conversation started quite
According to Professor Yarrow, a history professor at American University, it is unpatriotic to retire while you are still in good health.
"Retiring when you’re still in good health isn’t just wrong, it’s profoundly selfish and unpatriotic…Dropping out of the workforce while still in one’s prime means ending one’s contributions to America’s strength, mortgaging our children’s and grandchildren’s future, and leeching trillions of taxpayer
By Shae Hadden | Bio
The green-crested hummingbird is at my window again this morning, hovering in mid-air sunshine and snatching bits of food from the plants as they begin to bud. He appeared in my life a few weeks ago, and has been coming back every day without fail. Today his weightlessness seems like a metaphor for a new way of Being. I have a choice about who I am being in the world, and I choose to be as light and iridescent as this beautiful bird. This isn’t about reducing my body to its less than 115-pound weight or changing my hair color and wardrobe. Nor is it about casting myself differently in different situations or seeing myself from different angles or perspectives. Lightness of Being is about letting go of all that weighs us down: negative thoughts, beliefs, actions, habitual patterns of pain or suffering…anything from our past that keep us chained to the earth and that limits us from becoming who we choose to be and living the life we want to live. This is the only way for human beings to fly—by consciously setting themselves free.In the 1970s, I belonged to The World Future Society. I even toyed with the idea of becoming a ‘futurist’. I vaguely recall that there was a magazine on the subject and various intellectuals were trying to get prediction raised to the status of a science. According to Wired magazine, the Society still exists and there are people who call themselves professional futurists, but the numbers are shrinking and their status seems to be less than in the past—primarily because the future
By Shae Hadden | Bio
It’s so easy to get ‘comfortable’ with the circumstances of our lives—even when they are uncomfortable or when we can see that they may very likely lead to discomfort. It’s almost natural, sometimes even expected, that we complain about what’s ‘not right’ or ‘not perfect’ in our lives. But complaining (to ourselves or others) doesn’t change anything and we’re left ‘adapting’ ourselves to living with whatever is contributing to our discomfort.
Complaining
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
By Shae Hadden | Bio
My life is my game—no one else’s. And I create the rules. What freedom, what choices, what responsibility! Playing ‘by the rules’ means playing according to choices I’ve made about what’s ‘best’ for me. And that’s left me in a quandary, because many ‘old rules’ don’t fit anymore. It’s time to examine them, keep the ones that still suit me and replace any unworkable ones. So here I am, wondering how to pick and choose from the rules I have been playing by.Yet is it possible for us to know what choices, what rules will be ‘right’? We may very well be blind to possible consequences and dangers of what we’re choosing for our game. We may have committed to creating many new things, things that aren’t real yet. We can’t predict others’ reactions to these creations or what might happen with them based on past experience, because they have not existed in the world before. We may place ourselves in new situations, in circumstances