Tag Archives: conversation

The Great Turning

We Are Hard-Wired to Care and Connect – Part IV

By David Korten | Website

Reprinted from  "Purple America," the Fall 2008 YES! Magazine
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Read the first part of the article here.

=&0=&Getting out of our current mess begins with a conversation to change the shared cultural story about our essential nature. The women’s movement offers an instructive lesson.

In little more than a decade, a few
courageous women changed the cultural story that the key to a woman’s
happiness is to find the right man, marry him, and devote her life to
his service. As Cecile Andrews, author of Circles of Simplicity,

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Leadership

Angst

By Jim Selman | Bio

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 of the soul”. I
think that Heidegger talked about it as the inherent tension between
‘being’ and ‘non-being’. I think that angst underlies the ‘suffering’
that Buddha associated

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Fearless Aging

Embracing What Is

By Eliezer Sobel | Website

There is much talk on Serene Ambition and elsewhere about altering one’s perspective and internal conversation about aging so as to “create a future to live into” that infuses the present with passion and energy, as distinct from the dreary resignation of merely playing out the repetitive and predictable habits and tendencies generated by the past.

And yet, while this sounds good in theory, what of the physical limitations imposed by age? I read Marilyn Hay’s posts

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News

Youth Solidarity

Technology is bringing the youth of Detroit and Palestine together in conversation. Young media makers in Palestine and youth from communities of color in Michigan engaged in parallel workshops that introduced digital stories, music videos and murals. A recent videoconference held during the Allied Media Conference in Detroit linked the two groups of young people and allowed them to share stories about their lives, how they feel about how they as a group are perceived, and the daily struggles

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The Great Turning

The World We Want: It Begins with a Conversation

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

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Fearless Aging

What Conversation Are You?

By Jim Selman | Bio

As many of you know, I view aging, and the rest of life for that matter, as a series of conversations. In my work, I try to show people that if we can observe ourselves and our world through the lens of language, we can see that everything we think and experience occurs in the context of some interpretation or another. For most people most of the time, our interpretation is that there is a ‘real world’ out there, and if we could only understand it and control it (and ourselves),

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The Great Turning

The World We Want: What If We All Wanted the Same Thing?

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

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Wisdom in Action

The World Cafe

By Shae Hadden | Bio

Conversations can change the world. When we speak openly about what matters most to us, we can build authentic relationships. We can tap into the wisdom and collective intelligence we need to address our problems. We can create the future together.

I’ve been excited in the last few weeks to learn about The World Café through conversations with Juanita Brown, co-founder of the World Café and Anne Dosher, who at

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Wisdom in Action

Ethical Will or Intergen Conversation?

By Shae Hadden | Bio

I was reading an article about ethical wills recently that got me wondering about what kind of legacy I might leave behind if I were to die tomorrow. This type of ‘leave behind’ document—like diaries, journals, books, letters and photo albums—are usually loving prepared over the course of several years. Nowadays, we also have innumerable opportunities to record our lives and thoughts online to share with friends and family. So why bother going to the trouble of preparing an ethical will in addition to a legal will?

According to the article, an ethical will offers us an opportunity to communicate with loved ones on paper. We can share things like:

  • Our values
  • Our life history
  • Our regrets and our gratitude
  • The lessons we’ve learned
  • Our hopes for the future

It saddens me to think of these being communicated in a will. True, sharing lessons learned in a document as one approaches death or as one’s last words after death is better than not communicating them at all.

But I see more value if we can use the document as a starting point for conversation with younger family members and friends while we

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Wisdom in Action

The Art of Conversation

I was watching the CBS show “Sunday Morning” on the weekend and it had a segment on the dying art of conversation. The point was that with all our technology and almost real-time connections available with email, handhelds and social networking sites, people seem to have lost the ability to have conversations. It was a thought-provoking and, I think, mostly true observation about what is happening to us. The show also showcased a new book by Stephen Miller called

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