Tag Archives: future

Fearless Aging

Choice and Trust

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

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Wisdom in Action

The Shift

I came across an extraordinary six-minute YouTube video called ‘The Shift’—a presentation that blows one’s mind with factoids about the rate of change in the world. The Shift they are talking about is a ‘paradigm shift’, meaning our entire worldview, indeed our whole reality, is being turned upside down and inside out by virtue of technology, population and the exponentially accelerating rate of change. Whether

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Personal Empowerment

Redefining Success

By Shae Hadden | Bio

I’ve been thinking about how we define success, and observing how serene people become when they feel ‘successful’. For most of my life, I’ve focused my thinking on achieving the traditional symbols of success: significant recognition, meaningful associations with particular people, my own home, specific possessions. Something shifted in me a few years ago when I realized none of these ‘mean’ anything when we reach the end of our journey. They hold only peripheral interest for me now.

Life gets fired at us point blank. And I notice that my actions continue to be predicated on my old definition of success. So I need a new definition to provide a more empowering context for my future, one more in line with my current thinking. Here’s my first stab at a new ‘take’ on success. If I can live the following, I may be successful:

  • Sincerity – listening generously and speaking authentically
  • Understanding – learning about my self and others and our world
  • Commitment – being clear about what I’m committed to and acting on my commitments
  • Courage –acknowledging my fears…and being in action anyway
  • Empowerment – developing others to be who they choose to be (and myself as who I choose to be)
  • Standing – for others and the future I’m committed to
  • Serenity – surrendering to ‘what is’ and trusting intention

As Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do.” So to be successful, I’m committing to these habits:

  • Smiling for no reason
  • Loving compassionately and unconditionally
  • Listening with my whole being
  • Speaking powerfully
  • Singing spontaneously
  • Playing with work
  • Sharing my joy and passion
  • Doing what’s necessary to be energized, healthy and serene
  • Expressing gratitude for the arrival of each new day, every new person, and all the ‘breakdowns’ in life.

So how do you define

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The Great Turning

Anxiety

One of the nice things about traveling about as I have been for the past couple of years is that you get an opportunity to listen to people in other countries speak about the state of the world. As a fair generalization, I would suggest that we in the USA and Canada are among the most vocal ‘worriers’ I encounter. I would say that a high percentage of North American conversations—at least among those I converse with and based on my take on ‘the news’ on TV—are worried about something.

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The Great Turning

Baby Boomers or Baby Busters

I have been having a lot of ‘state of the economy’ conversations lately. The consensus is that we are going in the wrong direction and the only question is how long, how deep and how prepared we are for the long haul. I made the observation that the economic consequences of a recession are only part of the problem. A recession is a trust issue. When credit dries up, it means that lenders don’t trust the borrowers to keep their commitments. It creates a kind of double-bind. Here is how it

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Learning

Angels Do Not Sit On Pins

By Charles E. Smith | Bio

Last night I was sitting in front of CNN, drinking wine, hoping that "in vino veritas" would once again prove true. What was I to do with my future?
I was so sick of making lists, I could have screamed. I wanted, once
and for all, a goal that would bring salvation with it. I wanted a
colleague, friend or lover who would answer all my questions and
provide me with terminal support. I wanted to name a program that would

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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

Creativity II

Read Creativity I.

Now it’s easy to hear this conversation about ‘standing in possibilities’ of what the future might be as some sort of optimism versus pessimism discussion—the “Just be happy” versus “There’s no hope” maxims. I am not suggesting this at all. Optimism and pessimism are grounded in positive or negative predictions of the future. Changing how we observe is not a function of prediction: it is a function of commitment.

I predict that the future is likely

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The Great Turning

The Four Horsemen

I was playing a trivia game and had to answer what the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are. I got three out of four, but had to go to go to Wikipedia to get them all — War, Famine, Conquest and Death. These traditional Biblical symbols mark the ‘end of time’, when all things are put right and presumably all karma is erased and this journey will be complete. In researching each of them, I learned that ‘conquest’ is best translated in today’s language as ‘corruption’. The ancient

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