By Jim Selman | Bio
Our group of men met for our semi-annual retreat on Vince’s farm in New Jersey. We’ve been meeting twice a year every year since 2000. Next year will be a decade of friends coming together for no other purpose than to support and empower each other in our lives. We’re older and we’ve been through a lot together. What I’ve grown to appreciate is that we’re all very willing, able and open to being vulnerable in sharing our lives, our experiences and our wisdom with
By Jim Selman | Bio
I think that one of the things going on these days is that ‘Baby Boomers’ are waking up to the fact that they have a choice about how they age and what it means to be old. The Boomer label is just a demographic slogan. Personally, I don’t like being lumped into a single category with 70 million other folks. This sociological category of “Baby Boomer” (which is now almost synonymous with growing older) makes it easy for us to slip into generalizations about age and
By Kevin Brown | Bio
Increasingly I find myself thinking about the word
retirement and whether it has the appeal that it once had for the mature
worker. I remember, as if it were yesterday, my father talking about how he was
looking forward to retirement. After working long hours and raising a family,
there just did not seem much time for anything else. Through much of his
mid-life, my dad’s job (conductor for the
By Mariette Sluyter | The Foundation Lab
Read the first part of this article here.
As the project began we hit many roadblocks. (Blessedly, none of them were from funders or supportive agencies, but from individual human beings.) Shock, laughter, denial, repulsion and silencing. This came from youth, middle-aged people, professionals and, most heartbreakingly, seniors themselves. The attempts we made to overcome the roadblocks came from every angle. When one approach failed, we, our tireless
By Mariette Sluyter | The Foundation Lab
Seniors Sexual Health was not an area I was particularly drawn to as a 40-something community developer until a staggering statistic was pointed out to me: oositive HIV tests among those over 50 have risen from 7.5% between 1985 and 1998 to 13.5% in 2005.
After some thinking about the statistic, my colleague Nicole Hergert with The Calgary Sexual Health Centre and I explored some theories. It was clear that public health campaigns remain largely focused
By Jim Selman | Bio
I have enjoyed my short stay in Kiev immensely and am looking forward to more exploring in this part of the world in future. I had the opportunity to have fairly intensive conversations with only 60 or 70 people, representing a reasonable cross-section of the country (from what I can tell). Aside from it being a very different culture (in terms of language, alphabet, history and architecture), it was evident to me that the people of the Ukraine share the same concerns, dreams and issues that we have in our part of the world.This may be
obvious to anyone who has lived and worked in different cultures around
the world. But for those of us who have not, we sometimes live with the
unchallenged assumption that our differences are larger than our shared
ways of being and our common concerns. For example, much of the success
of European/American enterprise has been based in the power of the
Cartesian Paradigm—the worldview that everything in the ‘objective’
By Jim Selman | Bio
One
of my friends who is about my age has been in a period of deep
reflection and growth. He recently shared that he was moving into a new
space of awareness analogous to the transition from adolescence to
adulthood. He said he was becoming profoundly aware that he has
something valuable to say and that part of his growing older is coming
face to face with becoming responsible for creating a new
‘presentation’ in the world. He struggled
By Jim Selman | Bio
You hear about it and know it is true—the body breaks down as we grow older. Naturally there are lots of exceptions. If you take really good care of yourself, you might make it to the end of the game without any major physical impairment. However, for most of us we’re going to encounter some life-limiting change in our bodies. I encountered my first this week.I showed up for a meeting with an orthopedic surgeon to have what I expected to be routine work done on a torn tendon in my shoulder, only to learn that it was inoperable and that I would need to accept the fact that, for the rest of my life, I will have limited functionality. That means I’ll probably not play golf or anything else that requires mobility or power in the left arm. The good news is that my right arm can still be repaired.
What was interesting to me was to watch
By Jim Selman | Bio
I am spending a few days with my bestWe are all more or less in our sixties with one younger and one older. We are all in business or retired and we’ve all succeeded by most standards. Aside from lots of laughter and a few tears, we spend a lot of time listening to each other. The space we create for each other is one of unconditional love and respect, which generally allows us to express ourselves in ways in which we don’t normally have the opportunity. We are never judgmental, and whatever ‘coaching’