Tag Archives: guilt

Fearless Aging

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

read more
Retirement

Working Longer

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

read more
Personal Empowerment

Guilt

I was speaking with a friend recently about age in general, how we ‘remember’ our lives and the power of memories to affect our day-to-day experience. From one perspective, I think that living in the present is the point of living—experientially at least. When we are present, our memories are just memories and don’t affect us either positively or negatively. Our memories are our ‘story’, and we can relate to our past as just that—a story. On the other hand, our moods and our memories

read more
Personal Empowerment

Wasting Time

I am not sure it’s possible to waste time. It is possible to spend time, and waste is always a judgement relative to some standard or expectation of what we should be doing with our time.

We can use time to do things that we judge as having maximum or high value. When we are really up against a deadline and there is more to do than we think can be done in the time allotted, we can even somehow create time.

Yet, there are many times when I just don’t feel like doing whatever it is I think I

read more