Tag Archives: judgment

Wisdom in Action

The Wisdom to Know the Difference

By Jim Selman | Bio

Think about the positive attributes of growing older, and ‘wisdom’ will always appear near the top of the list. Until recently, I had assumed ‘wisdom’ was a kind of ‘right knowledge’. Every time someone says the Serenity Prayer, I am reminded of this attribute again.

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things that I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

I wonder if I do know the difference.

On one level, I have learned a degree of serenity and think I am more or less accepting of most things in life. Yet I still fret about our political leadership, the drift toward corporate oligarchy, the environment, TV programming, traffic and a hundred other things that I think should be

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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

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Learning

Discernment: Harold’s Story III

By Stu Whitley
Bio

This is the third in a three-part series.

I
read somewhere that good decision-making—indeed, good relations—
depends upon a virtuous cycle of respect, trust and candour (which
takes some time to establish, but which can easily be interrupted). 
Attitude, after all, is everything. Perhaps that last statement needs a
bit of refinement: the ethical
attitude is everything. By that I mean the determination

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Health

Health – Who’s on First?

By Vincent DiBianca
Bio

Like many, I’ve heard both sides of the ‘Cooking and Freezing in Plastic’ debate. A good friend recently sent me an email warning of the dangers of “microwaving and freezing food in plastic containers” accompanied with supportive research. Another friend responded by saying that the ‘authorities’ (including the FDA and Johns Hopkins University) say that Rubbermaid®, Tupperware®, plastic cookware and food wrap sold for home use have been thoroughly tested, only tiny traces of a plasticizer have been found, and even that is not an endocrine disrupter. This set off a productive dialogue about who to believe about what.

Another
friend who is a prominent bio-chemist and clinical physiologist says
the impact of synthetics has a major impact on compromising the immune
system. (He contends that contrary to some reports, leaching from
microwave cooking has been proven to occur in virtually all plastics
and whether the plastic touches the food or not). Ugh!

Personally,
I give little credence to much of the mainstream position on health and
well-being. Unfortunately, doubting our ‘authorities’

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Fearless Aging

Act Your Age!

By Shae Hadden
Bio

I’m pondering this throw-away comment, something I’ve heard countless times before and never really thought about. What do we really mean when we say someone isn’t ‘acting their age’?

In
effect, we’re judging whether their actions are ‘normal’ and
‘acceptable’—as compared to the majority of people of that same
chronological age in our society. But our assessments are neither true,
nor false. They are simply our perspective, our evaluation, of what we
perceive.

In many cases, our assessments have nothing to do
with age—they simply mask our judgments of the individual’s social
behavior or growth (either emotional, mental, physical

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News

Objectifying the Old

I just came across news of a humdinger of a research report from Georgia Tech
about how older people process information differently than younger
people depending upon whether they are in a ‘positive’ or a ‘negative’
mood. I have seen some pretty nonsensical conclusions reached by social
scientists and statisticians, but this is about a flaky as they come.

Granted I haven’t read the research itself, only a description of it which concludes:

"So it shows that the young and old are motivated by different goals and, therefore, perceive and process information differently because of the changes in goals across the lifespan,” said Blanchard-Fields.

Now my experience as one of the ‘old’ is

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Wisdom in Action

The Wisdom to Know the Difference

Think about the positive attributes of growing older, and ‘wisdom’
will always appear near the top of the list. Until recently, I had
assumed ‘wisdom’ was a kind of ‘right knowledge’. Every time someone
says the Serenity Prayer, I am reminded of this attribute again.

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I
cannot change, the courage to change the things that I can, and the
wisdom to know the difference.”

read more