I am officially on holiday. Darlene and I are in Granada seeing what is perhaps one of the two or three top tourist destinations in Europe—The Alhambra. Aside from this site being a unique and spectacular complex of ancient fortifications and Arabic palaces, it also tells the story of how temporal our lives and our civilizations really are. This one had a pretty good run (about 800 years) before it was conquered in 1492, the same year Columbus set foot in the ‘New World’.
Our visit has
Memory is an interesting and strange phenomenon. I think (as most of us do) that what I remember is more or less what happened. This came home to me a number of years ago when I was dating a woman I had dated twenty years previously and whom I had not seen in the intervening period. We ‘connected’ like old friends and more or less fell into the kind of comfortable conversation that old friends do. As we began to recall our earlier relationship (which was pretty intense and lasted for more
After seeing the movie The 11th Hour, I have been thinking a lot about The Eldering Institute. The idea all along has been a strategy for mobilizing a lot of people, both retired and younger to “take on intractable problems”. The foundation for this has been the observation that most older people want to make a difference and leave the planet in better shape than we found it, and younger
By Shae Hadden
Bio
I
am reminded, once again, that we cannot ‘give our best’ day in and day
out unless we also give to ourselves. And sometimes the best we gift we
can offer ourselves is a new perspective on time. For the point of view
I have held until now (that time is a precious resource that I don’t
have enough of), has left me drained and unsatisfied. I wonder what
happened to unprogrammed time to relax and smell the roses, to be in
the company
As the evenings get cooler and days shorter here, summer holidays wind down. Everyone seems to be preparing for the start of September, and looking forward to the last real weekend before things start up again. Most everyone I talk with has enjoyed some of the summer outside with family and friends, and I find myself experiencing a twinge of regret. For me, the last few months have been a blur of work indoors in front of the computer, interspersed with a few brief moments of relaxation. This afternoon,
My friends and I have been told by a couple of our wives and
girlfriends that we are a unique group of men. It is ironic that we
don’t really understand why, but we are all extremely open, vulnerable
and nurturing in our relationships with each other, as well as with
other people in our lives. I don’t know why, perhaps it comes with time
and the fact that we’ve all worked in some form of transformational
training for most of our careers.
Whenever
we ‘Souls’ get together, we follow
I am spending a few days with a group of my best buddies. We call our
gang the ‘Old Souls’. This started about 7 years ago when nine of us
from all over the USA gathered at Vince’s farm for a long weekend,
generally to talk about whatever was on our minds to and specifically
to discuss our experiences and reflections as we entered mid-life.
We’ve been gathering three times a year at various locations ever
since. Some of the faces have changed over the
My father and I drove from Arizona to the Northwest last week and we are now enjoying a relaxed week together along with my daughter and her husband. I am grateful for the opportunity to spend whatever time I can with family. I think that, as we get older, our appreciation for our children and parents expands. At the same time, I can also see that I can become ‘stuck’ in a kind of ‘family-get-together-pattern’. Not that this is bad, but it is different than how I might normally spend a
By Don Arnoudse
Bio
We
live in a country that deifies the hardy, self-sufficient
individual—the person who asks for nothing, owes nobody anything, and
“does it their own way” without compromising to others. We have
extended our legal definition of individual rights to an overall
definition of what it means to be human. Bad mistake.
My friend Mark introduced me to the traditional African concept of ubuntu, a very different philosophy that focuses on people’s
I had a great conversation this past weekend with my son Clarke. We were talking about the differences between ‘his generation’ and ‘my generation’ (the Boomers), and he shared a perspective I thought was extraordinary and which made me realize our two age groups advocate two very different interpretations of reality.
He believes that one of the biggest problems his generation faces is themselves—because they have grown up in a time in which they have been constantly bombarded with the