Tag Archives: responsibility

New Stories

By Jim Selman | Bio

David Korten does a great job of showing us how the rich get richer and the poor get poorer—how the ‘system’ is rigged to create more for the’ haves’ and less for the ‘have nots’. It makes sense. We can see it everywhere from the government’s disregard for regulation, to the now inevitable necessity for a ‘bailout’, to the way we measure the health of our society to the ‘either/or’ controversies that rage on while giving us more of what we resist. The saddest aspect of this whole financial meltdown is that we probably won’t learn our lessons. After all, wasn’t all of our current regulatory apparatus created after the 1930s so the Great Depression would never happen again?

David’s proposal—and I could not agree with him more—is that we must create new ‘stories’ that can move us from Empire to Earth Community and have a world that can work for everyone. In Alcoholics Anonymous, the second step is “came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity”. A new story for mankind needs a idea of something beyond our own closed and self-referential worldview, although it need not be a deterministic deity that is

read more

The Crisis

By Jim Selman | Bio

As
an elder, what do I have to say regarding the ‘crisis’ in the financial
system? To begin, I don’t know what to say about the crisis. But I do
know that this is not a time for ‘idle’ opinions or mouthing platitudes
and ideological dogma. I know the seemingly ‘sudden’ emergence of this
situation is mostly the fact that the media and government pays
attention only after something happens and doesn’t bother to listen to
thoughtful

read more

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

A World of Performance

By Lauren Selman | Bio

This
past weekend, I was hiking with a couple of co-workers of mine in the
beautiful Grand Canyon National Park. As we were walking, one woman
posed the question, "Is our society changing or is it our awareness
making it look worse?" I didn’t understand what she meant at first, but
as we continued to talk, she was speaking to the concept of perception.
For example, people have been making ‘at home ‘drugs for

read more

The World We Want: It Begins with a Conversation

By David Korten | Great Turning website

Read more posts in The World We Want series.

How does it happen? It starts with a conversation. A while back, Cecile Andrews, our local Seattle author of The Circle of Simplicity, explained to me how the women’s movement changed the story on gender and unleashed the long suppressed power

read more

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

Obama

I am more than happy to see Obama back on his game and in what looks like the homestretch in what has been a grueling horserace—for the candidates and the public. I am committed to Obama because I believe, along with a lot of other people, that he is sincere in his commitment to unite the nation and that he has demonstrated his capacity to stand for something beyond politics-as-usual. I have said on more than one occasion how sad it’s been to watch the fracture of our nation and our communities

read more

Priceless Gifts

By Rick Fullerton | Bio

My last blog anticipated the arrival of a new grandchild, and now I am pleased to announce that Angus Fullerton Beauregard arrived on March 14th—much to the delight of family and friends! As grandparents, it seems appropriate to us that he shares Einstein’s birthday.

Births, like graduations and marriages, are major milestones of life. These events trigger other feelings and reflections, in addition to the natural joy of celebration. For example, newborns bring concerns

read more

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

read more

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