By Jim Selman | Bio
It seems to me that there are three fundamental relationships that we all share as human beings: 1) our relationship with ourselves and other people, 2) our relationship with our circumstances, and 3) our relationship with time. When we are inflexible or stuck in habitual ways of being in any of these areas, we become trapped in a condition from which we cannot extract ourselves: we are caught in a
Tag Archives: time
A Taste of One’s Quality: 3 Rules for Good Temperament (Part 2)
By Stuart James Whitley | Bio
Continuing on from yesterday’s post….
2. Be patient
As the Biblical injunction provides, all things good come to those who wait. This precondition for good temperament has two elements to it: time and wisdom. Part of wisdom is the understanding that active listening is a form of generosity, a key element in a mature temperament. Waiting for the other point of view, the various possible perspectives, or even the depletion of emotion, takes discipline.
Deferring
The Medium is the Message
By Jim Selman | Bio
Forty-five years ago Marshall McLuhan coined the phrase “the medium is the message”. I wonder what he would have made of today’s media-on-steroids. Someone sent me a fascinating YouTube piece called “Social Media in Plain English” , which was followed up with a dramatic piece on the extraordinary impact of all that is going on in the Social Media Revolution. It includes a new term I had never seen before: socialnomics. It’s getting easier and easier to feel ignorant and out of touch.The general consensus is that the phenomenon of social networking/social media is as potentially revolutionary as the Industrial Revolution. Whether this is hyperbole or turns out to be fact will remain a question for history. What is a fact is that the medium is changing faster and in more dramatic ways than many of us can keep up with. I was just getting comfortable with email, blogging and my own websites. And now, almost overnight it seems, I am confronted with Twitter,
Seniors and Children: An Ideal Relationship
By Kevin Brown | Bio
Like me, you can probably remember a relationship you had as a child with an elderly relative or friend of the family. Some of my best memories of such a time involve Mrs. Cowling, an elderly lady who lived next door to us. We had just moved to a new neighborhood in Calgary, and there were only two completed homes on the block. Our home had the only family of children for about three blocks. There was my older sister Paulette (13 years old), myself (7) , and my brand new brother Ken who was not
Focus and Time
By Shae Hadden | Bio
What we do with our time seems to be an ongoing topic of interest for many. Popular belief says we need to balance time for ‘work’ and ‘life’. Innumerable authors and experts have invented tools and techniques for us to ‘manage’ our time. Common sense says that procrastination occurs when we ‘waste’ time doing nothing or doing things other than what we say we’re going to do. More experts have written about how we can get
Choosing Partners
By Shae Hadden | Bio
Despite my intentions to stay focused on launching new materials into the world, the last couple of weeks have seen a flurry of activity around forming partnerships. When I look at the very real challenges we are facing today and the urgency with which they need to be addressed, establishing relationships might seem like the last thing we should spend time doing. However, I’m reminded of something Jim Selman often says: “Relationships are the foundation of success.”
Filling Time
By Jim Selman | Bio
I notice lately that a lot of my conversations with older friends revolve around the question “What do you want to do?” This is usually followed by a smorgasbord of choices ranging from recreation to entertainment to ‘just hanging out’. It sounds a lot like the conversations my children used to have on a Saturday afternoon. It seems to me that this kind of conversation is about filling time, rather than intentional or purposeful choices. It is about picking from available
Staying Engaged
By Jim Selman | Bio
I’ve been thinking about aging and
observing the human phenomenon for a long time and I know that most of
the chatter in my head isn’t ‘me’—it’s just the tapes of my past and my
ego playing the tune to which my culture expects me to dance. For
example, I believe and know from experience that the key to health and wellbeing is “participation”—staying
engaged in whatever games I choose to play. Yet, that little voice
Passing Time
By Jim Selman | Bio
I was talking to my neighbor today about the book that Shae and I are working on. It is about retirement and we’re engaged in the question of ‘when’ does retirement occur. Is it merely an ‘event’ that happens at the end of our last job? My thinking is that it is whatever is left of our lives when our primary concern in life is no longer about earning a living. In this context, a trust fund baby could be born retired just as a person who is ‘retired’ could still
Circumstantial Drift
By Jim Selman | Bio
One of the biggest questions most of us have is “Why do we do what we do?”, particularly when what we do isn’t what we want to do or think we should be doing. My answer is that, for most of us, most of the time we’re not actually choosing what we do. We are living our life according to our historical patterns within some narrowly proscribed personal and cultural ‘story’ about what is and is not possible and what our options are in any given situation. In effect,