Tag Archives: worldview

Moods

By Jim Selman | Bio

Moods ‘color’ our experience of living. They are all encompassing interpretations of the world—especially the future—and tend to determine the quality of our lives. When we are in a positive mood, the world is bright and we ‘feel’ great. When we are in a negative mood, we typically want to withdraw from or strike out at everyone around us.  One of the most useful things we can learn as we grow up (at any age) is that moods aren’t personal.

First of all, they are involuntary. No one I know decides they will be in a bad mood (although there are a few who more or less equate their mood with ‘the way I am’, which can become a kind of self-fulfilling story and can justify just about anything). For example, I know a man who believes that he is, more or less, permanently doomed to procrastinate and put off what he knows he needs to do until the last minute. He then begins to become annoyed with himself weeks before

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Believing What We Read

By Jim Selman | Bio

Here is what I was reading in the Buenos Aires Herald this morning (paraphrased)—“Some folks like what Obama’s doing, other folks aren’t so happy”. Here’s another—“Lots of middle class people believe there is a financial crisis and others don’t seem to have been affected at all”. This is then followed by a restatement of the news for the last few months with a dash of history added in, such as comparisons between BHO and JFK or FDR. Blah, blah, blah…

I think

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More, Better and Different

By Jim Selman | Bio

The engine that drives the world’s economy is a principle that is embedded in our worldview—“more, better and different”. It may seem obvious, but when we think about consumerism, materialism or alcoholism—or any ‘ism’ really—they are all based on the idea that if we like something, then ‘more’ is good (and conversely, if we don’t like it, then ‘less’ is good). Continuous improvement demands that things get better and better—and ‘more’ better

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I am not a thing

By Jim Selman | Bio

I just saw the movie WALL-E about a lonely robot on planet earth 700 years after a Wal-Mart-like enterprise wins the game of mega mergers and is the only corporation left, effectively running the world. The people had to leave because they couldn’t keep up with the trash. WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter – Earth Class) spends its days (we soon begin to think of it as a ‘he’ thanks to some brilliant scripting and Pixar magic) creating skyscraper-scale mountains of

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Babylon

I went to an interesting exhibition called “Babylon” at the Louvre* over the weekend. A lot of the explanations were in French, so I am sure I missed a lot of the factual history. What was clear was the mythology surrounding the Tower of Babel that God supposedly destroyed when the civilization became too decadent. As I recall, this account heralds the beginning of disparate languages and the considerable miscommunication that has been going on between human beings every since.

We’ve been

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The Environment and Eldering

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

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The 11th Hour

My friend Chauncey Bell recommended The 11th Hour, a movie about the state of our environment and the kinds of things that need to happen if we’re going to have much of a future to think about, on his blog. It didn’t contain a lot of new information, but did a great job of focusing the mind and will hopefully mobilize a lot of people into action through The 11th Hour Action website.

Several of the commentators and experts in the movie drew a parallel between the ‘state of our mind’ and

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The Culture of Aging

People sometimes ask me what I mean by ‘the culture of aging’. I can start by explaining what I mean by ‘culture’.

Culture is, first of all, a word. And, like all words, it is a label for some phenomenon, some observable thing or idea. Culture is a concept and a very basic aspect of who we are. It contributes to how we relate to the world and, most of the time, constitutes an opening for our actions. It is a context for our human experience and occurs as a kind of non-stop conversation

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Building Bridges

I was listening to an interview on CBC’s wonderful Sunday program called "Our World”. They were speaking with Charles Taylor, a 76-year-old Canadian philosopher and political activist who was recently awarded the Templeton Prize to research how spiritual aspirations shape society and politics. In this interview, he came across as one of the most optimistic commentators on the state of the world I’ve heard and he was positive without being unrealistic or naïve.

The essence of his message

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Learning Across Generations

We had a wonderful conversation last night with my daughter Lauren (who is graduating from college this week) and two of her friends. The mood was celebratory with lots of speculation about Lauren’s future and so forth. The conversation became focused and very interesting as we began to talk about how her generation uses and participates in the ‘technological space’ of the Internet. Specifically, we ‘older folks’ were wondering why the young seem so intent on putting everything about

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