All posts by Jim Selman

Understanding the Hospice Experience for Patients and Families

Guest article from Lucille Rosetti

Having a loved one who is entering hospice is a challenging time for anyone. You’re confronting all the emotions that come along with this transition; simply wondering what to do and say can be overwhelming. Knowing what to expect can help you navigate this experience so you can better comfort your loved one and take care of yourself too.

 

Getting to Know Your Care Team


One of the best things you can do from the very beginning

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Tradition & Ritual

The Christian celebration of Christmas Day, like other traditional “holy days” such as Eid al-Adha for Muslims, is not just a chance to share our abundance with our families and the poor and needy. Like New Year’s, it is an occasion to pause, to slow down the normally hectic pace of our lives, and to take time out to reflect on some perennial questions.

  • Who are we?
  • Why are we here?
  • What do we want out of life?
  • What do we want in our relationships with others?

The rituals and traditions associated with most special days, especially the ones that are handed down through the centuries, define us and

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6 Secrets to Help Seniors Enhance Their Health and Happiness by Jason Lewis

As we get older, we tend to feel a little less in control of our lives. It seems harder to stay healthy, but making an effort to control your physical and mental health is the best way to have an immense impact on the quality of your overall wellness. To bring balance and benefits to your life, work these healthy practices into your routine:

Stay on Top of Your Healthcare

It’s inevitable: the older we get, the more we’ll need to visit the doctor, both because our aging bodies

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POWER and POLITICS

The United States is in the middle of a historic avalanche of change while navigating an unprecedented landscape of political and ideological conflict. The acrimony and impact on individual moods grow daily. I have become resigned to pundits shouting at each other, uncivil discourse and a governance process that has brought our most important institutions into gridlock.  You and I are daily witnesses the ugliest and most disgusting expressions of our body politic.

The ‘bottom line’ I hear

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Reflection on Aging

Serene Ambition started out as a blog site for reflections on aging.  While I get distracted by a variety of other interests, I am still interested in how we experience the last portion of our lives.  Somewhere in our 50s I think, there is a shift in how most of us relate to the future and ourselves. There is a ‘fork in the road’ where our bodies and our minds begin to move in different directions and age at different speeds.  My thesis has always been that how we experience age (and

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Who is responsible for the President?

Today is President’s Day and the pundits are engaged in a ranking of our nation’s presidents as if it were the ‘leader board’ in a PGA tournament.  I think this illustrates our national compulsion with polls and pundits compiling endless opinions and assessments about almost everything.  For better or for worse, our president is the person that can shape the direction and potentially the destiny of our nation and the world.  It is a thankless and paradoxical job in many ways. 

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Time to Saddle Up

The last blog I wrote was in September 2016. I was challenging my modest readership to not get sucked into what was becoming the Trump Train and suggested that, like the Uncle Remus story about a ‘tar baby’, we were likely to become stuck in a pattern of ‘the-more-we-resist-the-more-embroiled-and-trapped-we-become’. In the year and a few months since, I suspended my blog-a-day habit and joined the army of the resigned, wringing our hands and bemoaning the apparent collapse of

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Don’t Take DeBait

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As we approach the upcoming first debate between Hillary and Donald, few expect much beyond more spectacle and another news cycle in this already tedious media frenzy that is revealing the dark side of our collective consciousness just about everyplace we look.

We can see the unbelievable shallowness and hypocrisy in the media. We’ve become trapped between propaganda machines, cynical exploitation of psychopathic ranting or manufactured partisan scandals that would garner little more than

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The Scariest Game in Town

Why is everyone so riveted to coverage of the presidential primary campaign – the most widely viewed reality TV show in history?

Its as though we’re all sitting in the world’s largest virtual coliseum witnessing a global gladiatorial contest bigger than the Super Bowl, being fought by real people with real weapons (mostly money) with real life or death consequences. To make it more interesting, the consequences are not simply for the combatants, but for the audience as well — consequences

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2015 – Have We Hit Bottom Yet?

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It’s now the time of year when everyone seems to be doing recaps of what happened in 2015 and making resolutions or predictions for 2016. I usually like these efforts and look forward to being reminded of all that has occurred and the speculations of what lay ahead. This year, however, is different. Our challenge and my message is that if we’re going to have next year be better than this one, we need to get beyond thinking in terms of a ‘good year’ or a ‘bad year’ and

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