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Hillary

Monday Jun 09 2008

I don’t know if you saw Hillary Clinton’s concession speech, but it was extraordinary. While the skeptics might say she was stumping for the vice presidency or simply doing the expected, the fact is that she is a pro and spoke with dignity and, in my judgment, was sincere and even more magnanimous that the occasion required. She recounted the Democratic values and the distinction between liberal and conservative politics today. More than I recall at any time during her campaign, she spoke of breaking the ‘glass ceiling’ and the significance of her candidacy for women in politics. Naturally, she did her best to rally her constituents to support Barack Obama.[Read More]

Written by admin at Leadership

Tagged with: clinton democratic experience idealism leadership obama wisdom youth

Listening & Learning

Friday Nov 23 2007

Life happens while we are having conversations with ourselves and other people. Not learning from others may have a lot to do with not truly ‘listening’ to what others say. Listening is the context that makes life intelligible, allows anything to have meaning, and forms the basis for all communication (both written and spoken). It is a whole lot more than just ‘hearing’ the words that are spoken. I’m always listening, always bringing a prior interpretation or understanding of my world to every situation I encounter or can imagine encountering.[Read More]

Written by admin at Wisdom in Action
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Tagged with: contribution ego experience listening wisdom

Good Days, Bad Days

Friday Nov 02 2007

I caught a Larry King interview the other night in which he was speaking with a bunch of positive-thinking gurus about their beliefs and theories. One of the questions he asked was, “Do you have any bad days”? Most of them said they don’t have bad days, and a couple said that they still have ‘bumps’ in the road but recover quickly. I got to thinking about my own life and concluded that I too can claim that I don’t have bad days, although some are more challenging than others.
How can I account for this fact of my life?

Tagged with: choice experience judgement point-of-view relationship

Time and Temporality

Thursday Jul 26 2007

Lately I have been thinking about the future and the distinction between time and temporality. Our relationship to time can vary depending upon our culture and the era in which we are living. If I imagine living 300 or 400 years ago in what was primarily an agricultural ‘reality’, time was cyclical—we measured it in terms of seasons and lived in the certainty that life didn’t change much from one generation to the next. I can contrast that to today when time is viewed more like a highway moving ‘from’ someplace ‘to’ someplace. The future is an unknown and each generation is pretty much making up their own story and their own rules. These two views are as distinct as a circle and a line.
[Read More]

Written by Jim Selman at Learning
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Tagged with: experience future past present temporality time

I Can't Wait Until I'm Old Enough to...

Wednesday Apr 25 2007

By Don Arnoudse
Bio

My daughter, Sara, is about to turn 21. Her impending birthday has triggered my own memories of that familiar refrain of youth…”I can’t wait until I’m old enough to….go to school, to learn to drive, to vote, to get a credit card, to stay out past midnight, to travel on my own, to get my first apartment, to get my first real job, to go to night clubs and bars, and so on and so on.” It got me to wondering. What are the advantages of age now that I’m staring 60 in the face? Yesterday, I was listening to Julio Olalla, master teacher and founder of the Newfield Network. He began his comments on some of the crises we face in the world by saying, “At my age, I no longer choose to censor myself”. I thought, “Wow! That’s an advantage of age. Telling the truth as I see it without concern for others’ reactions.”

Tagged with: e experience freedom growing older perspective wisdom

Riverboats and Bone Yards III

Monday Feb 19 2007

By Stu Whitley
Bio

It is inevitable that the pressures of the past that are felt by the present have to be contained in some sort of manageable context. Life must be worth living. Gazing upward to the crumbling decks of those forlorn leviathans from my canoe on the Yukon River, I wondered about the men who worked those paddlewheel steamers. Back-breaking work it must have been to feed those enormous furnaces. Even the ship’s wheel needed to be six feet across to achieve the mechanical advantage necessary to turn the fat twin rudders under the paddlewheel. It must have required Herculean effort to avoid the snags and bars of the Yukon River. Did these men too end their hard lives as empty relics, used up, discarded on the strand as life’s indifferent perpetual current continued to flow by?[Read More]

Written by admin at Learning
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Tagged with: aging experience memory past process soul

Objectifying the Old

Monday Jan 29 2007

I just came across news of a humdinger of a research report from Georgia Tech about how older people process information differently than younger people depending upon whether they are in a ‘positive’ or a ‘negative’ mood. I have seen some pretty nonsensical conclusions reached by social scientists and statisticians, but this is about a flaky as they come.

Granted I haven’t read the research itself, only a description of it which concludes:

"So it shows that the young and old are motivated by different goals and, therefore, perceive and process information differently because of the changes in goals across the lifespan,” said Blanchard-Fields.

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Written by Jim Selman at News
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Tagged with: ageism experience judgment mood research