By Jim Selman | Bio
The older I am, the more I reflect on the
aphorisms all around us and wonder why it is so difficult to accept and
live with this obvious wisdom. Robert Fulghum memorialized many of them
in his bestseller All
I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. All of these
little ‘nuggets’ of wisdom we’ve accumulated over the years are
generally, well, wise. It is befuddling why so few people take them to
heart. Why do so many spend a lifetime learning these kinds of lessons the hard
way?[ Read More]
Written by eldering at Wisdom in Action
Tagged with:
aphorisms
choice
elders
experience
learning
life_lessons
pavlov's_dog
robert_fulghum
wisdom
By Stuart J. Whitley | Bio
I read somewhere that good
decision-making—indeed, good relations—depends upon a virtuous cycle of
respect, trust and candour (which takes some time to establish, but
which can easily be interrupted). Attitude, after all, is everything.
Perhaps that last statement needs a bit of refinement: the ethical attitude is everything. By that I mean the determination of the answer to the age-old question: who is right? Was Harold right to[ Read More]
Written by eldering at Wisdom in Action
Tagged with:
age
candour
decision-making
ethical_attitude
experience
judgement
justice
moral_choice
respect
trust
wisdom
The following segment from Tom Freston's 2007 commencement speech to
the graduates at Emerson College contains four pieces of wisdom about
'being in action' that are timeless. This man built MTV and Viacom's
cable empire, was fired by chairman Sumner Redstone, accepted a $60
million severage package and is now helping Oprah build her new TV
network while you travels to Afghanistan, Burma, Rwanda and beyond and
works with Bono to reduce global poverty and AIDS. [ Read More]
Written by eldering at Wisdom in Action
Tagged with:
adventure
bliss
career
curiosity
experience
learning
travel
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 eldering at Leadership
Tagged with:
clinton
democratic
experience
idealism
leadership
obama
wisdom
youth
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 eldering at Wisdom in Action
Join discussion COMMENTS [0]
Tagged with:
contribution
ego
experience
listening
wisdom
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? [ Read More]
Written by eldering at Personal Empowerment
Join discussion COMMENTS [0]
Tagged with:
choice
experience
judgement
point-of-view
relationship
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
Join discussion COMMENTS [0]
Tagged with:
experience
future
past
present
temporality
time
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.” [ Read More]
Written by eldering at Personal Empowerment
Join discussion COMMENTS [0]
Tagged with:
e
experience
freedom
growing
older
perspective
wisdom
By Stu WhitleyBio
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 eldering at Learning
Join discussion COMMENTS [0]
Tagged with:
aging
experience
memory
past
process
soul
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.
[ Read More]
Written by Jim Selman at News
Join discussion COMMENTS [0]
Tagged with:
ageism
experience
judgment
mood
research
|
RSS Feeds
