 By Jim Selman | Bio
It is almost impossible to turn on the television or read a
newspaper or a magazine without encountering one pundit, expert or “man
on the street” either talking about the future or trying to blame
someone for something. Our media commentary is rarely about what is
happening now: mostly it’s about what happened in the past or what
someone thinks is going to happen in the future. Combine the
establishment media with all of the blogging and chatting going on, and
it is incredible how fixated we are on what will happen next.[ Read More]
Written by eldering at Wisdom in Action
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 By Jim Selman | Bio
I
was listening to a lecture today on the philosopher Martin Heidegger.
He is pretty difficult to understand at the best of times, even though
I have been a student of his thinking for many years. The lecture today
spoke of the distinction he made between ‘tradition’, which he felt was
a bad thing, and ‘heritage’, which he thought was a good thing. In
fact, he felt heritage was essential to understanding the true nature
of ‘Being’. I won’t pretend to grasp it all fully, but what I did get was that[ Read More]
Written by eldering at Wisdom in Action
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 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, we live our lives in a ‘circumstantial drift’
where the future is determined by our past.[ Read More]
Written by eldering at Retirement
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 By Shae Hadden | Bio
The green-crested hummingbird is at my window again this morning,
hovering in mid-air sunshine and snatching bits of food from the plants
as they begin to bud. He appeared in my life a few weeks ago, and has
been coming back every day without fail. Today his weightlessness seems
like a metaphor for a new way of Being.[ Read More]
Written by eldering at Learning
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 By Shae Hadden | Bio
Spring is in the air today. The first crocuses blaze their yellow glory
at me from across the lawn. I’m staring into the sky blue expanse above
the mountain ridge, and wondering why I’ve chosen to move from this
place. The quiet location and the natural environment were perfect for
me when I moved in a year and a half ago. And now these four walls and
many of the things gathered around me loom like barriers to living full
out.[ Read More]
Written by eldering at Personal Empowerment
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The latest breakthroughs in genome technology will now be available to
consumers, allowing them to trace their past in order to predict their
future. Anne Wojcicki, the wife of Google co-founder Sergey Brin, is
launching 23andme today. The
web-based service, partially funded by Google, has set out to
revolutionize how
we look at ourselves in reference to the past, present and future. For
$999, consumers will get a complete DNA scan that reveals their
ancestry,
what their risk factors are for developing certain diseases, and
ongoing updates on genetic discoveries that may directly
affect them. Clients submit a saliva swab to this private company,
technicians extract DNA from the sample, then submit it to the 23andme genotyping process.
Each individual's data is entered into a secure database, which clients
can access online. From there, individuals will be able to research
their genome and supposedly connect genetically with others around the
globe using 23andme's web-based interactive tools. [ Read More]
Written by eldering at News
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I am always a little disoriented between the seasons when I travel to
Argentina or Brazil. When it is autumn in Canada, it is spring in
Buenos Aires. It is a beautiful and refreshing time of year. I am
thinking about the clichéd parallel between the seasons and the phases
of our lives—this being the autumn of my life. Yet as I travel, I can
see how fluid and changeable the seasons can be depending upon where
you are standing. This is an apt metaphor for living every moment creatively—consciously choosing a frame of mind that says each day can
be the first day of spring (if we look at that way). I wonder…[ Read More]
Written by Jim Selman at Fearless Aging
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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 Personal Empowerment
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I was having a cup of coffee with a very good friend of mine the other
morning. He was feeling down—actually, he said he was feeling a little
‘crazy’. On one level, his life has never been better, his work is
satisfying and, best of all, according to him, he has a new Porsche
that is requiring he move to the next level of performance in driving.
Life is good. Yet, amidst all his success (which includes a loving, happy marriage
and new grandkids), he was in a deep ‘funk’. I say funk because he
wasn't quite depressed, but wasn't feeling well either. He’d spent the
better part of the last month trying to psychoanalyze himself to find
the source of his malaise and achieved not much more than the usual
circular reasoning that we get into when we become trapped in our own
psyche.[ Read More]
Written by Jim Selman at Personal Empowerment
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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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