By Jim Selman | Bio
Do we have an economic problem or a spiritual problem?
My teacher and friend Dr. Fernando Flores was a candidate for the
Presidency of Chile. In one of his speeches, he declared, “We don’t have
an economic problem so much as we have a spiritual one…we’ve forgotten
who we are…we lack a vision and purpose for our nation”. He dropped out
of the presidential race, but this phrase has stayed with me. I think it
is true of most nations, including our own.
There is a maxim that states, “A vision without action is just a dream.
Action without a vision is a nightmare.” A vision provides a context, a
ground of being for our lives. A vision is not a goal: it is the
organizing principle for whatever goals we may have. A vision is a place
to stand—the future as possibility—a place to ‘come from’ in all that
we undertake.[ Read More]
Written by eldering at Fearless Aging
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By Jim Selman | Bio
I work with organizations that are attempting
to change. At the beginning of working with a new client, I point out
what’s missing for any organization that has recurring or seemingly
intractable problems: what’s missing is a different way of observing.
Whether we’re talking about a company, a community or a continent, a new
perspective always gives us an opening to create new possibilities,
have new choices and take new actions: a new way of observing the world
effectively gives us a different future than some variation of ‘more of
the same’. We need to stop asking what the problems are and start
asking why they persist. When we do, we begin to realize that we
have a paradigm problem. Until we deal with that, none of our seemingly
intractable problems—from staggering debt to unending war, climate
change to the underlying causes of the mortgage crises—can be solved.
Albert Einstein expressed this concisely when he said that sometimes our
problems cannot be solved by thinking the way we thought when we
created them.[ Read More]
Written by eldering at Wisdom in Action
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By Jim Selman | Bio
The last 10 years seems to me to have been a
long decade. I know that time is supposed to ‘speed up’ as we get
older, but the “Millennium” celebrations, Y2K and all the hype about
the 21st century seems like ancient history. A decade ago, we still
weren’t at war in two countries, 9/11 hadn’t happened, George Bush was
still promising a bipartisan administration, climate change was still a
bit of an arcane scientific debate for most of us, New Orleans was
still having a non-stop party and Google was a minor start-up. YouTube
didn’t exist at the turn of the century, eBay and Amazon were still
babies, and the real estate bubble was just beginning. Steve Jobs had
recently returned to Apple after spending 13 years with NeXT, the iPod
and iTunes were concept just beginning to be developed and the iPhone
wasn’t even in sight.[ Read More]
Written by eldering at Fearless Aging
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 By Jim Selman | Bio
It was said that
the philosopher Martin Heidegger’s last words were “Only God can save
us.” He was, perhaps, one of the deeper thinkers (at least in modern
times) on the question of who we are and what is really going on. As
far as I know, he wasn’t religious. So what he meant by these words, if
indeed he said them, is open to question. My view is that he was
talking about the fact that all human beings live in interpretations of
“reality”—cultural and linguistic inventions—and that humanity is now
‘trapped’ in an interpretation that has no back door. That is, the
‘Cartesian’ worldview that now dominates the globe is so powerful that,
like a black hole,[ Read More]
Written by eldering at The Great Turning
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By Jim Selman | Bio
There is a widely understood belief in
Argentina’s culture that “the way we are is a big part of the problem …
and one of our characteristics is that we’re always waiting for a
leader to come along and save us.” The first time I heard this I was
giving a talk to a large event in Buenos Aires. A man stood up and
challenged my ‘American optimism’, suggesting that I just didn’t
understand the way things really were in ‘their’ country. My response
was to acknowledge that this may be true and to suggest that, since
they were all waiting for the leader to appear, perhaps he could take
the job until the leader came along. That got a chuckle or two and
drove home my point. We live as if[ Read More]
Written by eldering at Leadership
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By Jim Selman | Bio
Tough times can bring out the best in
people. In these days of financial, environmental and social
challenges, more and more of us are stepping forward and asking “What
can I do?” Wherever we look, people and organizations are taking on
problems and working hard to create a better world. Older people are
volunteering more that ever. From an eldering perspective, they want a
chance to make a difference. People have an extraordinary capacity to go beyond what is reasonable[ Read More]
Written by eldering at Wisdom in Action
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By Jim Selman | Bio
There is an amazing website called The Brave Nation
that is showcasing people who’ve made a difference. Many of these
examples of human vision, commitment and perseverance are boomers who
challenged ‘the system’ in the '60s and '70s and are now sharing their
experience with the current generation of ‘change agents’. It is
inspiring to remember and reconnect with the idealism of our youth and
perplexing to wonder what happened to so many of us who have drifted
into complacency about (or in some cases complicity with) current
events.[ Read More]
Written by eldering at Wisdom in Action
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Over the past couple of years, I have been growing in my appreciation
of just about everything and everyone in my life. I am living most of
the time in an almost sublime state of acceptance and gratitude. Fears
about the future have somehow disappeared. My work is more satisfying
than at any time I can recall and, by all accounts, is more impactful. When I began this inquiry about aging almost 30 years ago, my vision
was that the end of life should have as much possibility as the
beginning—that age didn’t mean anything in terms of the quality of our
lives or what we accomplished. Today that vision, at least for me
personally, has become a reality.[ Read More]
Written by eldering at Fearless Aging
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It’s been said a lot of different ways that life is not a destination,
but a journey. A lot of homespun wisdom and formal philosophy attempts
to clarify ‘the purpose of life’ or various other questions about what
we’re doing with our lives and why we do it. A good friend was recently
seeking my advice about his relationship to money. He was somewhere
between perplexed and depressed that he hasn’t been able to produce the
financial results in his business that he wanted. This man is a very
well educated, experienced and competent businessman. He had been
successful working in other companies, but is still in the process of
getting his own business off the ground. I mention this because I think
a lot of us are at that point in our lives where we begin to take stock
of where we are, what we’ve accomplished and what we have in mind for
the next phase of our lives and career. The conversation with my friend
revealed three distinctions I think are generally relevant to anyone
and are worth noting.[ Read More]
Written by eldering at Personal Empowerment
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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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