 By Jim Selman | Bio
I
just saw the movie WALL-E about a lonely robot on planet earth 700
years after a Wal-Mart-like enterprise wins the game of mega mergers
and is the only corporation left, effectively running the world. The
people had to leave because they couldn’t keep up with the trash.
WALL-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter – Earth Class) spends its days (we
soon begin to think of it as a ‘he’ thanks to some brilliant scripting
and Pixar magic) creating skyscraper-scale mountains of trash. It is a
great film and brilliantly delivers ‘social responsibility’ messages
while telling a beautiful love story that meshes with some profoundly
human moments when people wake up to the possibility of having a choice
combined with responsibility for cleaning up the mess we made in the
20th and 21st centuries.[ Read More]
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I went to an interesting exhibition called “Babylon” at the Louvre*
over the weekend. A lot of the explanations were in French, so I am
sure I missed a lot of the factual history. What was clear was the
mythology surrounding the Tower of Babel that God supposedly destroyed
when the civilization became too decadent. As I recall, this account
heralds the beginning of disparate languages and the considerable
miscommunication that has been going on between human beings every
since. We’ve been working a lot recently on the formation of the Eldering Institute,
which is, among other things, focused on promoting “multigenerational
collaboration” (which of course implies intergenerational
communication).[ Read More]
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After seeing the movie The 11th Hour, I have been thinking a lot about The Eldering Institute. The idea all along has been a strategy for mobilizing a lot of people, both retired and younger to “take on intractable problems”. The foundation for this has been the observation that most older people want to make a difference and leave the planet in better shape than we found it, and younger people are faced with a sufficiently uncertain future that most would love to have partnerships with older people if there could be an authentic relationship—one based on mutual learning, respect and appreciation for the differences between our world views. Finally, the idea of Eldering recognizes that most of the larger ‘problems’ confronting us are paradigmatic in nature. This means that ordinary thinking and attempts to ‘fix’ things won’t work. We must create a new paradigm and doing so requires that all of us participate. No one has “the answer”, but together we can create possibilities that neither of us can see without the other.[ Read More]
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My friend Chauncey Bell recommended The 11th Hour, a movie about the state of our environment and the kinds of things that need to happen if we’re going to have much of a future to think about, on his blog. It didn’t contain a lot of new information, but did a great job of focusing the mind and will hopefully mobilize a lot of people into action through The 11th Hour Action website. Several of the commentators and experts in the movie drew a parallel between the ‘state of our mind’ and the state of our environment. It reminded me that was exactly the way we used to talk about consciousness at work. [ Read More]
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People sometimes ask me what I mean by ‘the culture of aging’. I can start by explaining what I mean by ‘culture’. Culture is, first of all, a word. And, like all words, it is a label for some phenomenon, some observable thing or idea. Culture is a concept and a very basic aspect of who we are. It contributes to how we relate to the world and, most of the time, constitutes an opening for our actions. It is a context for our human experience and occurs as a kind of non-stop conversation about ‘the way it is’. Culture defines our local reality, our norms and acceptable practices and, most importantly, what is and is not possible. Our paradigms or interpretations of the world persist and are maintained through culture. [ Read More]
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I was listening to an interview on CBC’s wonderful Sunday program called “ Our World”.
They were speaking with Charles Taylor, a 76-year-old Canadian
philosopher and political activist who was recently awarded the
Templeton Prize to research how spiritual aspirations shape society and
politics. In this interview, he came across as one of the most
optimistic commentators on the state of the world I’ve heard and he was
positive without being unrealistic or naïve. [ Read More]
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We had a wonderful conversation last night with my daughter Lauren (who is graduating from college this week) and two of her friends. The mood was celebratory with lots of speculation about Lauren’s future and so forth. The conversation became focused and very interesting as we began to talk about how her generation uses and participates in the ‘technological space’ of the Internet. Specifically, we ‘older folks’ were wondering why the young seem so intent on putting everything about themselves—information we’d prefer to keep private—on public display on sites like Facebook and MySpace? [ Read More]
Written by Jim Selman at Wisdom in Action
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