Category Archives: Learning

Understanding the Hospice Experience for Patients and Families

Guest article from Lucille Rosetti

Having a loved one who is entering hospice is a challenging time for anyone. You’re confronting all the emotions that come along with this transition; simply wondering what to do and say can be overwhelming. Knowing what to expect can help you navigate this experience so you can better comfort your loved one and take care of yourself too.

 

Getting to Know Your Care Team


One of the best things you can do from the very beginning

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POWER and POLITICS

The United States is in the middle of a historic avalanche of change while navigating an unprecedented landscape of political and ideological conflict. The acrimony and impact on individual moods grow daily. I have become resigned to pundits shouting at each other, uncivil discourse and a governance process that has brought our most important institutions into gridlock.  You and I are daily witnesses the ugliest and most disgusting expressions of our body politic.

The ‘bottom line’ I hear

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Reflection on Aging

Serene Ambition started out as a blog site for reflections on aging.  While I get distracted by a variety of other interests, I am still interested in how we experience the last portion of our lives.  Somewhere in our 50s I think, there is a shift in how most of us relate to the future and ourselves. There is a ‘fork in the road’ where our bodies and our minds begin to move in different directions and age at different speeds.  My thesis has always been that how we experience age (and

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Who is responsible for the President?

Today is President’s Day and the pundits are engaged in a ranking of our nation’s presidents as if it were the ‘leader board’ in a PGA tournament.  I think this illustrates our national compulsion with polls and pundits compiling endless opinions and assessments about almost everything.  For better or for worse, our president is the person that can shape the direction and potentially the destiny of our nation and the world.  It is a thankless and paradoxical job in many ways. 

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Time to Saddle Up

The last blog I wrote was in September 2016. I was challenging my modest readership to not get sucked into what was becoming the Trump Train and suggested that, like the Uncle Remus story about a ‘tar baby’, we were likely to become stuck in a pattern of ‘the-more-we-resist-the-more-embroiled-and-trapped-we-become’. In the year and a few months since, I suspended my blog-a-day habit and joined the army of the resigned, wringing our hands and bemoaning the apparent collapse of

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The Scariest Game in Town

Why is everyone so riveted to coverage of the presidential primary campaign – the most widely viewed reality TV show in history?

Its as though we’re all sitting in the world’s largest virtual coliseum witnessing a global gladiatorial contest bigger than the Super Bowl, being fought by real people with real weapons (mostly money) with real life or death consequences. To make it more interesting, the consequences are not simply for the combatants, but for the audience as well — consequences

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2015 – Have We Hit Bottom Yet?

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It’s now the time of year when everyone seems to be doing recaps of what happened in 2015 and making resolutions or predictions for 2016. I usually like these efforts and look forward to being reminded of all that has occurred and the speculations of what lay ahead. This year, however, is different. Our challenge and my message is that if we’re going to have next year be better than this one, we need to get beyond thinking in terms of a ‘good year’ or a ‘bad year’ and

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Responsible Gun Ownership

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How we approach change and how we personally relate to issues can make all the difference between whether we get upset and fight to defend the status quo and our values or whether we listen and consider that maybe we can have our cake and eat it too! Like most progressives, when presented with hard-line conservative positions, I just shake my head and become resigned. Gun control is one of those issues. I simply cannot understand how unrestricted and laissez-faire attitudes toward guns make

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I Want To Be Me.

“I Want To Be Me,” written and directed by Lauren Selman and produced by Pina De Rosa, is about amplifying the voice of our children and reminding us that the future depends on being ourselves and following our dreams. You know it’s up to you, what do you want to be?

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