By Shae Hadden
A friend shared corporate poet David Whyte’s recent article "A Fire Inside: Thoughts on the Creativity of Winter" with me. David uses a brilliant metaphor to explore the trauma of loss prevalent in the global economic crisis. He speaks of a a fire burning inside a home on a winter’s day as being like an "internal, alchemical, almost catalytic core of identity-making and decision-making….the
By Shae Hadden | Bio
Spring flowers bloom passionately on this sunny West Coast day, birds are preparing nests for their young and people run madly by me as I sit by the ocean and ponder what it takes to survive in these times. My search for a place to live has not yet been entirely successful, and the conversations I’ve had reveal both desperation and gnawing hesitation in myself and others to actually put a stake in the ground—metaphorically speaking—and declare that this is the future we are committing to. It’s almost as if, with so much uncertainty about so many things in our lives, we are afraid to take a chance—whether on an investment, a potential tenant, a business expense or a relationship.What do we lose when we put aside possibility and focus on surviving?
I think that we lose touch with our courage and creativity. When things look difficult, change is tumultuous and our internal sense of balance is thrown off kilter, we often forget there is a silver lining to the economic doom and gloom. We now have an opportunity to return to the heart of things, to simplify our lives, to free ourselves from practices that might have had us living beyond our means.
There
By Shae Hadden | Bio
It’s Thanksgiving in Canada, and I’ve just enjoyed a full weekend of personal and work commitments. But the highlight of the weekend was a chance to reconnect with the power of the ‘nap’.
Research in the past few years has found that the human body requires as much sleep as the brain will allow it and that the brain needs a rest every now and then. So taking that mid-afternoon 20-minute snooze really can give one a burst of ideas and energy. And,
The idea that our brains decline as we age is in itself in decline. Studies reported in a new edition of the neurology book Progress in Brain Research suggest that for most of us as we age, our attention widens in focus. This, combined with the fact that we have more information to remember, makes it more difficult to recall small bits of information like a phone number or name. Yet it is this very accumulation of information that helps us become "wiser" as we age: by transferring
By Rick Fullerton | Bio
I
am waiting for our third grandchild to be born. In fact, everyone in
our family and circle of friends is primed for the big event—but none
more so than the mother and father to be. Their lives are about to be
totally transformed when their love, commitment and belief in the
future is expressed in the arrival of ‘baby’.
Birth, for most
people, is the ultimate miracle of life. So it is natural that birth is
celebrated universally as an act of creation.
Read Creativity I.
Now it’s easy to hear this conversation about ‘standing in possibilities’ of what the future might be as some sort of optimism versus pessimism discussion—the “Just be happy” versus “There’s no hope” maxims. I am not suggesting this at all. Optimism and pessimism are grounded in positive or negative predictions of the future. Changing how we observe is not a function of prediction: it is a function of commitment.
I predict that the future is likely
My friend Dan at Curmudgeon recently sent me a very interesting video of a speech by Sir Ken Robinson. He is a British educator committed to reinventing education to give creativity in our schools as much weight as we now give to literacy. This makes sense. One of the underlying principles of Serene Ambition is that we need intergenerational collaboration.
I was watching the CBS show “Sunday Morning” on the weekend and it had a segment on the dying art of conversation. The point was that with all our technology and almost real-time connections available with email, handhelds and social networking sites, people seem to have lost the ability to have conversations. It was a thought-provoking and, I think, mostly true observation about what is happening to us. The show also showcased a new book by Stephen Miller called