All posts by Jim Selman

Wisdom in Action

Divisadero

AARP had an interesting book review of Michael Ondaatje’s new book, Divisadero, that leaves me thinking about how the past affects not only the future but also how we experience the present. Based on the review, it sounds like a well-written and thoughtful yarn. I will pick up a copy at the airport.

The premise of the book reminds me of a provocative question we used to ask in the 70s when the focus was on ‘being here now’ and ‘going with the flow’. The question was:

“Would you want to have 10,000 experiences in your life or live one experience 10,000 times?”

The point being that

read more
Personal Empowerment

The Little Voice

It is a cold day in Buenos Aires and I have a cold so am resting in the hotel room. For no particular reason, I am more conscious than normal of my ‘little voice’—you know the conversation in our heads. I talk about this phenomenon a lot in my work. People laugh when I challenge the conventional view that they can control it: “Try to turn it off” or “Don’t think about what I am about to say”. Then I suggest that this conversation we are always having, what we call thinking, is

read more
Health

Health – Who’s on First?

By Vincent DiBianca
Bio

Like many, I’ve heard both sides of the ‘Cooking and Freezing in Plastic’ debate. A good friend recently sent me an email warning of the dangers of “microwaving and freezing food in plastic containers” accompanied with supportive research. Another friend responded by saying that the ‘authorities’ (including the FDA and Johns Hopkins University) say that Rubbermaid®, Tupperware®, plastic cookware and food wrap sold for home use have been thoroughly tested, only tiny traces of a plasticizer have been found, and even that is not an endocrine disrupter. This set off a productive dialogue about who to believe about what.

Another
friend who is a prominent bio-chemist and clinical physiologist says
the impact of synthetics has a major impact on compromising the immune
system. (He contends that contrary to some reports, leaching from
microwave cooking has been proven to occur in virtually all plastics
and whether the plastic touches the food or not). Ugh!

Personally,
I give little credence to much of the mainstream position on health and
well-being. Unfortunately, doubting our ‘authorities’

read more
Fearless Aging

The Game of Life

Last week, the International Herald Tribune featured a fun editorial on the Game of Life Twists & Turns by Lawrence Downes. He was musing that if ‘life is a game’ he hopes it isn’t like the 120-year-old brainchild of Milton Bradley. It seems that the board game is getting another face-lift in August (the last one was about 1960). I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

His description of the ‘new’ Game of Life and of playing it with his young

read more
Wisdom in Action

Aging and Poverty

I just came from Sao Paulo—an enormous city of more than 20 million folks. Brazil has about 188 million, a lot of them dealing with poverty every day. They have about 17 million folks over 60 and, like our aging population, that number will almost double by 2025. The biggest difference is that Brazil doesn’t have as much of an economic foundation and social infrastructure to support its older citizens. I was speaking to a friend there who shared his view that very few people in Latin America,

read more
Wisdom in Action

Sand Art

I am profoundly grateful today for the gift of life and the opportunity to observe. How extraordinary and beautiful this all is. When we consider how miraculous it is that we are here at all, even the difficulty and pain are exquisite.

If I think about my life, it is utterly amazing that I have survived this long and have had such a wealth of experiences—a cornucopia of the good, the bad and the ugly. Perhaps the greatest gift of growing older is to appreciate ALL of it, the marvelous and the

read more
Personal Empowerment

The Blessing of Sadness

By Don Arnoudse
Bio

For as long as I can remember, I have been an optimistic person. I’ve always taken great pride in my natural inclination to see a ‘silver lining in every cloud’. ‘Making lemonade out of lemons’ was one of my favorite clichés. Imagine my surprise when, in a recent conversation with Ann, my personal coach, I heard her say she felt a deep shiver of sadness while listening to me. It brought me up short. I had been talking about turning 59 years old, how good life was right now and, at the same time, how acutely aware I was of how fast time was flying by. When I stopped, took a deep breath, and listened to my body, I realized that deep down there was a pool of sadness within me. This is an emotion I’ve kept at bay for a long time. I’ve learned in my work with Julio Olalla at the Newfield Network that sadness is not something to be avoided. Contrary to what our culture would have us believe, it is a valuable emotion—one that reminds us of what we truly value. When we mourn the loss of someone or something, we are brought up close and personal to that which truly makes our life worthwhile.  I’ve decided to ‘practice’ sadness. To let it in, rather than deflect it. I am beginning to understand the gift it is. In great sadness, we have a profound opportunity to take another look at our life and make course corrections. Ironically, sadness can also give us access to gratitude. Sadness points us to what we must accept in life in order to achieve real peace. From now on, whenever I feel a glimmer of sadness, I intend to sink into it a bit before moving on with my busy life. I feel sad about a number of things even now… My father died last October. I felt initially overwhelmed with sadness and then, in my eulogy of him, I was so grateful for the many things I had learned from this modest man. My two children are 21 and 22. I am sad for the many mistakes I now see I made as a parent. As they create their independent lives, I am sad for the distance between us. I am so grateful for them in my life and I so value my relationship with them. My sadness points out my need to accept that I did the best I knew how to do at the time and reveals my commitment to love them for the rest of my life. I am increasingly aware of my mortality. I do the ‘life math’ and am sad that I won’t have as much time as I would like. My sadness points out how much I love life, my fascination with so many things, and the eagerness with which I live most of my days. What a blessing! I am sad for my friends who have already died. I miss them and I am so grateful for the contributions they made to who I am today. I pledge anew to make time for the friends I have today. I am sad for the state of the world we inhabit. War, hunger, poverty, the environment, terrorism, racism, greed and exploitation of the powerless and all the other seemingly intractable problems sometimes seem so overwhelming. I am glad I no longer live with my ‘head in the sand’, naively seeing only the bright side. I commit to engaging with the world, not hiding in fear. As I hear the life stories of my coaching clients, I practice letting myself simply be with their sadness for losses they have suffered. Rather than try to cheer them up right away, I acknowledge and am grateful for the connection this allows me to have with them. I am grateful for the shared journey we are on and for the trust they have in me that allows them to communicate their pain. I yearn for peace at this point in my life. My sadness gives me clues to what I must learn to accept to find that peace. I accept that I am a human being who makes mistakes. I have a dark side. I sometimes let people down, even those I most love. I sometimes betray my own values. I procrastinate on important things. I backslide on resolutions I have made. And these are all things that make me who I am. These are the struggles that have shaped my character and remind me of what I prize in life. My wounds have given me compassion for others. My failures have allowed me to appreciate success and the value of continuing to show up and give things my best shot. My tears allow me to get close, to drop my mask and be intimately connected with others.  So, when you see me with tears in my eyes, please don’t try to cheer me up. Be grateful, along with me, for the blessing of sadness. read more
Wisdom in Action

Procrastination

Jose Ortega Y Gasset said, “The most compelling thing about life is its immediacy. It is fired at us point blank”. I think that says a lot for why we need to learn to live in the moment and not become trapped in our internal conversations about this and that, forever chasing the future that never arrives or dragging the past forward like a yoke….

We live too much of our lives in our head, wishing and wanting things to happen later and regretting and resenting what is already gone … and

read more
Personal Empowerment

Grown Ups

AARP Magazine’s editor did an interesting video interviewing folks on the question of what a grown up is. It was interesting to hear the diverse viewpoints on this concept, and to discover how little agreement there is about what constitutes ‘being grown up’. Everyone seems to have a different point of view about what the words mean. The conversations we have about ‘acting our

read more