Snapshots and Visions: a View from the Now

Publisher Marketing: You have the power to reinvent yourself! The power lies not in your mind alone. It's also in your genes and DNA. It's what makes us human. Humans change - that's the essence of life. Everything, from the smallest plant to the largest mountain, is in the process of change. And that's especially true with human beings. We can't always recognize it when it happens slowly and we learn to adjust to the differences. But when a living organism stops changing, it dies. I'm not just talking about simple physical changes, here. Those changes are not that important, really. They're going to happen, one way or another, whether we are conscious of them or not. I'm talking about psychological, emotional and spiritual changes - the kinds of changes, for instance, that mold children into mature, emotionally balanced adults. Each of us, by the time we hit senior citizenship, will have made countless choices and agonized over millions of decisions. We tend to think of them as either good or bad. Some of them led to happy, productive, constructive events. Others got us into a world of trouble. But from the perspective of age, every choice was good in this sense: it offered the opportunity to learn something. Right or wrong, good or bad, whatever the consequences that followed our decision, we learned from what we have done. That kind of learning is called experience. That's all experience is - living through the consequences of choices and remembering what happened. Contributor Bio:  Willis, Jim Jim Willis, PhD, is professor of journalism at Azusa Pacific University. He is a veteran news reporter and editor, formerly with "The Dallas Morning News" and "The Daily Oklahoman", and has lectured for the U. S. State Department on topics regarding American journalism. His published works include the Praeger titles "The Media Effect: How the News Influences Politics and Government" and "The Human Journalist: Reporters, and Perspectives, and Emotions" as well as Greenwood's "100 Media Moments that Changed America". Willis holds a doctorate in journalism from the University of Missouri.