Mostly Personal

It has been far too long since the last post to this blog, for which I apologize. So I’m going to ramble a bit to bring you up to date.

In July, I attended the World Future Society conference in Vancouver, B.C., which is one of my favorite cities. Brought back lots of good memories. The conference was very good—lots of good speakers and sessions. This annual event is almost like a reunion with lots of good friends, since I’ve been participating at WFS for over ten years. In addition, the Association of Professional Futurist held a session for their members the day before the conference.

A lot of good things happened for me in Vancouver. I participated in Steve Steele’s panel on teaching Futures Studies, then was interviewed by Dee McCrorey (here’s the link http://youtu.be/0YKUkOR7y6g), and had several meetings about Personal Futures and my book It’s YOUR Future… Make it a Good One! Finally, I was offered an opportunity to teach a class in Personal Futures at the Universite Anger (pronounced Ahn-jay) in France, starting in the fall of 2012. I quickly accepted! More about this in another post.

Back home in Southern Texas, there were orders waiting for me to ship books, mostly to college bookstores, as school starts soon. I’m noticing that a lot of students are ordering the eBook version.

Now, the real justification for waiting so long to write this blog.

In early August, I had cataract surgery in my right eye. Very simple and quick, with amazing results. I had to turn down the brightness on my computer monitors, and still wore sunglasses because the right eye was taking in so much more light. For days, I would close one eye, then the other to compare the old and the new. The difference was hard to believe. If you really want to know what it’s like to have cataracts, smear a little Vaseline on your sunglasses, then go out for a walk or drive.

I’ll have the same surgery on the other eye next month, and can hardly wait. Cataracts are one of the effects of aging. When I was young, there was no surgery for cataracts. Many old people simply could not see.

I suspect that over the next several years this surgery will become even quicker, simpler, and cheaper, as is happening with so many medical procedures. Heart surgery is a good example of this progress. In the Fifties, people, especially men, had heart attacks in middle age and died. In the Seventies and Eighties, surgeons cracked open chest cavities and bypassed clogged heart arteries. Long, painful recoveries were the optimistic outcome. Now, most of those surgeries have been replaced by balloon angioplasty with little or no pain and very quick recoveries. Many procedures or surgeries never occur, because they have been prevented by medications that clean arteries before they can become clogged.

Looking backwards, you can see huge progress. Looking forward, you can already see that bio-science, technology, medicine and medical procedures are advancing rapidly, and will be bringing substantial future benefits to Boomers and the following generations. The result continues to be longer and healthier lives.

Want to know more about Personal Futures? Visit www.personalfutures.net or follow me on Twitter @urfuturist.