Just got back from a logistics meeting feeling incredibly excited about a new personal project I’m doing. Next Saturday I’m flying off to Udon Thani, a small town in Thailand, for about a week. I’m going to visit my friend Paiboon, who’s been a monk for the last five years, at the forest temple of Wat Pa Don Hiay Soke.
I last visited him four years ago; I told the story of my first visit to the forest temple and the subsequent 10 days in a Vipassana meditation retreat in the now retired Life Coaches Blog. I’ve always wanted to visit with him again, but I never got around to doing it.
Paiboon & I, four years ago in 2007.
Since those four years, I’ve polished my interviewing and photographic skills working as a full-time writer, and I dreamed up this idea of not just revisiting Paiboon, but applying my skills there to come back with a short video interview about his life as a monk in this remote forest temple.
I thought his friends back home would be curious to know why he gave up his secular life and career four years ago to become a monk, and especially curious about why he’s stayed a monk for the last five years, when at the beginning he only wanted to become one for three months. What has he gained that makes him prefer a life of austerity over a secular life, and what nuggets of wisdom can he share with us after following the Buddha’s path for half a decade? Does he ever think he’ll come back to a secular life, if not, why not? Read More →
I never had any interest in learning how to drive.
For that, I have to credit an ex-girlfriend, who repeatedly pushed me to take lessons. I’m glad I did now, because I was lucky enough to graduate with a family car waiting for me. For my first car, I got a 1991 BMW E30 316.
It may have been 16 years old when I got it, but it was still in relatively good shape. And it handled like a dream – not that I knew how to appreciate it until I had to drive a rental Japanese car when Snoopy later got into an accident. Snoopy was what I called her, strange mix of gender I know, when the Snoopy from the cartoon strip Peanuts is male. But my brother coined the name after it got sprayed white, with its black accents it looked just the part and the name stuck. I never felt like Snoopy was a guy though, so I always called Snoopy ‘her’.
Even though some of my friends made fun of me driving an old car, I absolutely loved the fact that she was a vintage breed. For one, you don’t get many of her on the road, and whenever Snoopy and I bumped into another E30 there was always a joy of recognition (I remember one particular gold E30 pulled up beside us on the road and we waved hello to each other). I loved her centered, balanced stance and her unassuming headlight eyes. I loved her classic frame, which gave her infinitely more character than the generic-looking cars these days which tend to look like one other. Just by looking at her, you could tell that the car had been designed by somebody who cared, and it made me appreciate driving her all the more. Read More →
I get why some people don’t like Chinese New Year. The same incessant songs running on repeat, the endless questions by relatives during visits and the sheer effort put into every year’s preparations.
But for my part, I love Chinese New Year. I love the cleaning and the preparing, I love that the shops are closed, I love the festive season in the air, I love that everyone wears something new and cheerful. And though the words may not always come true every year, I love how we still greet each other with blessings of health and wealth on this special occasion.
Most of all, I love visiting relatives I don’t get to see for the entire year. I love seeing my aunties, uncles and cousins – maybe not all of them to be sure, but enough of them to make it all worthwhile. It’s also a stark realization when I see them older every year; when many of them are passing through the golden years into the sunset ones.
This year, one of my aunties doesn’t respond as quickly to our calls anymore, and she just sits there staring into space. I’m not sure if she’s just hard of hearing and seeing or if she just isn’t there. It makes me think of times when she was vital, when we used to all play cards together at Chinese New Year and when I used to stay at her house as a little child. Read More →
There’s a saying that goes ‘the map is not the territory.’ It helps to remember that everyone looks through the world using different beliefs and values; an Amazonian tribesman who’s never left the forest sees the world differently than a Vegas billionaire.
The more a map can adapt to feedback from the world the more useful it can become, that’s what learning is. For example, there are certain universal truths that once adopted, help make maps more effective. The principle of gravity is one, it helps you develop the useful belief that jumping off a cliff will significantly shorten your lifespan.
But there are people whose maps seem to have become unhinged from the world around them; where internal reality barely seems to touch external reality. On one extreme you have people in mental institutions who only physically share our space but psychically have disappeared into somewhere else. Tone that down a few shades and you have people who can barely function in society but manage to pass through with enough normalcy…before the degree of their delusion is discovered.
The degree of some people’s delusions amazes me. How they don’t seem to understand the basics, and live in a world where gravity goes up, disrespect expects respect in return and being useless is a skill in itself. A world where the map not only isn’t the territory, but isn’t even a map at all.
At the end of every year I always wonder where it all went. Has it been 365 days, 52 weeks, 8765 hours already? Another year gone, never to come by again, and have I done right by it?
It’s strange having a flawed memory. Images tumble back and forth when I try to recall something, and things that felt like they happened in 2010 actually occured in 2009, and memories from 2009 seep into my recollections of 2010. Events from the year before feel more vivid, while some events that happened a few months ago I can’t remember at all. If not for the photographs I take and the people around me who help me remember, I wouldn’t be able to write this post at all.
Travel Highlights
No photograph could show you how beautiful this spot is in real life.
The highlight of the year for me were the 15 days I spent with my girlfriend in Japan. Especially when we stood on Naoshima island together, outside the cafe of the Chichu Art Museum on a cliff overlooking the sea. Ever since I first visited the museum in 2008, I’d dreamed of bringing her there to see one of the most beautiful places I know. Read More →