Personal Growth

The responses to my last post, both on the blog and through email, have been many, var­ied and deeply appre­ci­ated. They’ve been thought­ful, and have inspired me to think.

Many of my friends encour­aged me not to give up on the pas­sions that add color to my life and to con­tinue pur­su­ing them. A cou­ple asked prag­matic ques­tions; like if each pas­sion added to my abil­ity to work and play or took away from it, and how to prac­ti­cally find time for all of them.

But per­haps my friend Pai­boon gave the most prac­ti­cal answer of all: To remove pas­sion from my heart, focus, be con­tent, set goals and act to achieve them. His advice gave me the most pause for thought.

To get where Paiboon’s com­ing from though, you have to under­stand who he is. Just four years ago, Pai­boon was an ordi­nary layper­son just like you and I, work­ing every­day for a liv­ing. In June of 2006 though, he gave it all up to become a Bud­dhist monk, and he’s been one ever since. So his advice comes from a really dif­fer­ent place.

If I under­stand it cor­rectly, Paiboon’s say­ing to not be led by my pas­sions, but to lead my pas­sions with inten­tional focus and con­sciously set goals. He’s warn­ing me that unbri­dled pas­sion is a well that can­not be filled, or an ani­mal that can’t be tamed, and will always push me ever onwards, in an end­less search to sat­isfy its thirst.

Pro­duc­tiv­ity, mean­ing, pur­pose, dreams, life, death. Things you don’t always want to think about, but which will always come back to haunt you in the quiet moments.

My car got back-ended last week. It was a heavy hit from the back, the entire back left cor­ner of my car was smashed in and twisted, a mean feat espe­cially since my metal con­ti­nen­tal was struck by a light­weight Japan­ese model. The left rear body folded in, pin­ning the back left door and jam­ming the wheel. Aside from some sprained necks, nobody was seri­ously injured. We were lucky, really lucky. Strange how I can feel that after I’ve been in an acci­dent that I didn’t cause, but when I imag­ine how much worse it could have been in any of a mil­lion lit­tle ways, I do.

What did the crash feel like? You can imag­ine the phys­i­cal crash: light-hearted ban­ter amongst the three of us as we waited to make a right turn, one of hun­dreds we’ve already made in a car, after a nice din­ner and look­ing for­ward to some evening cof­fee when we were thrown for­ward, our con­ver­sa­tion inter­rupted by a loud crush­ing of steel, crack­ing of plas­tic and break­ing of glass, and in an instant – see­ing the peo­ple you love being vio­lently shook for­ward and back, looks of sur­prise and pain on their faces. That’s what I can vaguely remem­ber, but really, every­thing hap­pened in a sud­den loud moment.

I read ear­lier this week that it’s harder to be kind than it is to be clever.

My girl­friend and I were cook­ing din­ner for my par­ents over the week­end. It was sup­posed to be fun, we were try­ing out a cou­ple of new recipes and I wanted to let my mom and dad take it easy as we pre­pared them a meal. But one of the switches on our stoves just wouldn’t turn.

I wanted to use another stove but my dad – ever the fixer-upper – wouldn’t let it go. He forced the switch and gas started hiss­ing out. Then the switch stuck, and we couldn’t turn it back! Gas kept leak­ing into the kitchen as we scram­bled to turn the switch back and cut the gas off, but no luck.

Amidst this rush, I snarled at my dad: “I told you to leave it alone already!”

I really regret­ted that.

We twisted the switch back with a wrench soon after, and on hind­sight there really wasn’t any dan­ger in our well-ventilated kitchen. But rather than hav­ing a good laugh of relief over a prob­lem solved, I’d turned the sit­u­a­tion into an even unhap­pier one, just because I had to insist on hav­ing been clev­erer.

The truth is, I had been the dumb­est one in that room.

Unless it’s hor­ri­ble, I don’t sugar my cof­fee too much. Too sweet and it becomes sugar water. Too bit­ter and drink­ing becomes tor­tur­ous. Just a lit­tle bit­ter, because it forces me to con­sider the drink each and every time I take a sip – instead of mind­lessly con­sum­ing it, the cof­fee becomes med­i­ta­tion; ask­ing me to focus and be aware of it as I’m drinking.

I hated the new U.S.S. Enter­prise ever since I saw it in the Star Trek reboot. Its nacelles bur­geoned, its lower hull jut­ted too much for­ward and tapered way too much back. Where the old Enter­prise NCC-1701 was an ele­gant, white seag­ull, the new Enter­prise was a fat, obnox­ious pel­i­can that looked like it couldn’t stand on two legs.

The orig­i­nal Enter­prise, a beauty of design.

The new USS Enterprise.

And yet, some­thing kept mak­ing me look, and look, and look at it again.

It was just bit­ter enough to force me to con­sider it every time I looked at it.

My brother bought me the new Enter­prise toy for my birth­day, not sus­pect­ing the geeky design angst I was hav­ing over the imag­i­nary star­ship. At last, I thought, this inces­sant tug to look at the ugly pel­i­can could be sat­is­fied, as I placed the toy model on my work desk.