Living

I've been very blessed recently to have a dream to work towards, a family to love and to be loved, and friends to share living moments with.

Passion and Synch

From 14 to 18, it was so special to feel that shy excitement making a duet with the guy next door amongst cheers from the karaoke crowd.  Achievements were never the aim.  Having fun and passing requirements was :) Enjoying being friends and learning from young and old teachers alike was rewarding.  The SN world was anti-competitive, anti-pressure, the lost child of the school lol

Then for the next 4 years, all they talked about was finding a purpose. Passions have to be utilitarian, even if the utility can just mean making oneself feel happy or content with 'having found one's path'.  It's better to partition oneself in a delicately balanced way, such that most highly-valued utilities can be realized. As Steve Jobs, Oprah, and many other graduation speakers have concluded, pursuing one's passions is perceived as one of the surest ways of living a meaningful life.

But then, not everything needs a purpose. Focusing on passions can be different from focusing on life.  The former can easily be an excuse for achievements. Would we trade losing the next hour planning and executing one's passion for those few minutes feeling shy or excited with friends and family, innocent, light, and pure? Would we spend the next day growing the same passions even bigger because that's the natural path the passions would lead to, or let life come in and tell you something else, in all its liberty and mystery? Either way works, hardly comparable yet both can be as satisfactory.  Yet, knowing the purpose is hardly the decision compass; synching with life may be.

It feels good to when we once felt surfing and 'synching' with life.  Recreating the experience could be almost impossible.  But we do know what we did NOT think about and what we spent our time on, because of some unknown feelings (gut/intuition).  We know what feels right, albeit no purpose, no clarity of passions.

Friendship - Grad reflection

found from 2009, on airplane home from college graduation :)

      JW, with his usual pragmatism, said with a tone of denial, of resistance or simply, of not being sure how to handle the fact that a few years from now, our friends will drift apart.  I sadly had to concur with him that we would not be able to attend to each other’s ups and lows, of important events in our lives, anymore.  But will it be that sad if when we meet again, all we will talk about is the past? Won’t we be able to talk about the present and the future, the mundane everyday conversations or meaningful conversations? I’m not sure.  The analytical me told me that there are many different layers of friendships: based on common interests, similar experiences, shared values, and the deepest level, shared purpose.   

      Friends with common interests will be able to have fun with each other talking about sports, girls, movies, music – you know, all those first conversations we have with new friends.  Similar experiences engage friends with common interest at another level where we bond through “hardships” and common achievements, like a team’s experience.  We would experience each other’s strengths and weaknesses, when they are happy and when they are stressed.  Shared values would then predict whether the friends can stay strong during the similar experiences.  Conflicts sometimes arise and should our foundational values are too diverge, we stay away from investing our time and efforts being with these friends.  

      Shared values can form really deep friendships, yet we change, as we grow up and as we are physically too far from each other to have shared experiences or to fully be together when our values change.  Our friendships are at risk at this stage, or put in JW’s words: our friendship base would shrink as we grow up.  Shared purpose may be able to heal this gap.  For example, we are concerned about each other’s happiness and dreams, or we share the same life purpose, broadly speaking, of improving ourselves, understanding the world, making impacts, and living with our human inevitable cycle of birth and death, etc.  These purposes will bring themes to our friendships and will make us, as my idealism and optimism say, stay great friends.  They have the potential to transcend geographic or temporal barrier to friendships.  Yes, our friendship base will shrink but at any point in the future, should we meet each other, I hope our common sense of purposes will still bring us conversations, tears and smiles, just like the brightly innocent, sincere and happy smiles we have had for each other, when we were at Stanford, radiated in the sun. 

Back

 

Back to life

For tomorrow that may never come 

For the world that falls and stands 

For romances chasing moonlights

For friends lasting through seasons 

For life and purposes 

For vast rivers, endless sky, beautiful imperfections 

It feels wonderful to be back 

Fresh and anew in joy 

:)

Facebook and the ivory international school dream

Back then, I wanted to move to an international school very early on in high school, tired of rote memorization and looking for * something else * that I believed was more holistic, with better teachers, better programs.  The tuition fees were exorbitant! And hence, I stood outside, from my public school looking faraway, for a freer land.

The international school community was then for me an ivory tower, an idealistic dream.  My dream was protected from all reality that was happening behind those walls.

Nowadays, with facebook and the Internet, the walls are torn down.  Yet, if I were a student now, how would I feel?  Envious with the prom parties, the international travel photos, the non-Vietnamese facebook friends, the good-looking dresses? Disappointed with a world not always filled with motivation, good friends, good teachers? Or simply appreciating what I would be having even more?

With facebook and such transparent personal information load, would the world feel more empowered, or more disenchanted with more reality? When more truth is relatively easier to seek now than before, people could be more self-conscious. But their quality of life, improved or not, seems to me not being essentially driven by this development.

A human day

Once again, things remind me that we can never know for sure when would be the last time we see someone and can just exchange some nice acts between humans: a smile, a handshake, a hug, a sentence.

And that realization has melted all the other worldly emotions. When it's between humans, I ought to remember that I will never know when would be the last time.... 

Power, Money, Love, Ideals, and Life frames

- You know why you should advocate for U.S. colleges over other countries? Because it's where kids can be asked to dream and have both the freedom and the social pressure to dream and pursue one's dream.

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The Singapore and U.K. education frame students' purpose around making it to the top of the corporate ladder, and hence, valuing money.  The Australian education teaches students specific vocations, valuing stable life.  The Vietnamese education separates professors from students, which makes students have nothing more exciting to do than to bond with each other more and hence, to value love.  And here I am, indoctrinated by the habit to ask why, wonder about life's purpose, like a black sheep in these circles when talking about "dreams." 

I recently find myself at odds with the circle I'm familiar with as well.  These people I know, inspired by their U.S. education and understanding so well their own life reasons, are pursuing their dreams, ambitious, worth-pursuing.  Some others make do with what they need to live first, money and family.  Some take advantage of the time and the skills to become, step by step, more powerful.  When the pieces are arranged together, the attractive picture of various impacts and happy lives shimmers.  On the pessimistic frame, it looks as though some dreams have been left behind for new dreams and the realistic life to take the lead.  On the optimistic frame, maybe it was just a hole in the U.S. college education: one should not strive for individual impacts or for becoming heroes, because in reality, the collective impacts of a generation and how those interact with external forces of the society they live in should worth more than any particular case.

When I get depressed and put on my pessimistic frame, I could be so sarcastic of people, even though they do nothing wrong or bad, and being sarcastic of them means being sarcastic of my own self.  When I put on my optimistic frame, I have to turn off my impatient desires for answers and angst for knowing the future.  When I couldn't care more about anything and stay with my under-twenty personality, it feels like a kid, so optimistic, moving on, playing, smiling.  Sometimes, it feels sad having such a messy soul, as it makes sharing too challenging.