Tag: Kairos

People w/ Purpose

When I read about a young girl who designed flip-flops and got picked up by Macy’s, I thought that was awesome.

My daughter thought the girl in White House Down was also.

Built-in and born with. That recognition of greatness, valor and something grander than one’s self.

We might not end up being one, but we can recognize it when we see it.

Self-actualization.

United Flight 93 passengers had not thought of themselves as heroes or martyrs.

But they have become in our history book.

People with purpose.

Not cogs in the machine.

But inventors of one.

The market is the most democratic place. People vote with their own pocket-book.

Those who don’t make it pass the Valley of Death, won’t be around.

Survival of the fittest.

ROI. COD. Billions of transaction daily.

See that need, pin it down. Think up a solution. Implement and Evaluate.

Out of the gene pool emerge People with Purpose.

Design a flip flop (after all, in the summer or in Asia, they are shoes).

Flag twirling? An extra curriculum? Use it when needed.

The inventor of the mouse (for computer program which was called CAT) has died.

He saw the coming of the computer age.

Jobs also. Sitting in a minimalist room, or even laying down, he came up with the I-Pad, a tweak of Notebook which HP had flopped and could never play catch up.

The purpose-driven life has a short span. It takes you into the zone, the Kairos, as opposed to Chronos, which inmates know damn well.

When was the last time you pick up a good book, and immerse yourself in it? Its narrative, plot and twist, laughter and sorrow.

Writers invent a world of their own.

With a purpose.

Raymond Carver observed the absurdity and agony of our modern age, albeit in sleepy NorthWest.

His short life did not seem to be a waste (spending away his Chronos jumping from one odd job to another, just to create and give us a chance to enter into his Kairos).

Where do I begin, to tell the story of ….People of Purpose.

You find greatness everyday. You just miss it.

Greatness doesn’t scream from the distance for attention.

It is hidden like in an acre of diamond.

Hidden jewel.

Awaiting discovery.

In most the unlikely place.

Like right here, right now.

And when found, it will get us to jump out of our seats. To follow its light. To be changed and be that force of change.

I like that little girl who designs flip-flops. Her age doesn’t come as a hindrance. It makes news.

Rain-bow start

It’s not an optical illusion. It’s real.  Has always been there and it’s called light. But somehow, this afternoon, at the start of my run around the park, I saw a rainbow. Nature conspires to create a rainbow for Southern California. Breath-taking is its beauty.

People paused and took pics from their I-phones. It’s a rare sight indeed, consider there wasn’t even a drop of rain.

It’s always been there.  Just another way to show itself, light that is.

We need sunlight and its photosynthesis effect.

The cycle of dawn to dusk.

We keep hearing “life is too short”. And then, we hear that in places like Alaska, the days are long.

Which is true? People must be talking about Kairos vs Chronos.

Timeliness vs the conventional 24-hour cycle.

(BTW, it’s news cycle now. So we all know what happened with Isaac upgrade to Hurricane category 1, or  GOP kicks off their meeting in Tampa,  etc…).

We are inundated with trivia. News that trigger curiosity but trivia still.

Then we learn to tune out the top and the side bars (advertising).

Then we grow desensitized and disengaged. If world citizens are “compassion-fatigue”, not so much because they wore themselves out from doing good, but because they threw the baby out with the bathwater i.e. news, as presented to us in current forms-  that they might miss out an opportunity to engage or be warned.

I got a good laugh today, when my roommate showing off his once-$600 film camera. Who would sell him films and develop them nowadays?

Change comes that quickly.

And might you, the guy is still young. Not your grandfather with his black-and-white momento.

So, we get on, with RIM down, Nokia down, Sony struggles and Amazon rules (the Cloud).

That quickly.

But nothing is new. All that happened before. Just like the rainbow I saw today.

Just another way for nature , which has always been there, to be in our face, with a new spin on an old story line. Inviting and daring discoverers to go where no one has ever set foot before.

RIP Neil Armstrong. You got to see that picture of them in an isolated trailer, with President Nixon looking in from the outside.

It could have been their coffins, given the 60’s P.O.V.  In fact, there had been a prepared speech,  just in case they didn’t make it.

Now, with giants’ shoulders as platform, let’s stand tall, be confident and grateful that we have less fear of the irrational. And best of all, a majority of us will have long to live, love and  learn more than those before us, who I am sure had seen an occasional rainbow as I did today, and perhaps had also wondered: is it an act of God? Is this lucky or what? To have such a symmetry painted on the sky, for free and for all.

Redemptive rain

Our own Duc Huy, along with Dylan, during the 80’s, sang about “the hope of redemption” and how “the heart found joy once again”.

The 80’s was the time of culture war: right vs left, straight vs gay, East vs West, secular vs conservative.

Thirty years on, we are faced with a different set of challenges. Small potatoes now grow dominant, so do small apps.

BRICS finally emerged, while incumbents are now worried about social disparity and other larger trends i.e. gay marriage. It rained here last night in Saigon. Free wash! Free Aircon!

One cannot ignore the sound of heavy rain pounding on tin roofs. It was also redemptive: one wash sweeps all dirt.

Duc Huy resonates the longing for faith and trust.

His thoughts flow, from morning coffee to evening pavement ( that leads to the girl’s home) and display universal longing for permanence instead of temporal, eternal instead of fleeting.

Duc Huy wishes for more rain to tie down his love, for time to stand still.

That moment in time, we all experience at times, is called Kairos.

It is a mark, an event that is more significant than any others.

It reveals who we are to us.

Then, perhaps,  there is hope for redemption.

“Toi hy vong duoc on cuu roi” (I might  hope for redemptive love).

I started my opening chapters of Monte Christo.

We all know the story line. But its author first paints the perfect picture of a young sea Captain reunited with young wife, before he is betrayed, and imprisoned.

Of course, the plot will switch to revenge instead of redemption.

But that is human drama unfolded.

That is how much “dirt” we manage to produce.

Then came the rain. Redemptive rain.

One wash, all gone.

Begin anew. Hope again, trust again, love again.

Like smokers who will get a new lung after 7 years of quitting, we all are getting another shot at life. Just don’t use the same script again. It will only produce the same result. Try the opposite. From bottom and up. Outside in. Be creative. Be redeemed. Be rain makers.

On being a foreigner

Train, plane or automobile, we all try to get somewhere, point A to point B.

Far enough to be looked at as “foreigner”.

The Economist has a piece on this subject to highlight the decade of globalization.

http://www.economist.com/world/international/displayStory.cfm?story_id=15108690&source=hptextfeature

I was surprised to find Vietnam, especially in HCMC and Hanoi, to be very cosmopolitan i.e. a large body of expats and international tourists. Meanwhile, young Vietnamese themselves travel overseas for educational and occupational opportunities.

Recent news showed violent incidents among the Vietnamese expat workers in Eastern Europe and Vietnamese students in Taiwan.

This is a withdrawal syndrome of a minority group (cocoon) when facing the “threat” of a larger majority, the Others.

And while regrouping, they turn onto each other, love or hate. It happened in Paris with the Russian immigrants, Little Italy in the US etc..

In the 1920’s, Americans found Paris, its cuisine and culture (as Parisians perhaps now discovering Big Mac and small Mickey) fascinating. Hemingway and Maugham all had memorable recollection on this era.

Something about greeting the New Year in a foreign land, far away from home.

The balloons, the balls and booze are the same, yet in the company of strangers, one experiences “lonely crowd” syndrome.

And everybody is aware that while it is New Year there, it’s not yet New Year else where (a testimony to our globalized world) e.g. Russian New Year lands on the 13th, Chinese a month later etc….

The Greek have two different words to express this sense of time: kairos and chronos.

Kairos is the fullness of time, while chronos is just the ticking of time (like 60 minutes on CBS, or 24 hours with Jack Bauer). In Kairos, one can greet the New Year with a sense of awe and anxiety e.g. a decade ago with the Y2K scare. Kairos brings about convergence of chances and choices. Cultivation and harvest time.

Other time zones will have to endure the chonos, to take their turn at counting down. Ten, nine, ….

Everybody sings Abba’s “Happy New Year“. Cheap champagne was passed around. Balloons were popped. Kessler described this experience of Russian celebrating their expat New Year in lowly quarter of Paris (The Night of the Emperors).

It is only to show that we have no control over the passing of time, and the changing of places.

More and more cities are being transformed to accommodate population growth. And real estate are in demand, driving the poor to the outer edges. Dark side of change.

The hard part is to get pass that denial: the more things stay the same, the more they have to change.

Thatcher was found to be utterly against the influx of Boat People into former British Hong Kong.

And look at where things are now . The economy in Asia is resilient, just as its people.

In this 21st century, the real foreigness perhaps lies within ourselves: that ardent refusal to admit that the world had moved on, and that it will be easier to be Margaret Mead than Margaret Thatcher. Not with the broadband penetration, not with the mobility of smart phones, and not with supersonic boom in E commerce and global commerce. If Made-In-China is no longer foreign, then nothing is foreign today. Just a hop on the plane, you will be from point A getting to point B.

Global shuttle and reshuffling of the card deck. An illness or blessing? All in the eyes of the beholder. But no longer a foreigner in 20th-century sense. Not with I-pod, I-phone and I-nternet.