Tag: Snow

Snow cover

It doesn’t matter what color your roofing is or the shape of your lawn.

Snow covers them all. In a blanket of white.

Wet and white.

Crushing underneath your feet, leaving foot prints and tire marks.

The power of (snow flakes) accumulation and its compounding effect.

Nature’s lesson to men: there is a season for everything.

Time to be born and time to die.

Nature is self-healing and self-correcting. It shows that nothing is constant  except for change (hint: hard times don’t last).

Go with time flow and season change. Resist not.

Stop playing God.

As if we could.

Born this way. But die some other way.

While alive, pay forward.

Stand tall. And ask not.

Sometimes I wonder what people living in the 60’s  regreted, because, now, we regret life in the 60’s.

When things did not break down as easily, when customer service picked up the phone and spoke your language, and people stopped to help strangers (Good Samaritan).

Now we got a labor surplus (and because machines got more efficient) due to population explosion (3 to 7 Billion). With density, we’ve got scarcity. And the pendulum swings from prosperity to austerity. Yesterday’s dream is today’s problem.  Yet the dream must go on, at least, a version that resonates. It will need new packaging and new label, over the generic, the organic and the authentic. Because if we don’t sell the dream, others will. And their version of snake oil would be worse. Albeit their pitch more perfect. Sugar-coated and snow-covered. Snow, like death, comes uninvited and buries everything. Snow buys us some time regardless what’s underneath. To reflect and to change course before all is revealed.

Becoming yourself

Orhan Pamuk, Nobel Prize Winner, told a story (in the Black Book) about a writer

whose wife left him for no reason at all. Restless and sleepless (and perhaps facing writer’s block) he imagined living out his former single self ( the status he now found himself in ). After a while, the mind played trick and he got used to being single. Until one day, his wife returned to him for no particular reason at all. He again found himself in a situation precaire.  Would you once again imagine yourself  being married so you can get used to it?

I am not sure what the moral of the story is, except that we are not  content with who we are. I guess once we figured out our boundaries, our strengths and weaknesses (painful), we are on the way of becoming ourselves.

Not the kind of person our families wish us to be, nor who we thought we were.

Just is.

After millions of encounters, negotiating and coordinating, including navigating the Wild Wild West  (wow! they did that) and World Wide Web (wow! they are doing that?)  we are on the way to becoming.

With one new revelation, one turn of event, one special encounter, our lives take on a new shape and contour. Dramatic events tend to dominate and serve as bookends to our otherwise uneventful lives. But most lives are lived in “quiet desperation”.  Having said that, what looks like boring to us might be very peculiar and interesting to others (if not for people in other place and time). From future vantage point, our action and inaction during this Housing Bubble  make interesting historical studies (the same as we study the Dutch Tulip Bubble – now with hindsight, we can see it as bubble. But to them, at the time, not jumping in was akin to suicide. The same with the Chicago World Fair, and how for the first time, attendees saw electricity. They simply thought they were in Heaven).

I guess part of the fun in living is discovering. Not so much about places and people, but about how we give and take, turned on and off by a certain place or people. Then we learn about our chemistry as well as our social identity.

Orhan Pamuk moves back and forth on the East-West continuum, so he is more attuned on the subject of identity e.g. women who put on veil or unveiled in Snow, his other novel.

We too in some small way, assumed multiple identities every day. Even if we don’t want to, people still put us in a box, a number and a place in line. NEXT.

Now serving G24 at window number 9.

Please punch in your last 4 digits.

Don’t stand too close to the vehicle etc….

So many web sites, so many log on ID‘s.

Avatars and photos. Inner and outer circles.

No wonder at times, we feel neurotic.

Split identities. Being one thing online and another off-line.

And yet another when we are utterly alone, with a clock or a cross on the wall.

Who are you? Who am I? The color of my skin? The pronunciation of my name?

Or the size of my bank account? If it makes you happy, why the hell are you so sad (sings Cheryl Crow). I hope tonight I don’t have to wish I were my former self. It had its own set of problems back then. Just as now. So just live out the present self. I like it. I like my becoming self. Who else can put up with me besides myself? Wife comes and goes, for no reason at all. It’s me who has to negotiate with my restless self (and muscles) to get some sleep. In restless dream I walk alone,..

Neither East Nor West

Orhan Pamuk must be born of “Other Colors” and in the “Snow” who later built his “Museum of Innocence“.

He got the Nobel Prize for his unique perspective and perception on being in the middle of things: Istanbul.

Pamuk invited us back to his childhood, to view changes through a child’s eyes “when we watched the film, up to the part where

Abraham loved God so much without expecting anything in return, we all cried…then when the lamb suddenly appeared out of nowhere to stand in for his only son, …we busted out in tears” (Museum of Innocence).

In Snow, his character was a journalist who investigated why veiled women went on a suicide binge.

We were invited into the inner sanctum of a mysterious culture, an exclusive club.

There, we learned that they laughed, cried, went to theatre or appeared in play.

The West can learn something and so does the East.

Pamuk truly serves as a hyphen to both worlds.

He inadvertently takes up an ambassadorial role for our new globalized world.

In our broadband world, the speed and spread of information has no longer been an issue.

But information often times don’t equate with knowledge or cross-cultural sensitivity.

Until we enter our customer’s world, with all its habits and behavior.

When Vietnam was partitioned back in 1954, 2 Million North Vietnamese migrated South in “tau ha mom” (French carriers left over from D-day). The majority of them settled near Vung Tau, Bien Hoa and Ban Co.

I was born there at the last stop. Being Northerner inside the house, and Southerner outside, I grew up aware of the subtlety of sub-cultures as they came into contact or even collision.

Later, in America, I seeked out classmates from Ghana, Singapore, Taiwan, Netherland, Argentina …to ask questions, to hear their world views.

Thirty years ago, the issues were information flow (North-South).  Now that Korea and to a certain extent, Vietnam, all got access to broadband and I-phones. The results: South-South lateral flow e.g. Korean soap programing.

Vietnamese companies, meanwhile, are trying to export themselves, from tangible products (rice, garment, cashews and coffee) to intangible products (outsourcing and software testing service.)

Those who enter and embrace customers’ world will win the day.

Those who don’t, won’t.

It took me a while to register Pamuk’s name, the same way North American did with names like “Nguyen”.

But once the lights are dimmed, and you took on the character’s role (suspension of disbelief), you became a “universal” Turk with his hopes, fears and dreams.

Pamuk’s signature is his remembrance of childhood in all its particularity and his negotiating/reconciling East-West identities.

He did not floss over the details. He paid attention to them.

Because of this, he earned our trust and established himself as an observer and author.

He made the mundane his most cherished.

Because of Pamuk, I will never look at the Turks the same way (as friends rather than foreigners).

It’s as if I got new lenses to view the world, from his point of view,  as neither East nor West; just global citizenry who struggle and savor their dreams, exterior and interior.

The problem with our material-centered world is that we focus on the outside and observable at the expense of the inner beauty.

He is no fool to lose that which he cannot keep to gain that which he cannot lose. This is true from Abraham on down to today.