Tag: TIME

Long Winding Road

To your door……

I woke up to a Friday. Not any Friday. But a birthday Friday.

Long and winding road. Like a graph, your life can be “manipulated” to make it a more positive-trending (not Bell-shaped).

Depends on how you look at it. People have said that President Obama looks older than when he first took up office. Oh well, who wouldn’t  after three and half long years.

I share concerns with friends these days. Always with long shots, and high hopes, from Electric Vehicles to Electronic Medical Records. Stuff that earlier generations had never heard of.

(except for the EV part).

The same with Mars and upcoming discoveries in Science. How they will shape and reshape the human race.

Yet one thing stays unchanged: human nature itself. We still react under certain principles, Pavlovian, for instance.

Ring the bell, the dog salivates. Facing danger, fright or flight.

Oh well. Long and winding road.

Friends said no matter how far and how much traveling they had done, when they came home, they just wanted mama’s cooking. Acquired taste. Subliminal and unconditional trusting. Talk not to strangers (yet I keep connecting with the multitude of you out there via Social).

Talking about networking. Since it’s my birthday. Can you send me a referral. Some doctors who need to install EMR?

Or a telecom engineer department that need their software tested offshore. Long shots? Yes. Long winding Road? Yes.

We , social animal, do need each other and do reciprocate.

I am here today thanks to the help of many friends and families.

I in turn have helped friends and again, some families.

That’s how the circle of Life operates. How pay-forward  works. And how the virtuous cycle is. There is no need to recast that graph. Just be and become better. Each life is different and each person unique. Born on a different day and dies at a  different  hour. While living, let’s make it a pleasant journey. The tilted clock on the wall reminds me that there was an Earthquake a few days ago. Even time is not standing still. Nor is the clock that shows time. How can you assume too much that it (Life) is going to be a straight line? To me, it’s more like a long and winding road.

Adventure in my homeland

One of my earliest  collections was the Adventure of Tin-Tin.

It was a roadmap for my adventure later in life, which took me to ten countries and roughly fifty cities in North America. But nothing had prepared me for an adventure in my homeland. Certain familiar elements still exist: Chemin de Fer, Ben Thanh Market and the noodle stand in my old neighborhood. But new elements have emerged as well: I-Pho T-shirts, I-Center and Steve Jobs biography in Vietnamese.

At rush hour, thousands of helmets compete for pavement and sidewalk. Call it “Helmet Nation”. But at night, when the heat subsides, tables and chairs sprout up on the very sidewalks commuters had just fought for the right of way earlier.

People are getting married (young demographic), are into fashion and style and going to school at ALL hours of the day ALL WEEK LONG.

I heard that Koreans work  the longest hours (55) and the French shortest (35).

Maybe Vietnam should be ranked at the top for classroom hours vs free time.

(This study load perhaps did not scare off the only Korean student enrolled in Vietnam University to study MBA out of a few thousand foreign students in Vietnam, most taking Vietnamese lessons).

During my “re-entry” I could pass as a “pure” native, until  my slightly red-hue hair gave me away

“Good morning Sir, would you like to see the menu?” one vendor approached me at Ben Thanh Market.

And before I knew it, I purchased a Steve Jobs biography by TIME’s former Editor (in Vietnamese, by Alpha Book) instead.

After all, Steve was born Syrian. And his idea of “think different” would fit here where “Sorrows of War” copies are sold along with I-Pho T-shrits.

On my way home, I stopped by the I-Center in District 3 to see how closely this “reseller” reflects Steve’s original and obsessive control of  every Retail  detail (inadvertently, I acted as an unsolicited mystery shopper).

The rep asked “what would you like to buy”?

In the States, his counterparts would have left me alone to play with the I-products, until I became so engaged and enthralled that I wouldn’t need to be asked (puppy-dog sales).

The strangest feeling was to walk out of Mission Impossible (which took the audience to the Kremlin, Dubai and Mumbai) and emerged into the sunlight of my old neighborhood in District 3. For a moment, life seemed to be  a continuous loop, from Adventure of Tin Tin, to Tom Cruise, to Tommy (me), as one  writer put it, ” return to the same place, and see it for the first time”.

I finally understood the expression “the eyes of one’s heart”. Perhaps we will reach the Empathic Civilization sooner than thought: understand others and be understood. Full circle. Adventure that started at my doorstep ended there as you may have guessed. Ecole L’Aurore. District 3.