Lorem Ipsum

This combination of sadness, disappointment, anger, and despair is not easy to dissipate. I understood this when I was researching my book “Underground,” about the 1995 gas attack on the Tokyo subway, and interviewing survivors of the attack and family members of those who died. You can overcome the hurt enough to live a “normal” life. But, internally, you’re still bleeding. Some of the pain goes away over time, but the passage of time also gives rise to new types of pain. You have to sort it all out, organize it, understand it, and accept it. You have to build a new life on top of the pain.

Cross-Cultural Communication

At a reception in our flat, four men—a Swede, a Thai, a Korean, and a Filipino—were discussing the indicators for measuring quality of life.
The Thai said: ” Well, gentlemen, my Filipino friend here and I have settled the matter.

We have agreed that the quality of life for us Asian men is better than it is for Western men. And we have one clear indicator for this: we can lie to our wives.”

Pressed to explain, he said: ” Well, when we come home late from a night out with the boys, our wives ask us where we have been. We know that they don’t really want to know the truth, so we lie to them. They know that we are lying, but they also know that we are lying out of consideration for their feelings. It is a sign of love for them, and is accepted as such. They are happy. We are happy. What better life is there?”

After the laughter had subsided, the Swede said wrily, ” You probably have a point there. In my country, we tell our wives the truth and they divorce us.”

This provoked more laughter, as the Swede’s wife had just decided to leave him as a result of having discovered that he was having an affair with a Korean girl.

Then the Korean spoke up: ” l don’t understand all this. What is this business about lying to your wives? In Korea, there is no need to lie to our wives. They never ask us where we have been.”

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from
Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it.
Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m
convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I
did.

To travel is to relearn the particular; to possess the leisure to once again see the particular in itself, in a context all its own. As children we learn from experience what each word means (tree, rock, lef, cold and warm, fast and slow) and then, growing up, we turn to abstraction, in what must be a retreat from the sensory world into the realm of concepts. We become removed and intellectual, forgetting the unbounded variety each concept in truth denotes.

We travel, then, partly to find the meaning of words again: we come full circle (or full spiral, as we ever expand) from word to thing and back again. The slowness of a Galapagos tortoise, the stillness of a Komodo dragon. This is what slowness can be; this a facet of still.

And one of the interesting things about success is that we think we know what it means. If I said to you that there is somebody behind the screen who is very very successful, certain ideas would immediately come to mind. You would think that person might have made a lot of money, achieved renown in some field. My own theory of success — and I’m somebody who is very interested in success. I really want to be successful. I’m always thinking, “How could I be more successful?” But as I get older,I’m also very nuanced about what that word “success” might mean.

Here’s an insight that I’ve had about success. You can’t be successful at everything. We hear a
lot of talk about work-life balance. Nonsense. You can’t have it all. You can’t. So any vision of
success has to admit what it’s losing out on, where the element of loss is. I think any wise life will
accept, as I say, that there is going to be an element where we are not succeeding.