I would like to share with you the powerful insights of this wise man who changed – for some aspects – my vision about life and its purpose on Earth.
Thank you for your time 🙂
Olivier
I would like to share with you the powerful insights of this wise man who changed – for some aspects – my vision about life and its purpose on Earth.
Thank you for your time 🙂
Olivier
LOVE ANNIVERSARY – When I turned on my computer today, I was wondering what to write about on this blog… I knew it is a special day for my wife and I but, as usual, I wanted to keep it “quiet” and discreet on our 21st wedding day anniversary: go together to a restaurant, eat something good, mostly just looking in each other’s eyes and contemplating “solid” and true love… Continue reading I love my wife!
So that’s it: you know it, you can feel it in your guts! This time, this is the ONE BIG THING: this person is so amazing, you just cannot help but thinking about him or her, you really, truly and fully love this person! Continue reading Love is math(s)… also. #1
An answer to Mr. Douglas Kennedy:
Work is a part of your way to equilibrium in life. It surely gives you “shape and meaning” to the day, and also to a large part of your life. That is why we have to take it seriously and find a healthy attitude towards it: if you work in order to feed your family, that is OK. If you work in order to earn money to pay your studies, OK. If you work in order to do what your family wants you to do (or what YOU think they want you to do)… then reconsider it. Always reconsider it after a while, it is best to do so if you do not want to find yourself prisoner of your own inertia on a sad day. Continue reading Is work the best sort of equilibrium?
OPINIONS, ALTRUIST ECONOMY – As I was explaining in a first post on our blog in French, I decided a few days ago to begin lending money on Kiva after viewing an interview with Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard attending the Davos meeting a few weeks ago.
Logging into the Kiva website was pretty easy. I did it with my Facebook account in order to make it quick. In a few minutes I created a PayPal account and was able to make a transfer very easily from my bank account. I think the whole operation lasted about 15 minutes, with the connections to the bank, filling the forms, money conversions, checking the numbers and so on.
So I decided to make immediately my first lending and found the “Kiva team” I selected a few days ago and wanted to join: “Supporting Widows and Single Parents” as I explained in my former post. I searched all the pending loans and found my first female borrower: Mariam from Lebanon. As I write these lines, Mariam’s loan has been fully funded and I am happy for her. I hope she will attain her goals and I am confident with it anyway.
As a former entrepreneur in Romania, I know that if someone in the position of borrowing to sustain one’s family will do anything possible to do her (or his) best and give the money back. It is a matter of honor.
Nevertheless I have to tell you that something puzzled me a little bit: during the lending process, Kiva is asking you to make a donation that represents roughly 14% of the total lending amount. To me, this is far too much: I can understand that their activities generate costs, but that is not OK to present things like that: you have to make the calculation in order to evaluate the percentage and come to this conclusion by yourself. I agree to donate 2% for overhead expenses, as Matthieu Ricard explains in this video on the Karuna-Shechen foundation’s website. 2% is not much, surely it is not enough and maybe I will donate more afterwards. But not in the very moment I make my lending. In my opinion, we can have the choice to make a bigger donation afterwards: this is perfectly possible on the Kiva’s website anyway.
I have to tell you that I did not credit Kiva with lots of money: I would like to “test” first with a few hundreds of dollars and see the results. Only then maybe I will raise my participation.
That being said, I will lend 1-2 borrowers per week (after having carefully read their stories) until all my Kiva credit is gone, waiting to relend and put my money back to help others. This is my way of getting concerned by this activity and feel a little bit of altruism in front of my laptop’s screen 🙂
Until then, take care and pay a visit to Kiva’s website!
Well,
What a beautiful, and sad, story about your dad and his friend “Big Joe”…
What a beautiful story about… you.I know that it is sometimes difficult to have a serious discussion with parents who suffered a lot during the past: the wounds are not well healed and maybe they think we – the children – are not ready to hear their confessions. Sometimes they express themselves in awkward ways because they did not completely “heal” themselves and did not figure out everything completely… Even if we linger to hear these healing words, these phrases that will alleviate suffering and, most of all, the unknown, these “unspoken” things, the silence hurts so much because you just don’t know the truth. And it is unbearable. Sometimes life does not give you any chance: how many abandoned children or orphans do not know anything about their past? It is horrible…
But your dad decided this was the right time for you to know a part of his past, a part of yours, he gave you another piece of the puzzle… He talked to you just like that, without warnings, out of the blue, and you were wise enough not to say anything stupid, but just hear his story and “align” yourself with him just like that, in a second… That is true wisdom 🙂
It is also clear to me that you had to go to Vietnam and make this first pilgrimage, because it won’t be the only one. You will have to go there maybe a couple of times more during your life in order to grasp the reality of this beautiful country, and correct your present “vision” (product of your strong feelings at the museum for example… but these feelings are “too strong”) about it in order to make your own, not the one you think it is for now… Because it is also your country in the end and you have to be at peace with it… And you will be
I think you will continue to write your book about your parents as you were told in Bali, because it is important to you, because you want to know what your “genesis” was. You have to build your own “past” in order to move on… that is why you are so eager to learn a lot of cultures and languages. So keep on learning !
And, if you allow me to make a personal comment about your feelings, I would like to correct your assumption “the war made me”… It is bold, it is strong… but it is not entirely true. I would write “I am a child of love… Of a love born during the war…”.
Please think of it. Please let this idea enter your mind peacefully, calmly. See if it will be yours someday, if you are OK with it: your parents fell in love in the middle of hell, their love was the first best thing they WANTED to create… The second thing, well… it is you : you are a child of love, not of war. Because I do not think they fell in love because of the war: the war was an “opportunity”, as the fall of the iron curtain was for me and Cristina… The love they lived was THEIR choosing, THEIR will, so you certainly were not any accident. You ARE not an accident. The war did not make you.
You are a child of love.
Olivier
During my short visit home over the holidays, my dad and I often sat at the bar table sipping white peony tea. He was nibbling on a cinnamon roll, I was snacking on some leftover Goi Cuon (Vietnamese spring rolls) my mom made earlier in the evening.
My father fought in the Vietnam war. It’s where he met my mother. There are a slew of Vietnam veterans scattered throughout the country, but few managed to bring back a local from the war torn remains of Vietnam, and even fewer of these couples managed to keep their relationship together through the final, and most difficult hurdle: Culture Shock. Even if a Vietnamese woman were to escape her homeland and be with the GI of her dreams in the supposedly “happily ever after” ending following the Vietnam war, many of them experienced extreme culture shock from both the environment and their new…
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One of the more inspiring speeches I have ever heard was that of the late Steve Jobs. This guy changed the face of the world as we know it and thanks to him we enjoy technologies I personnaly did not dream about when I was a child. (…)
Well, the part I prefer refers to “connecting the dots” in life, where I literally almost cried, moved by the depth and simplicity of the image… Continue reading Connecting the dots…