The Buddhist Temple

Where I went, how I got there, and what I found.

Three years ago, while on a solo trip through northern Thailand, I stepped into a local Chiang Mai restaurant for lunch. I was pleased to see no westerners inside, a good indicator of authentic spicy thai cuisine. But as soon as I sat down and struggled to communicate with the waiter, a white man that had been hidden from my view by a column leaned over to me and asked, "do you need help ordering?" He ordered a spicy noodle dish for me in fluent thai and then began telling me his story.

He had arrived in Thailand 5 years ago from Paris, France. The reason for his relocation: to meditate. His response to my question of when he would return to France still rings clearly in my mind, "I'm not going back. My life is here now." His tone was so calm, so confident, so unfamiliar, that my curiosity began gnawing at me as it does before taking action. "What the hell has this guy seen?" I inquired further about his experience and he arranged my trip to meditate for 3 days at the buddhist temple where he originally learned. I bought all-white meditation clothes at the Chiang Mai night bazaar and boarded a songthaew the next morning, headed to the town of Chom Tong. I finished the 3 days and vowed to return in the future to finish the full 21 day course. And just this month, I did just that.

Wat Chom Tong, the main temple in the town of Chom Tong, began offering meditation courses to foreigners in 1992. The International Vipassana Meditation Center has undergone significant development since then, and now contains various dormitories, a library, and a number of meditation halls, catering to both thai and international meditators. The center is run and operated by Kuhn Thanat, who also acts as an English-speaking meditation instructor, and one of the wisest individuals I've ever met.

The temple grounds are spacious, calm, and very beautiful. The international center is tucked away in a corner of the temple grounds and has a direct path to a lake with gorgeous views of the mountains and countryside. Meditators share the grounds with buddhist monks, nuns, and temple staff. Although communication was limited during the meditation course, there were a few opportunities to briefly interact with the monks at buddhist ceremonies and chanting events. As I mentioned in a previous post, my intention in coming here was to learn meditation, not buddhism, but participating in these ceremonies added a unique cultural dimension to the experience. I'm glad I did.

The center offers a 21-day "basic" meditation course as well as 10-day retreats for experienced meditators. However, you can stay as long, or as little, as you wish. I completed the basic course and would recommend others to do so as well in order to truly grasp what the hell is going on. Believe me, your mind is in for the ride of its life. You might as well do the full course, if you can, to get the most out of the experience and your time far from home. The course is very difficult, but rewarding in greater measure. I say "greater" because the difficulty doesn't stay with you, but the lessons do.

Oh, and lastly, there is no charge for either food, lodging, or meditation instruction, but they do ask that you leave a donation. Donations provide the sole source of funding for the meditation center and the money is used to build new dormitory buildings and other infrastructure needs. As I told Thanat one day, it's very ironic that one of the most valuable life skills, learned through this practice, is taught free of charge. But then again, there would be no fairness in this world if the international meditators did not donate generously in observance of the instructors' tremendous efforts in teaching such a difficult skill.

Feel free to browse through some of the photographs I took during my stay at the temple. If you do decide to take this step, I wish you the best of luck. More information can be found here: Wat Chom Tong on Google.

The Present

"There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." 
Shakespeare, 16th century, England

"The mind is its own place, and can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n." 

John Milton, 17th century, England

"The whole universe is change and life itself is but what you deem it." 

Marcus Aurelius, 2nd century, Rome

"Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead, want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well." 

Epictetus, 1st century, Greece

"Do not like, do not dislike; all will then be clear. if you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against." 

Sen-ts'an, 7th century, China

"Our life is the creation of our minds." 

Buddha, 6th century BCE, India

2,500 years ago, Siddhartha Gautama, from India, made one of the most important psychological discoveries of recorded human history while engaging in the practice of meditation.  The discovery was so significant that it spawned an entire religion, philosophy, and way of life. Siddhartha was later named the Buddha, or "the Awakened one," by his followers. I spent nearly 3 weeks learning and practicing this same form of meditation - vipassana - in northern Thailand. Vipassana means "seeing clearly," and is also known as "Insight" or "Mindfulness" meditation.

It's difficult to summarize what I experienced. It is incomparable to anything I am familiar with, and from what I've been witnessing, anything most of us are familiar with. So of what good use are words if they cannot convey anything of value, or anything understandable, to the listener? The only true question of value in this case is, "Do I think it was worthwhile?" The answer is yes, and in fact, more worthwhile than I could have possibly imagined. It was also the most difficult thing I've ever done. But does that even matter? I can explain the experience detail by detail, but will that change you, the reader? Will that provide any lasting value other than temporarily quenching your curiosity? Surely not. So what is important to know about the meditation experience? 

Meditation makes a profound statement about happiness.

Consider the following scenario:

Over the last 50 years or so, individual income levels in most developed nations have steadily increased. We have access to an astronomically larger set of options to satisfy ourselves than we did 50 years ago. We can watch movies on demand, we can play the most advanced video games, we can shop for almost anything we can imagine, we have access to an endless source of explicit information via the internet, we can purchase nicer homes sooner than ever before, we can eat practically anything we want at almost anytime (I bet our primitive neanderthal ancestors would have been jealous), and we can travel easily and frequently. We, residents of developed nations, have access to everything we could reasonably desire. Sounds like a reason to rejoice.

But according to recent psychological studies over the last 50 years, our levels of happiness have not increased. Has anything increased? Yes: rates of depression, anxiety, ADHD, and consumption of Prozac, Lexapro, Paxil, etc. Please think about the significance of this phenomenon. I did not come up with this. These are recorded statistics. So what is going on?

Our traditional measuring stick for happiness is generally tied to life successes. The more we achieve, the more we acquire, the more we know, the happier we should be. But we´re not. The happiness hypothesis we share in the western world is mostly wrong. It is a grave error of common sense to think that once our basic necessities for survival are met (food and water), happiness can only be increased or maintained by striving for it. Striving to increase happiness causes tension. And even when you do reach a goal, the happiness that success produces is fleeting, temporary, because our minds are programmed (evolved) to adapt to increases or decreases in happiness and return to a common set point. A set point that seems to be, for the most part, predetermined genetically. That's why the levels of happiness reported by new lottery winners and new paraplegics is not significantly different from the other's after a year's time. Therefore:

The purpose of meditation is to help you realize that happiness doesn't lie in the past nor in the future. Lasting happiness doesn't lie in successes or positive states nor does lasting unhappiness lie in failures or negative states. Happiness lies in the present moment. In fact, it is always there.

Right now, exactly where you are, reading this post, or whatever it is you are doing in the present moment. Even if it's just sitting on the floor with your eyes closed. Even if you are simply breathing. Wherever you are, whatever your income level is, whoever you're with, happiness is there. It's present in every single moment of our lives. We have just never learned how to look. Instead we embark on a lifelong search for lasting happiness in external things and events... and never find it. So then the looming question becomes, "what the hell are we searching for?" We have everything we need right now. We all do. 

It's not out there. It's in here.

I know this is fancifully abstract, I know this sounds like new age, cotton candy, feel-good bullshit talk, I know it goes against everything we have ever known about happiness and enjoying our lives. But realize that some of the greatest thinkers in history from different parts of the world (quoted above), east and west, have all reached similar conclusions.

But even now after reading this, you can't *feel* what I'm saying. You can read and repeat these words but you can't intuitively know and feel that fear, insecurity, sadness, depression, anger, impatience, anxiety, worry, doubt, boredom, loneliness, jealousy, and even physical pain are nothing but illusions. You can´t simply decide for them not to affect you by reading or listening. It is such a foreign concept that you have to experience it for it to make any sense. It's the only way.

I'll end this post with a simple, encompassing, statement by social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, professor at the University of Virginia: "Events in the world affect us only through our interpretations of them, so if we can control our interpretations, we can control our world." Think of Neo stopping those bullets in the first Matrix.

Meditation is the path not only to observe these interpretations, but to change them. Thanks Buddha. If you had been an advocate of reciprocity, we'd all owe you one.

Lest We Forget

What else remains but our life story?

This will be a short post. It's 4 AM, my neurons aren't firing as accurately as they should, and the flight leaves soon. But this point is important.

People tell me, "you're putting in a whole lotta effort to go meditate. Shit, I'll let you meditate in my bathroom for free." Both statements are true, but the first is inconspicuously misleading. It is a lot of effort just to go meditate. It will consume a considerable amount of time, money, sacrifice, risk, discomfort, etc. If you look at my decision as practically and concretely as that, then I would have no choice but to agree with you. Please, allow me to at least lock the bathroom door from the inside so as to not be disturbed. But, as I hope to reveal through this blog, this trip is not solely about learning how to meditate. It's perhaps more importantly about building character. What character? The character I envisioned ever since I was little.. and perhaps, so did you. Huh?

What a story it will be to tell my children... not about meditation, but to say that when I was younger and overflowing with dreams, as fanciful and fantastical as they may have been, I blindly and faithfully reached out to grab them. Or at least to touch them, or graze them, even with my fingertips, if only for a second. What a story it will be to tell myself.

I hope these stories and experiences serve as a symbol of not taking life for granted. I hope they become a clear signal of the choice we all have to pursue our dreams. A choice so frequently forgotten. For in the end, what do we have left in life but our stories, our convictions, and our character?

I send out a huge wish that you may all enjoy your holidays. 

P.S. I will be unable to write any more entries for a good while. But after it's all over, I will. Till then :)

A Most Valuable Skill

Le Petit Prince
Antoine de Saint-Exupery

To us westerners, true meditation is an alien concept.

What meditation tells us about our brains is akin to what Copernicus told the world 500 years ago - the earth moves around the sun (instead of the sun moving around the earth). Very few believed him and others just thought he was on a bad acid trip. Why was it so hard to believe? Because no one could feel the earth moving, duh. But now we know the truth. This big ball of rock we're sitting on is hurtling through space at over 67,000 mph and rotating at 1,000 mph. And so are we. You may not know what 1,000 mph feels like, but I bet you could imagine it. Take a second, look away from your computer screen, and.imagine everything around you going 1,000 mph in one direction. You probably imagined all your shit getting slammed into a wall of your room, right? It's hard to accept that we're moving that fast, but we've been conditioned to the idea since infancy, so we accept it. I won't even bother with the 67k. The point is, it's extremely difficult to separate what we feel from actual fact if we have not been conditioned to it.

In order to understand meditation, we have to accept something we have not been conditioned to feel. Give some thought to the following cause and effect scenarios:

• If our 40" plasma TV gets knocked over and breaks, we get angry. 
• If our significant other calls and says, "I want to do something special for you tonight," we get excited. 
• If we're arriving late to watch our favorite show or to the Twilight premiere, we get anxious (I did). 
• If our college of choice admits us into their program, we get overjoyed. 
• If our best friend lies to us, we become mistrustful.

Anger, excitement, anxiety, joy, mistrust, and every other thought and emotion wield a profound influence on our moods, decisions, and behaviors. For example, say you're already pissed off because your dog took a shit on your white carpet. You cleaned and scrubbed it to death, but a little brownish stain remains. You are now predisposed to react more harshly to otherwise trivial issues throughout the day, like if your friend forgets you don't like butter on your popcorn and adds it by accident. All the responses listed above are quite normal, expected, and most importantly, automatic. But what's really happening here? We are being controlled by external factors. Emotions, involuntary thoughts, and bodily sensations are all external factors that induce near automatic responses in us. This weird phenomenon restricts us to remaining positive only as long as the outside world is smiling upon us. Check this:

"I'm having a really bad day."

     "Oh no, really? Why, what happened?"

"I ordered the wrong automatic espresso cups for our coffee machine."

     "Oh no! That sucks! Did the boss get pissed at you?"

"Yeah, he's so angry, and on top of that, the dry cleaners ruined my black shirt. Damnit!"

     "Well, how about I treat you to Starbucks after work? That'll cheer you up!"

"Wow, that sounds great, thanks, you're such a great friend!"

We are on an invisible leash that's tugged by our emotions and our thoughts. Wherever they tug, we go. They tug towards positive, we get happy. They tug towards negative, we get sad or angry. We are, essentially, fully reactive, and therefore, controlled by external stimuli provoking the same automatic reactions out of us over and over again. Our "true selves" are merely riders in the rollercoaster of reactivity while someone or something else pulls the levers. Here is where Copernicus fits in. We can't "feel" that we're being controlled, but meditators know that we are and psychologists have proven that we are. We do not have control. You do not have control. For real. I ain't lying.

Did you have a strong reaction to this last paragraph? Then smile for the rollercoaster photo.

Riding the Rollercoaster of Reactivity

You may see where this is going. Meditation separates the self from external and involuntary stimuli. It allows us to see emotions and thoughts at a distance, as they attempt to exert their mighty influence on our vulnerable selves. Once we see them for what they truly are - external stimuli that our self latches onto - we can successfully decide whether or not to react to them and to what degree. I've oversimplified the process but please consider that these concepts are quite complex and extremely difficult to attain in practice. I walked out of my first day of meditation. The mental exercises were ridiculously difficult, stupid, and useless. I fell asleep numerous times over and over in the beginning, drooled a little even, but it all clicked in the end.

There are more benefits derived from being able to consciously separate the self from involuntary stimuli than my fingers care to type. From increased compassion, to increased happiness, greater stability, better relationships, more authentic decision-making, longer life, stronger immune system, the list goes on and on. It probably cures erectile dysfunction and enlarges breasts too, but those are still under scrupulous peer review I've heard...

If simple "relaxation" could do all of this, I would spend my life on a hammock by the beach with barrels of pina colada and a constant supply stream of (medical) marijuana from Jamaica. I would probably be writing this post from that very hammock in Jamaica.

As a final note: Meditation has nothing to do (except a shared history) with religion - buddhism, hinduism, or otherwise. These religions have adopted it as part of their routines and we now associate the two accordingly. Meditation is simply a skill or a tool. I've been a secularist for years and had absolutely no problems detaching religion and the supernatural from meditation. I would even argue that detaching the two is ideal.

There's much more to this skill than what I've discussed, and there are numerous studies of its effects on the brain and well-being. For example, some studies found that meditation actually adds mass to the brain... WHAT! Yea, crazy right? Anyway, the research is still very recent, with more publications and experiments yet to come I'm sure. If you're interested, I highly suggest you check out some of these links, you hippies.

Meditator Brain Analysis

     How Meditation Reshapes the Brain (Big Think)
     Buddha on the Brain (Wired Magazine) 
     Just Say Om (Time Magazine)
     Short-term Meditation Induces White Matter Changes in the Brain (scientific)
     Mindfulness Meditation Reveals Distinct Neural Modes of Self Reference (scientific)

Resolving Reactivity

Buddha may have been the greatest psychologist in the last 3,000 years.

The reason I started this blog is because I made a vow to myself, to follow my passions regardless of the obstacles or negative perceptions involved. I thought this concept would be interesting enough for a blog so...I'll just get right to it.

I'm heading back to Thailand in a few short days. While there, I'll spend several weeks living in a monastery with Buddhist monks. I am not interested in either Buddhism nor any other kind of eastern philosophy. I'm not going there for that. I'm going there to acquire a skill.

The Rules: wake up at 4 AM, breakfast at 6 AM, lunch at 11 AM, in bed by 10 PM. No solid food after 12 noon. No reading anything, no writing anything, no leaving the temple (unless it's an emergency) and no speaking with anyone besides the instructor for the duration of the course.

All that time in between? Meditate. Damn.

I know, I know, most of you unfamiliar with meditation know it as a relaxation tool. You might ask, "Yo, did no one tell you? There's no need to meditate 14 hours a day in isolation to relax! Listen, let me roll you a fatty. Or better yet, I have this coupon for this one massage place on U Street that even does happy endi..." I agree. It would be pretty absurd to travel to the other side of the world simply to relax. But meditation is so much more than that.

It's just difficult to explain. Not because I can't find the words; the words are available. But meditation, real meditation with purpose (instead of simply to chill out after a long day at work) is absorbed into our minds in a very similar manner as the lessons learned from intense, even traumatic, experiences. There's no possible way for someone to show you what it feels like to survive cancer. There's no method to truly convey how your parents' divorce affected you as a child. There's no way for me to fully appreciate how deeply you experience love with your partner. The only way to feel the full effect of these experiences is not through words, but through directly experiencing them. These lessons form part of a broader category of learning called tacit knowledge, or more commonly known as wisdom. And it fully applies to meditation.

I will explain my perspective on the effects of meditation in a subsequent post. Most likely though, someone will still try to offer me massage coupons.

Kindred Spirits

Kindred Spirits
Asher Durand

A person who shares beliefs, attitudes, feelings, or features with another.

The world would surely be a lonelier place if no one else shared our thoughts. Especially those thoughts dealing with life's larger questions of purpose, happiness, courage, compassion, and what is worth striving for. I met two individuals in the last few days, by pure chance I might add, that shared a strong disposition with me not just in thought, but in action. This phenomenon, the natural and almost immediate affinity with another human being is astounding, uplifting, and enlightening. These "kindred spirits" I speak of have asked themselves the big questions and have come up with very similar answers to ourselves. Why? DNA. Certain individuals hold similar views of life's larger questions because they share inherent genetic traits with us. These people tend to inspire us and be inspired by us through sheer psychological magnetism. Perception of this can be overwhelming and wonderful indeed. If you've ever met someone that understood your profound argument so completely and immediately, that you felt compelled to tell them "everything," then you know what's up.

I will summarize the stories of the 2 individuals here, anonymously of course. I'll name them Bill and Ted.

Bill: We met at a bus stop in New York City. Studied psychology in college and loved it. Parents persuaded him to become an investment banker, he did, made some serious dough, and quit a few years later because he felt he had been seriously suppressing his creative and intellectual side. He has now changed course completely and is pursuing his Master's degree in filmmaking. Imagine the resistance. We talked our way through a 5-hour bus ride, jumping around topics from psychology, to religion, to creativity, to travel, to meditation. We shared the same viewpoints on our automatic and unaware repression of our passions in exchange for the "goods" of society such as belonging and acceptance. We didn't just agree on the consequences of this repression, but also on the importance of taking action directly to counter it. Best of luck to you bro.

Ted: We met at a Barnes and Noble in Washington D.C. He had studied computer science in college and was an IT director for a very large health insurance company. He was in the midst of applying to MBA programs abroad and... well, you can imagine where the conversation went from here. Instead of looking at me like an idiot who'd one day be eligible for food stamps, he opened up. Another kindred spirit. We discussed the personal moral sacrifices we make to the corporate world in exchange for money and social neutrality and, guess what, he confessed to have always been a staunch opponent of health insurance companies due to their exorbitant greed and corruption. He is still against them, even while working at one for years. Talk about a moral sacrifice. Whatever decision you make, best of luck to you as well bro. You've inspired me.

Soulcial Studies

Elephant and Rider (important psychological concept)

"I would pursue my passion if I knew what it was."

We all have at least one, but finding even that one can be very difficult. It took me a considerable amount of introspection to acknowledge that I had a higher-than-average interest for psychology ("the study of the soul"), especially since I was so entrenched in the "maximize profits, minimize costs" mentality of business. A friend recently told me he would drop everything and follow his passion if he only knew what it was. Well, this post's for you, bud. So far, I believe there are five primary methods to discover your passions. I present them to you in my subjective order of effectiveness. The first you're born with, the other four you learn:

1. Natural Bastard:

You're born knowing what your passion is. Plain and simple, and highly envious to others who aren't so lucky (like me). Since he was still in diapers, my older brother always knew he would become either a doctor, a cop, or a pilot. This gave a wonderful sense of security to others about his life, including me, for I knew, even when I was still in diapers, I'd enjoy cheap flights one day. And now I do. Thanks for being a natural, bro!  

2. Introspection:

This is the bread and butter of self-discovery. Know thyself, famously inscribed by the ancient Greeks in the Temple of Apollo, is unfortunately, an underdeveloped skill we share as human beings. It's harder to know ourselves than to know others - this is biological fact, no use fighting it. Rather, engage it. Engage yourself. Analyze your strengths, identify what you naturally gravitate towards (i.e. animals, people, problems, cleaning, whatever), and pick apart complex tasks to discover which aspects call out your name. For example, I loved my management job not because it granted me authority over my employees, but because I was fascinated by discovering their strengths, developing ways to motivate them, and exploring their unique mental processes.

3. Feedback from Others:

Others know ourselves better than we do. Hard to accept right? It's obviously a bit more complicated than a simple sentence can summarize, but it's largely true and highly applicable here. The point is that others are magnificent fountains of new knowledge about ourselves. A simple question such as "What do you think I am best at?" or "What do you think I do better than everyone else?" can reveal a treasure trove of you. It's funny, while I was working on MBA applications, 4 different people mentioned I would be a great psychologist (thanks sis!). And after changing direction to a psychology PhD, others admitted that they never really envisioned me in the business world... ahhhh, if only they had spoken out sooner.

4. Read:
Go to Barnes and Noble (or any bookstore) with zero expectations or ideas. Wander everywhere. Go on auto-pilot and let your unconscious mind run wild. Let it command you to pick up the most interesting books. Skim through the contents, read the back cover, smell the pages, whatever. Just get the overall idea of each book. At the end of the day, buy your favorite 3 or 4 books and then analyze why you chose them. Can you guess which ones I chose WHILE STILL preparing the MBA apps? Linchpin, The Happiness Hypothesis, Narcissism Epidemic, and Psychology Today (mag). Surprise surprise.

5. Career Development Tests:
To me, these tests act like a shotgun blast to finding your passions. In other words, these tests give you a list of say 10 possible career paths for your "type," and among those, at least 1 of them is really you. We humans are too dynamic to be bulls-eyed, but we can definitely be narrowed down. In the MBTI (Myers Briggs Type Indicator) my type is ENTP, and possible career paths include: entrepreneur, consultant, psychologist. Booya!

Bottom Line:Whatever you do, don't settle. Even if you don't know your passion; You do have one, really. Be honest and caring with yourself, and search that soul until you find it. Let me assure you, we will ALL benefit from your discovery. If you need to discuss, get in touch.

The Resistance

"A psychology degree is worthless."

The resistance struck swiftly and tactlessly from those closest to me. Like Clark Kent ripping his clothes off in a phone booth, everyone around me suddenly unveiled a hidden expertise on living the good life. I must not have been blessed with that superpower, apparently.

Resistance is often tricky to identify because it arrives under the cute and delicate guise of loving concern and caring advice. To be fair however, we are all guilty of this subtle form of manipulation, especially when dealing with loved ones. Our desire for others to seek our guidance, and in effect, supply us with a sense of relevance is, well, human nature. We offer seemingly unbiased advice... laced with colorful but toxic sprinkles of self-interest without knowing it.

Fine, I'm not mad, but fuck, it's annoying, and potentially destructive.

Selfless advice, and I mean truly selfless advice - the type that few of us receive and even fewer have given - is priceless. There is a profound psychological explanation for the human tendency to dish out tainted self-serving advice. I would like to expound this in a future post.

 In any case, here are some examples of the "caring advice" so humbly bestowed upon me:

• It's just a phase, it will pass
• You're just confused / immature / stupid
• But you're too old to change careers!
• You will be too old after you get your PhD!
• Following a passion is the stuff of movies and books!
• [Such and such] is filling your head with stupid ideas!
• But you won't make any money! (or the alternative) But you'll starve!
• But your future family won't have any money! (or the alternative) But your children will starve!

Well, the consensus seems to be that someone in my future is gonna starve. I guess I'll start stocking up on canned beans now while they're on sale and while the starvation-proof coffers granted by my previous investment job are still plentiful enough to purchase canned beans.

There is one thing however that the above criticisms have in common. They all were uttered by individuals that had never studied psychology nor received a PhD. But then, how could they offer advice without truly understanding the consequences of my decisions? Hmmm, human nature strikes again it seems.

Bottom line: If a person hasn't experienced whatever it is you're doing or about to do, their opinion should carry little to no weight on your decision. Oh, and be very careful with advice from loved ones, they may be harming you without meaning to. They still love you though, and so should you.

Are you sure? (the intro)

No. I'm not sure. 

The response hit me like a psychological seismic shock. She asked if I was sure of pursuing the MBA degree. I was five days away from submitting applications to Harvard, my essays were polished, recommendations locked down, and I had a GMAT score high enough to compete with other Harvard hopefuls. I had suffered extensively to attain remarkable business experience over the last 3 years and had worked on the MBA applications for months. Just around the next corner, my future corporate career was patiently waiting and suspiciously beckoning me with the promise of money, success, belonging, safety, admiration... and there I was, unsure. Oh no, more questions...

"So what would you rather do?"

     "Follow something I'm passionate about."

"What are you passionate about?"

     "How people think. Why people think. Psychology. It fascinates me. I would do the work for free if I could."
"And why aren't you pursuing that instead?"

     "...becau...well...uh...shit...I don't know."

I felt like a child again, completely unaware of why I did the things I did, incompetent, helpless, humbled, and in total awe of life's simple lessons. A most basic exploratory question had just delivered a shattering blow to the vision of my future life. "That's funny," I thought, the vision had seemed completely unshakable. How had I managed to coerce myself so unwaveringly for so long? And to think I drew fulfillment from encouraging others to question their beliefs and to follow their passions! I had seen the specks in their eyes while completely ignoring the log in mine (this quote is originally from the bible - Matthew 7:3).

The culprit was fear. Fear of following not only an uncharted path but an unaccepted one. Fear of failing. Fear of telling everyone that society's definition of success and happiness was wrong. It was not a "one size fits all." Damn, I thought, I must be one weird dude to need a different size. "C'mon man, you're in your late 20s. Passions are meant to be lived now. Not in old age. You've always believed this, when will you live by it?" I had to either completely accept myself now - and act on it - or lock that part of me away in my tiny box of unrealized passions and inconvenient truths...but honestly... I was so tired of doing that...

I canceled my MBA applications, effectively pulling the train's emergency brake. Everything came to a screeching, gear-crunching halt. I had boarded the wrong train.

However dark or vulnerable my decision may turn out to be, I chose me. I'm tired of following other peoples' dreams. I'm tired of people encouraging me to do so. I'm tired of not following my own dreams. I'm tired of postponing them. I'm tired of simply dreaming about them. I'm tired of convincing myself that they're hopeless. I'm pissed. Not at the world, but at myself for being so dishonest for so long. This is the only life I'll ever have. No more. Forever. That's it. It's time for honesty goddamn it.