Seeing Out the Window

As I join the rest of the shut-in world of California, I’m giving myself a chance to reset. Things are different here than where I was, and they’re different than they normally are.

These circumstances give us a unique opportunity to pay attention. They enable us to follow the news more closely, to see how the country’s leadership responds to the needs of its citizens. The situation allows us to form new habits and build new routines. Most of all, we have the chance to examine our paradigm, our lens for seeing the world.

What do you see? What would you like to see in the world in the future?

Return Reaction

Well, I’m back. It’s been a crazy 36 hours. I’m discouraged by how the US government is handling the current global situation and how the subsequent repercussions are affecting citizens, but that’s for future posts. The point is I’m home.

No more FaceTime, only actual face time. Our loved ones are part of who we are. It’s easy to see this clearly when you’ve been away for so long. At once we are lost and experiential and worldly and alone, as well as together and unified and apart of the greater.

I guess the overall feeling is gratitude. There and Back Again. What new normal will we create?

Processing the Planet

All of a sudden, I’m coming home. It’s kind of surreal—the trip was originally supposed to end in late April. Now I’ll be back in the US tomorrow, for the first time in 7 months.

In every way, this journey has been a once-in-a-lifetime experience. It’s difficult for me to process right now as the end has come so soon and unexpectedly, but looking back on almost a year’s worth of travel to all 7 continents, there’s been an overarching constant.

The world is big. With modern travel we are able to cover vast distances, but it’s still possible to appreciate the Earth’s scale. I’ve taken 10 hour flights that only get you to the next continent, and crossed an ocean and back on a ship for 2 weeks. There’s a lot of Earth out there.

The world is beautiful. The falls of Iguazu are literally awesome. The art and architecture in Europe spawns existential epiphanies. And you can’t picture a more serene beach than the innumerable ones dotting Asia. We could not ask for a more beautiful planet. 

The world is amazing. It’s impossible to describe the diversity of both flora and fauna across the globe, from blue-footed boobies and red lakes to limitless savannas and serval cats to gigantic coral reefs and kangaroos. Our world is so unique we’re not even capable of fathoming it.

Most of all, the world is one. No matter where you visit, you see all life adapting to their environment, thriving with the will to survive. You see that humans are one species of millions on this planet, and that we have a place within the global ecosystem.

Our petty self-perceived differences equate to nothing when seeing the whole world. We share so many more similarities than differences. We all need food and shelter and love. We all laugh and cry and smile the same. 

It is clear: huge key issues of vital importance affect all of us together, regardless of nationality, age, gender, or culture. Weather and disease do not discriminate between us. 

To keep our world big and beautiful and amazing and one, we must change. We must focus on how we live, how we interact with the rest of the planet, and how we view the world and ourselves. Climate Change and Education and Equality and Openness and Global Consciousness will only be achieved if we unite together. We must inspire each other to change.

This is what I’ve found while traveling around the world. It has been the most meaningful journey of my life. Now that I’m coming home, it’s time for a new journey to start. Will you join me?

A New Dawn

Did you know today is the Vernal Equinox, the (in the Northern Hemisphere) first day of Spring? Maybe we can focus on small wins as we all continue to experience a vastly different 2020 than previously imagined. Spring and Autumn are important seasons in that they herald so much change. New life starts in Spring as the Northern Hemisphere warms up. Here’s to embracing all the current changes in our lives. There is a horizon off in the future—keep it in mind as we strive to be the best citizens and the best humans we can be.

Take a Look

Have you noticed I keep writing about the same things? Climate change, education, uniting humanity, global consciousness…almost all of my posts pertain to these things. I believe these concepts and topics are the keys to the survival and prosperity of our species, as well as all other life on Earth. They are all the same thing: One world. One species. One way—together. I will keep writing about this for the rest of my life.

We have a moment of pause here. So many people are restricted from their normal behaviors right now, so many are removed from their routine. With this step back we can more objectively view these behaviors and routines. It is essential, for the survival of humankind, to take this look. We reflect now, and hold communion, or the reckoning will be too overwhelming for us to endure. What affects some of us affects all of us. We live in one closed system. 

If we look, we will see. We will understand. And we will change. Take a look today.

St. Patty’s in Cambodia

Wow, it was nice to be distracted today, just being mentally away from all the corona gloom.

Perspective is everything. Our lens, our paradigm, affects our subsequent experience as much as the experience itself.

It was an interesting conglomerate of tech media companies which made the unified statement about disinformation, and it proved telling: “misinformation” is part of our lexicon now. It’s proved to be one of our species’ most significant challenges. I mean, how would you rank them? Climate change, Education, ”misinformation?” And right now they’re all interrelated.

Just overall a weird mood across the planet. I can only hope things don’t “go back to normal.” We now have a unique opportunity to decide. Globally for once, we can reflect on our circumstances and choices, and decide together: Who are we? Who do we want to be?

It’s one fucking big beautiful amazing world. Can we unite, can we develop global consciousness, can we change the world?

Species Turning Point

Some moments matter more than others. Now is such a moment for our species. This virus creates an opportunity for us to think critically about how we function as a society and how we live as humans on this planet.

The ability to access information has never been easier. But the quality of that information, how we process it, and how we use it, needs to be questioned. It is a meta problem that affects how we do everything else.

So many companies are doing good to help make things better. It’s encouraging. Why don’t we do this all the time? Can we keep this going, through 2020 and beyond?

As social distancing is adopted worldwide, we have a unique opportunity to reflect individually and globally. What kind of world do we live in? What kind of world do we want tomorrow? 

Facts and Tangents

Beware the Ides of March. The world is reeling right now. I find the CDC, state.gov, and WHO websites frustrating to use (they seriously need to consult some UX designers. Hey, that work can be done remotely!) So I’ve decided to list the most important facts right now, mixed in with some random musings for those of us who have done too much serious reading:

• The actual number of cases and the reported/official/confirmed cases are 2 different statistics—the latter is behind the former—so anticipate affected areas to have many more cases than reported. 

• There isn’t a single movie based on a book that’s better than the book. Prove me wrong. 

• Social distancing is the best measure to mitigate the spread of the virus. This means staying home as much as possible and maintaining a 2 meter distance between people when out.

• Wat Phu, near Pakse, Laos, is like a smaller version of Angor Wat or Machu Picchu. Could be a “hidden gem” for travelers in the next 10 years. My post yesterday featured a picture of it. Google it and check it out. 

• People can be both infected and contagious before symptoms occur, which is why social distancing is the way to ride it out.

• Lebron is getting screwed out of another NBA championship—the Lakers were killing it this year and now the season is suspended. A series of unfortunate events? P.S. I’m not a “Lebron fan”

• As far as we know, transmission occurs when you inhale the air from an infected person’s sneeze or cough, OR if you touch an infected surface and then touch your eyes, nose or mouth.

• Did you know Thailand is the only South East Asian country not colonized by a European nation? Kind of wild. 

• Masks other than N95 masks do nothing to protect you from the virus. Masks need to be reserved for healthcare workers on the frontlines who are continuously exposed to infected people.

• Did you know Laos has a beer imaginatively named “Beer Lao?” It’s actually really good! And they have different varieties!

• COVID-19 symptoms include fever, cough, and shortness of breath. 

• I befriended a stray dog whom I named Tiger in Arusha. He would walk with me to work every day and we would hang out at the local bar together. I even gave him a ride in a tuktuk once. He’s a good doggie. I still think of him often.

• The majority of infections are mild—around 80 percent. So don’t panic. If we act quickly, stay informed, and be smart, we will minimize the impact of this virus.

It’s such an incredible planet. My travels are being affected by this outbreak, and if that’s the only thing in my personal life that’s affected, I will be extremely grateful. We need to keep things in perspective. Part of that perspective is recognizing we’re all in this together, on this one lone rock. We rise and fall together. Let’s adopt a global paradigm and make the world a better place. 

Vision Components

The long-term utopian vision: societal efficiency to the scale that social isolation during a pandemic affects the economy at the most marginally. This means further automation and further technological integration into more sectors of society. This means incorporating socialist principles in the economic sphere to allocate funding to public finance or a social dividend. This does not mean abandoning the market system. Instead it focuses on sovereign sustainability. And finally, with regards to healthcare, this vision requires we prioritize it more than the military-industrial complex. 

How can we work towards getting there? By promoting scientific and mathematical literacy across our society so people can individually access and interpret data for themselves. With sound rational and logical reasoning, people will independently reach the same conclusions (or be able to productively and civilly dispute each other), eliminating distrust and animosity.

I don’t know how we get there. Even if we waved a magic wand and ensured every single child would be scientifically trained from tomorrow onward, that still leaves the rest of us. We’re quickly approaching the reality of facing these difficult problems. Let’s solve them. 

Conquering Uncertainty Adversity

COVID-19 seems to have sparked panic in the United States, or at least California. I say “seems” because I am far away, in a much calmer place: Laos. One of a few dozen landlocked nations, Lao People’s Democratic Republic is always included on the UN’s list of Least Developed Countries. Yet people here are both very aware and very calm about the conronavirus pandemic. Employees of stores and restaurants are regularly seen disinfecting commonly touched surfaces. Hand sanitizer is available for use at almost every public venue. Security guards check people’s temperature at high-traffic chokepoints, such as the entrances to big malls. How can a country blanketed with 600,000 tons of unexploded ordinance, a political backwater, be so far ahead of the United States?

From a perspective far removed, a couple variables stick out. America is dealing with 2 factors that Laos is not: an unhealthy relationship with the media, and an unpredictable president. Laotians might consume the news, but they certainly aren’t addicted to a 24-hour news cycle. In part due to poverty, Laotians aren’t particularly on their phones that often. They also don’t have an antagonistic leader. Regardless of whether you agree with Trump’s politics or not, insulting public figures and attacking other institutions with hostility (The Federal Reserve, the legislature, other nations) does not promote stability and calm. 

Panic is a chain reaction. It occurs when scared people infect others with fear. As more and more people succumb to the fear, collective chaos spirals out of control. The result? People buy massive amounts of toilet paper (what?). People wear masks in parks and coffee shops. People lose faith in completely unrelated industries in the stock market.

More than anything, COVID-19 is testing our resilience to uncertainty. So far we are failing as a global society. So here’s what each person can do:

Stop the spread—of fear and panic. Steady yourself and anyone else who needs it.

Learn and stay updated by consistently checking the websites of the CDC and WHO. 

Reduce the risk of infection and community spread by practicing good hygiene.

Think critically about what kind of person you want to be and about how you want to be remembered when facing adversity. Be that person. 

We can weather this storm and come out stronger. We can reform and strengthen the capability of our healthcare system, we can be more critical of what we read and hear and watch, and we can grow our global grit to overcome future adversity. COVID-19 is forcing us to sink or swim. Let’s do better. Let’s change the world. 

Surviving Our Time

It’s kind of amazing if you really think about it. We’ve got to a point where we don’t have to think about food, we don’t have to think about survival. We don’t even realize the subconscious narrative that we’re all going to live long lives. In the 1st World, it comes as a shock, as something terrible, when someone dies young. In so many ways this is a good thing. 

But it also removes the fragility of life from our experience. It hinders our appreciation for life itself, for the balance and beauty that exist on this planet. And it affects our mindset and our choices. Survival seems a given, catastrophe so far way. Why doesn’t matter if I recycle? So what if I use a lot of energy? Why must we move away from fossil fuels? Everything is fine. 

It’s just that we’ve also reached the point where we will start to see consequences in our lifetimes. We will see the very real effects of climate change, and of our exponentially growing population. The danger lies in its gradual occurrence. Will enough of us notice it in time, will enough of us change, will enough of us act? That’s the 8 billion dollar question. There is a great challenge before us. To defeat it we must work together. It will require sacrifice of comfort and convenience. What will we do with the time given to us?

Ode to Joy

In 2017 I attended one of Brendon Burchard’s conferences. He’s an inspiring person, mainly due to his strong positivity. One of his key mantras is to “live with joy.” It’s a good way to say it. Unlike happiness, joy is something we can choose to experience. Joy is something we can focus on, something we can aspire to have. Joy is active: we can “do it.” We can conscientiously live with a feeling of joy. We can bring a sense of joy to everything we do. #joy is one of only a few hashtags I include in every single one of my Instagram posts. To “look on the bright side” or “be positive” is great—but joy goes a step further. It’s you actively manifesting the thrill and pleasure of being alive. Because how glorious is life? We are atoms and cells, the universe consciously experiencing itself. Embrace it. With joy.

The Smoke is Clear

Gotta be careful when browsing travel blogs. They make it seem like every single sight is a MUST, that it’s the most amazing place ever. Often the negatives are omitted.

Case and point with Laos, a beautiful country full of whole-hearted people. It’s the high season right now for tourism. But what you don’t get told is that it’s also the smokey season. Coal factories, farmers burning crops and fields, wildfires, and locals burning trash all contribute to much of the South East Asian region being blanketed in smoke for several months every year. 

Vang Vieng should be paradise but is literally difficult to stomach. It’s funny, traveling long-term to many places has only reinforced how dire our collective situation is, across the entire planet. The smoke is clear. We must change to change the world. Do your part. 

Forced to Consider

"You don't know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.” The line obviously applies to climate change—people could see what was happening even way back in the ‘70s—although instead of putting up parking lots it seems we’re more intent on building warships and hypersonic missiles. But these lyrics can also apply to our current global health situation. Health seems to be the first thing we forget to be grateful for, but wow don’t we miss it when it’s gone. We’re experiencing it on a massive scale with the coronavirus. Remember when we lived in healthy bliss? 

Therein lies the biggest takeaway of all this. This outbreak proves our actions and habits affect others. Community spread is happening, and more than 90 countries are now infected. Two things are important here: first, we will prevail. Our species has conquered much worse. Panic and dismay don’t solve anything. We need to keep it together. Second, we must be considerate of others. Hygiene is finally being given some importance, but it goes beyond that. We share this planet with a lot of other life—it’s not just us. It’s a big world. And it is indeed a paradise. Let’s recognize we are an integral piece of it while doing our part to maintain and improve it.

Equilibrium Maintenance

We have to match the atmosphere of our environment. It’s difficult to enjoy a laidback location when you’re uptight—I can tell you that from firsthand experience. Likewise, it’s difficult to accomplish anything in a high-stakes setting when you’re relaxed. We have to reach homeostasis with what’s happening in the world around us. Maybe that’s why we prefer certain places over others when we travel. We sample different places, and if our mood and our surroundings are conflicting, we experience stress. The same applies to everyday situations. The real question seems to be: how well do you adapt? 

Backwater Vibes

There’s a flavor to Laos that I can’t quite describe. It might be my recovery from sleep deprivation over the past couple days, or it could be that Laos is utterly unique. Life here seems simple; the locals do whatever job they have and then relax when off work. Because the whole country is such a backwater, there’s a lot less worry. It’s as if the whole nation is just living day by day, moment to moment. I mean this as a good thing. It’s peaceful. To get anywhere is an absolute journey, and when you arrive, you find that the whole country is made of towns. Not cities, but towns. You experience the culture here whether you intend to or not. The vibes gently sweep you off your feet. It’s a sort of wonderland. That places like this even exist in this day and age..it makes me smile and rest easy. Our lives can be so simple if we let them be and enjoy them. And we have this paradise of a setting to live them in. Perhaps just doing that will change the world to something we all love. 

The Race for Citizenship

Well it’s a race now. It’s pretty suspect how Buttigieg, Klobuchar, and Steyer all dropped out and endorsed Biden immediately before Super Tuesday while Warren, who fared far worse (compared to expectations) than all three of those candidates, continued her campaign. Now that she’s dropped out, she won’t endorse Bernie publicly, the candidate she is (supposedly) the most ideologically similar to. Doesn’t this all seem fishy? Does it harken back memories of 2016? It certainly makes it harder to have faith in “the establishment,” in our political system. 

On the other hand, Bloomberg dumped I believe $700 million into his campaign. Like I said before, it’s his money, he can do with it what he wants. But it seems like an awful waste. He has proclaimed to pour more money into supporting whoever the nominee ends up being—wouldn’t it have been better to do that from the start? Did he ever really have strong convictions about leadership? It just goes to show that running against someone or something as your raison d’etre doesn’t work. 

It’s important for us as citizens to ask such questions. They might be uncomfortable, and they might lead to even more difficult questions. But it’s our responsibility as citizens to think critically about the answers. If we want to govern ourselves then our election system and our political bodies must answer to no one else. Perhaps that’s the good news to all that’s happening—maybe we will wake up and see our political system for what it is. A thriving society requires our active participation. If we truly want the freedoms and justice we have grown accustomed to believing in, we must earn them. It will never be easy—no one who isn’t selling something has ever promised that—but it will make its retribution that much more fulfilling. We can change the world. It will take awareness, work, and perseverance, but it can be done. Do we want it?

Laotian Fairytale

Only 20 hours later and you enter a new world. Laos encourages you to contemplate the state of the world. Luang Prabang makes you wonder, “where am I?” WiFi passwords printed on receipts confounded with seasonal bamboo bridges rebuilt every year will cause you to ask that question. The world is vast. Exploring it gives us some sense of its scale, and its beauty. What a fairytale we live. 

Transitions and Implications

Today is a day of transitions. At 9am I boarded a sleeper bus in Chiang Mai, Thailand, and at some point tomorrow morning I’ll disembark in Laos. It will be a long journey. 

The Land of Smiles lived up to its namesake: the scenery is stunning, the culture and history rich, the food delicious, and the locals kind and welcoming. I thought it would be hard to match the genuineness we experienced in Bali, but Thailand was equal to the task. Having visited the south, central, and northern parts of the country, it’s easy to see its diversity. From pristine beaches to chaotic cities to lush mountain forest jungles, Thailand is an adventure. 

As I’m crossing the border into a new land, I think about what I’m experiencing here versus what’s happening back home. Super Tuesday is well underway, and its results will impact November and the next 4 years. People sighed in resignation when voting for Hillary in 2016, and will do the same for Biden this year if he wins the nomination—will the Democratic Party ever learn? The GOP has proved much more nimble and adaptive over the last several years. Ironic, given their respective liberal (usually leaning towards progressivism and openness) and conservative (usually favoring the status quo and tradition) ideologies. 

I ponder these things because the elections matter. Despite what the media proclaims, I find it hard to believe Biden can defeat Trump in November. Fatal acceptance won’t increase our dismal voter turnout rate. Only passion and conviction will do that. And this matters because the election in November will affect way out here, somewhere in the forests and fields between Thailand and Laos. Climate change does not await the results of the election. It’s happening now, affecting every Super Tuesday state, as well as the communities where I am. The implications of this election are on a global scale. We are all one species living on one rock; what one subset of us decides to do in one corner will impact all the rest. When I get off this bus in Laos, the pollution from forest and trash burning doesn’t magically go away because of an imaginary line in the dirt. It’s past time we understand this. We can change the world, but only if we act as one.

Pollution Spurs

They say life is a journey. I think some days harbor more progress than others. Today was one: hiking up a mountain to some temples in Chiang Mai’s “smokey season” made me reflect critically on my worldview. I see very little give for putting so many (millions) people’s health at risk. But we only ever truly walk in our own shoes. It’s important to remember that too. Outside-in perspective. It truly is a big beautiful amazing world—and we need to take care of it.