Essays on becoming Chris Barclay
The other day I watched a 4-D ultrasound of our soon-to-be born baby girl. If you’ve never seen one of these video scans, they are way beyond the grainy black & white images of last decade’s techology. During the exam, I could see her yawn, smile and suck her thumb in blocky, slow-mo, baby claymation. […]
Continue ReadingOne day around sunset, Zhuangzi dozed off and dreamed that he became a butterfly. He flapped his wings and sure enough he was a butterfly. What a joyful feeling as he fluttered about, he completely forgot that he was Zhuangzi. Soon though, he wondered if the butterfly was really Zhuangzi who dreamed he was a […]
Continue ReadingIn my recet post, “How to be an expert“, I talked about passion as being key to finding fulfillment in what we do. Yet so often we invest our passion into a hobby, because we can’t fully express it through our work. As hobbies rarely pay for themselves, we learn to live with spending the […]
Continue ReadingThe Thai don’t shake hands, they wai each other; putting their hands together in a prayer-like fashion. They do this for greetings, thanking, apologizing and taking leave. They also wai statues of Buddha, temples and other things that don’t wai them back. Who wais who first and how high you put your hands are all […]
Continue Reading“If you are rich and are worth your salt, you will teach your sons that though they may have leisure, it is not to be spent in idleness; for wisely used leisure merely means that those who possess it, being free from the necessity of working for their livelihood, are all the more bound to […]
Continue ReadingUnboundedLife is my exploration of personal freedom, and a key aspect of this is wellness. I like to think about it as freedom to consciously choose and be accountable for the quality of our life. There is so much confusion about wellness in modern society, because it has become a huge industry, and there are […]
Continue ReadingAs I pick up bits and pieces of the Thai language each day, I’ve found that the Thai people have a unique way of talking about themselves: they omit the “I” and refer to themselves in the 3rd person. This is the first time I’ve encountered this kind of disassociation in a language and made […]
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