Essays on becoming Chris Barclay
“Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something that people take. And people are as free as they want to be.” – James Baldwin This week’s online video from the National Organization for Marriage (NOM) as part of their crusade against gay marriage, was a perfect storm of bigotry, hypocracy and religious […]
Continue ReadingI recently came across an essay on The Good Life by Jim Rohn, who calls himself “the world’s leading motivational speaker, philosopher and entrepreneur.” I watched some of his videos on YouTube, including one in which he exhorts an audience not to be “broke, stupid and ugly”. Talk about the power of positive thinking! I […]
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 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 […]
Continue ReadingThe man I am writing about is not famous. It may be that he never will be. It may be that when his life at last comes to an end he will leave no more trace of his sojourn on earth than a stone thrown into a river leaves on the surface of the water. […]
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