Tag: Reflection
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What Didn’t Change After A Decade
This past week, I organized my room and came across a stack of old notes from a decade ago. It appeared I journaled for about three months before picking it up again six years later. I was taken aback by what I privately wrote, in Chinese, on August 23, 2014: A blank piece of paper.Don’t…
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Disrupt a 20-year Pattern
In the last 20 years, I started many projects. I had a dozen blogs with less than ten posts. I had a podcast in 2006 with five episodes on computer-related topics. I lost count of how many journals I had bought. These projects were nowhere to be found three months later (sometimes only two weeks).…
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A Habit Changed My Life
I want to share with you a practice that has transformed my life. I have been doing it for more than two years. It makes me happier. It helps me make sense of a bad day. It gives me a sense of clarity. This practice is a five-minute daily review. The method is inspired by…
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Christmas comfort
Christmas is often associated with comfort: beautiful gifts, candle-lit dinners, and celebrating with loved ones. All of which are wonderful. One interesting contrast is how the festivities compare to Jesus’ life story: He was born in a manger. His bed was made of hay. Not even a one-star hotel. Didn’t smell great with donkeys around. He spent…
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Light and darkness
The seasonal Christmas lights remind me of Thomas Edison. After experimenting with thousands of filaments, he discovered a material that would glow well and last a long time for an electric light bulb. His effort literally lit up the world. Was he a genius? Certainly. But more importantly, he did a lot of work. I wonder how many…
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Karate Lessons
When I was a kid, I practiced karate for a few years. I focused on kata, basically a choreography of martial arts movements. Like most Japanese art forms, precision, control, and accuracy are key to a great kata performance. One year I participated in a kata competition. My body was tense that day. The moves were not smooth. I lost balance…
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Regrets of the dying
Bronnie Ware, an Australian nurse who spent more than a decade with the seriously ill, recorded the top 5 regrets from her patients at the end of their lives: Source: The Top Five Regrets of the Dying
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Win-win
A while back I treated a friend to lunch. This week she treated me to dinner. Both meals cost about the same. On paper we are even: no monetary gain or loss. In reality both of us are better off. We had fun together. We each had an opportunity to give. We each accepted a…
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On Drinking Tea
I open my eyes. A great sense of peace dawns on me. I feel well rested. I am thankful for a new day. I am alive, and I want to live. I go into the kitchen. I scoop a teaspoon of loose oolong tea leaves into a petite glass tea pot. These tea leaves are…
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On One Year of Meditation (2021)
Over the years, I experimented with meditation a few times, but the practice never quite stuck for more than a few days. Once in a while, an article or a podcast on meditation would catch my attention, but for the most part, meditation seemed like something “nice to do” when you have some extra time.…
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Reflecting on Death
Bonnie, a friend of mine, recently passed away. Her funeral mass was held yesterday at the Oakland Cathedral. It was a beautiful memorial, with wonderful music played by more than a hundred musicians from the Oakland Symphony and a local children’s choir. Hundreds gathered to mourn, but also celebrated a wonderful life that left behind…