Reaching Escape Velocity
Guinid, a 90-year-old man in the Philippines rain forest, pounds rice every day in a mortar he carved from river stone. He told me stories of the Japanese invasion, his family’s history as head hunters, and his conversion to Christianity.
I HAD AN EPIPHANAL MOMENT at age 18 watching my Danish host father, Helge, look lovingly into the eyes of his wife, Karin, and call her “skat”. Skat means “darling” in Danish, but I was more familiar with the English “scat,” aka wild animal poop.
A tremor went through my young system at the cognitive dissonance: the deeply universal humanness of romantic love expressed through a cultural overlay so random that it can turn darling to poop and poop to darling.
Of course everyone knows, as I knew, that languages and cultures are different. But I grokked it on a deeper level that day. The tremor I felt was a realigning of my pixels, a loosening of the neurological patterns that defined my world. And the unlocking of a more dimensional way of understanding people and the complicated intermediating networks we construct – communities, organizations, businesses, societies, nations.
“The big red arrows of the universe are pointing me towards change.”
My professional life has been devoted to understanding human and organizational behavior, first as a journalist and then as an insight-based marketing strategist. Now, with the big red arrows of the universe pointing me toward change, I’ve decided to spend six months traveling: to learn, to grow, to pattern crack.
The gravitational pull of the Bay Area has loosened its hold on me. My son is settled at college and we’re downsizing our homested. The tech industry where I make my living is working through a period of creative destruction, to put it mildly.
The democracy where I make my life is going through a different kind of destruction. I’m okay watching that from afar, for now, and instead of worrying about it at home, committing myself to observing how other societies operate and what lessons we might take from them.
Perhaps the biggest gravity-lightener is achieving the milestone age of 60. This is supposed to be the year when the Great Calcification takes hold – right? Yet I feel amazing – more like I am blooming than aging.
My body strong and flexible, thanks to a power yoga addiction. And then there’s the age = wisdom thing. Through many years of Buddhist practice, I’ve been working to plant seeds of empathy and understanding. At age 60, it seems they might be bearing quality fruit. I could be deluding myself – one does not know. But I feel less reactive, more grounded, more forgiving, and on top of things.
In any event, escape velocity achieved, I have officially launched my six-month adventure.
In July, I spent two weeks in Hawaii and two weeks in Japan with my son. He returned to his second year of college in San Francisco while I continued on to the Philippines, which I’ll write about in my next post. For the next two weeks I’ll explore the wildlife and indigenous peoples of Borneo. And then on to Indonesia, Western Malaysia, Singapore, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand, where I’ll spend 30 days at a Buddhist monastery on a silent insight meditation retreat.
In late January, I plan to return to the Bay Area, renewed and refreshed with what I hope will be a ginormous realignment of brain pixels.
I’ll be posting as I go. Take care and stay tuned.
