Talk is cheap

Jiro-san is a sushi maker who owns a nice sushi joint in Singapore's East Coast road.  He is not related to the famous Jiro from Japan, who happened to also own a world-renowned sushi restaurant.  Jiro-san of Singapore just happened to share the same name.

In fact, Jiro-san of Singapore never had any experience in sushi making before he decided to open the joint 15 years ago.  He was working in a Japanese company as a "salaryman", a term that the Japanese like to use to describe the nine-to-fivers.  One day, he was told that his services were no longer needed and he was let go.  Stuck in Singapore in the late 1990s, he decided to do something radical: he stayed and took on a brand new field of sushi making.

His joint is now one of the "best kept secrets" of Singapore - where only the lucky few would know and have the chance to visit.  He never advertise and relies solely in word-of-mouth.  I happened to be sitting in front of him in his restaurant a day after he had an operation.  I asked him, why is he not delegating, despite the pain he had to endure standing for hours behind the sushi bar while his wound is not yet fully healed.  He said in his broken English that he tried, and he could not find any one to fit the bill. Therefore he had to return as soon as possible.  So Jiro-san has been working in this mode, 7 nights a week, for the last 15 years.

Jiro-san clearly takes his job seriously, you can see in the way he slices the fish to the way he places the sushi on the plates.  But he is also a struggling businessman.  Singapore rental market has gone up tremendously. When he started 15 years ago, he did not have the foresight that the rent cost will blow up out of proportion compared to his income.  He also did not have the money, the opportunity or the interest to buy the property he was renting - so he kept on renting the place since he started.

A couple of foreign expatriates were sitting in front of him last night.  I happened to be the only other customer left, and I over heard their comments:

The wife: ".....so, after all these years, you have never bought a property"....
The husband: "...if this things go up-and-up-and-up, you will suffer.....  If you were to buy this property a long time ago, the value of the property would have beaten any income from your sushi shop...."

It hit me when I heard those comments, how arrogant and unhelpful these two ignorant expatriates had been. Jiro has to endure the rent problem every night he closes his shop.  Yet he still have to ensure that he slices the best sushi for the customers, just like he did 15 years ago.  And here they were, a couple of ignoramus who has never done anything as good as he does, lecturing him about buying properties.

At that moment I felt like I needed to stand up and tell them, that if Jiro were to spend his time speculating on properties, we won't be sitting here enjoying his sushi. Also, if they can't say anything useful, please shut up.  But I decided to stand up, paid the bill and left.  I managed to escape the rest of the verbal garbage - but poor Jiro had to endure it until the end while serving the sushi.

Talk is cheap. People should do more, and talk less. 

The Transient Life

A bright red-blue-green Rosella flew in front of me as I stood in my back yard porch in Australia, looking at the mountains, holding to a glass of red wine.  To my surprise he landed on a branch not more than an arm’s length from where I stood.  He may have mistakenly thought that the wine glass was a cup of delicious corn kernels.  He stood there for a while, staring at me as I admire the amazing mix of colors of his feathers, wishing that I had real corn kernels to give.

As I stood there, I thought, this is how life should be……the bird in the tree, a glass of wine and the mountain at the background.   The bird flew away and I went back to my house.

I stood at the junction of 16th and K street of Washington DC.  I looked along the 16th street and saw the White House at the end of the street.  I walked across the street to the office that I had to go to, one block away.  The city was clean as always, the smell of coffee from the café next door was tempting.  The monuments and the flowers in the parks make the city feel cozy.  An African American lady who worked as the security guard of the office building greeted me with a smile.  She said – “how are you today?”.  I returned the gesture.  I met with 3 of my colleagues, an immigrant from China, an old Caucasian man, and an African American lady.  They told me that if I am hungry there is a very nice Indian food joint just around the corner.

As I stood among them, I thought, this is how life should be…..the beautiful city, a rich mix of culture. The meeting finished after a couple of hours and I made my way to the airport.

I alighted from bus number 10 in East Coast Road in Singapore.  I walked to a hawker center selling one of my family’s favorite foods, the vegetarian wanton noodle.  The stall lady-owner greeted me and asked how my family and I are doing.  I answered that we are doing well but we have just moved to Australia.  She asked me when will we return, and I said I do not know.  I ordered one dish and asked for a cup of my favorite tea to come with it.  She made me a slightly up-sized dish as a nice gesture.  I heard familiar noise of other hawkers working in the background as I enjoyed my comfort food.

As I sat there, I thought to myself, this is how life should be…..beautiful food, familiar people, familiar places.  The food was finished in no time and I rushed back home to pack up and return to Australia.

Everything in life is transient.  Love what you do, love who you are with, love everything around you.  

Finding Greatness

Last time I checked there are 7 billion people on earth, and counting. That is a steep growth from 3 billion just sixty years ago, and from less than a billion a century before.  Sometimes I wonder,  with so many bodies in production, would God be running out of stock one day and say - "no more soul to give, if you need a soul look in eBay, maybe someone is selling"

The human body is a superbly designed vehicle that is self governing and self repairing. Furthermore it is equipped with the mind, the software that helps the human race to be the dominating species in the world. The human beings can easily replicate - an average woman has more than 30 years of fertile age and only 9 months lead time to produce a baby.  Theoretically it is easy to get a population from 1 billion bodies to 7 billion, and equally easy to bring that to 70 billion.

So here is a question: would life be the same for you and me, whether there are 7 billion, or 70 billion, or 7 million people in the world?

The answer depends on whether you believe on a higher purpose.

I believe a body is assigned to every soul (I define "body" to include the mind). The soul is on earth with a purpose, and it needs the body to manifest it. The life purpose is never hidden or elusive. It is as clear as the sun, shining brightly. But our mind, that is created to help us survive in this world, is very obstructive. Our thoughts, dogma and emotion that came from the mind create the sand-storm and smoke that block away the clarity.

The modern world is a world focused on the mind. Education system and professional life afterwards reward the sharpest minds. Tools are created to sharpen it even further, or at least to help the mind make more detailed analysis at a faster pace. But as we focus on the mind, we also create more and more smoke and sand-storm that blocks away the clarity of our soul's purpose.  We have been doing this for so long that so many of us are lost souls, and so many have been born and left without finding the purpose.   Many people try to find the purpose for the soul by thinking even more. Unfortunately, no analysis, thinking or frameworks can help us obtain clarity for the soul, because the mind is not created for that.

Lost souls are harmful for the body, because it may lead the body to do things that it is not meant to do.  Naturally it will also be harmful for others and the earth....it is so easy to pick a few examples of people who harm others.  So if there are 7 billion lost souls in the world, that's bad and we would be better off to have only 7 million of them.  But if there are 7 billion souls with clarity of their purposes, that would be a wonderful thing. So the state of the world's well being is not in the left brain or right brain of every person. It depends on how many people of the 7 billion has the clarity of their life purpose.

When the soul finds that purpose, it would have found greatness. Greatness not in the sense of fame or financial wealth, although it could be a side effect. Greatness in a sense that the soul will find satisfaction and conviction in what it does. Greatness in a sense that there is a feeling that the universe is working to provide its support.  And greatness in a sense that the energy it brings inspires others and the environment around it.

As a parent I have asked myself how do I give my child the best passage to clarity? How do we reduce the exposure to man made smoke and sand-storm that prevents her from seeing the clarity?  I also asked myself on how do I overcome my bad habits, my thoughts and emotion that have created the smog in front of my own eyes?

Nature is the best teacher. Pollution in a city can be stopped within a day if the city decides to stop doing what it has been doing. In the same way the sand-storm and smoke that cloud our souls can clear up very quickly when there is stillness of mind.

After being in the world of noise for so long, creating stillness is no longer natural and it requires tremendous courage and faith. But it is worth the pursuit by every one of us, every one of the 7 billion people in the world. Afterall, within the stillness, there is greatness.