“We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again – to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more. The beauty of this whole process was best described, perhaps, before people even took to frequent flying, by George Santayana in his lapidary essay “The Philosophy of Travel.” We “need sometimes,” the Harvard philosopher wrote, “to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what.” read more

I like Sunday because it’s an unscheduled day that unfolds in interesting ways if I just get out of the way and let it flow. This is particularly true in Saigon where Marilynn and I have learned to let the day find its own rhythm. We usually sleep in, which for us means 6:30 or 7, since we’re normally up at 5. During the week I make a beeline for the kitchen to grab a banana and some creamy yogurt and then it’s a step by step routine till we’re out the door to the gym. But, Sundays are different. read more

Back in Saigon after six weeks away –

It feels so good. Not that it wasn’t fun to see family and friends in the US; but it was cold, wet, and hectic for the entire time. I made three trips to the Bay Area on business and we stopped in LA for a night on the way back to Vietnam.

Christmas was a minimalist event for us – the Vietnam adventure was our gift to ourselves. It isn’t inexpensive setting up a second household but more than that we have had so much fun exploring, tasting, smelling, walking, talking, and getting massaged that it didn’t seem like we needed to do more for ourselves on the holiday. read more

Old habits die hard. Old opinions are hard to change. Old patterns are hard to break. They are even more difficult when they become embedded in the culture and part of its political mindset. They may be based on painful experience, but they are often maintained when conditions change and then they stand in the way of progress. When this happens it prevents us from moving on and seeking solutions to current problems. There are many examples; Cuban-Americans can’t let go of their pain and hatred of Castro’s Cuba. Israelis continue to build settlements on the West Bank when it is clear that it will prevent a negotiated solution to their mutual problem. And – Vietnamese-Americans have such hatred and distrust of the government in their homeland that it prevents them from helping other Vietnamese and Vietnamese-Americans when they have a chance. New generations tend to inherit the attitudes and opinions of their parents. read more

Progress is a difficult word to get a handle on. What is it exactly? How do we measure it? What timeframes are appropriate for evaluating it? Is it linear? Is it always a positive thing? We’ve obviously made a lot of it in some fields – from mainframes to iPhones in computing, from the Model A to the Prius in automobiles; from segregated schools to the election of an African American President. Sometimes progress astonishes us. In just 53 years the US moved from a society that recognized separate-but-equal as a legal construct to a government led by someone who might have been barred from voting in some jurisdictions at the beginning of the period. read more