Life, Laughter and Everything Else

It was well intentioned but impulsive nonetheless. Would $5 be enough? Nah, lets make it 10. I keyed in the letters, my credit card details, scrolled down and clicked "Donate". Within a minute, I was $10 poorer, though somewhat happier. After all, had she not stated on her site that Donating equals to Loving? Though just as an afterthought, maybe I should just make sure it went to the rightly deserved. So I googled her name, "Maria Popova" and clicked on the first Wiki link that came up. It started of with the usual introduction. From Bulgaria, started the website Brainpickings.org that had millions of readers monthly, writer for the Atlantic, Wired etc, once one of Forbes 30 under 30. Obviously someone who had started small and grew to be very influential through her website which I frequented now and then and whose articles would, often at confused and stressed junctures of my life, give me much emotional and spiritual relief. As she stated, it was a one woman sho...

This is the story of what the meditation retreat I went to in the South of Thailand in a Buddhist monastery ( I don’t want to name them in case they find out I killed mosquitoes while I was there) was like. There were about 136 of us of which about 130 were Caucasians with about a 60:40 guy to girl ratio. Most of them were, I suspect, between 20-30 years, with a handful of seniors and some who seemed to be going through a mid-life crisis. About 20% of them would drop out over time before the course was over. On Day 0, we were told to surrender all our electronic devices, watches, books and writing material and warned not to talk to each other or risk getting expelled from the monastery. I sneaked some writing material in but, like most others, adhered to the other demands to embark on a journey when every day was pretty much like the other. This is my story. Waking up The bell at the 2 storey bell tower ran punctually at 4 am every morning and the ringing went on for a...