Life is moving
Last night we went to Alin’s friends for dinner and beer. We ended up sitting for hours laughing, talking, drinking. Khmer people are very warm and affectionate types. Beer drinking figures large in the social repertoire of their lives. These people are poor and have little but are thankful for all they do have. So I bought the beer a few times, Alin cooked for them all, we ate and talked in a mix of Khmer and English. No one cared about the lack of a common language because smiles and saying “cheers” with almost every drink is the way to just be happy.
Life is a moving thing but we always expect it to be measurable and trackable and with bullets. Life is not that way. It could give a shit less if you track it or not. Khmer people have this saying,
same same but different
They all wear wrist watches all the time but hardly ever apply time tracking or even know how long it takes to do a thing. Or even today with Alin asked me what day it was. How many western cultures lose track of the day? No! Instead we create methods to break it into smaller parts that we can measure and illustrate. It brings to mind another saying here I have heard,
I’ll see you when you see me
I think this encapsulates how unhurried life is here in Southeast Asia but particularly Cambodia and Vietnam. We don’t need to stride out the steps to see something or someone like we are forever taught in schools and work. Instead we can wait. We can see the person when they see us. Why the F do we learn to hurry up so much, to get so much done, to accomplish? It just seems after living in Cambodia so bogus and stupid. We lost sight of the seeing and when others see us because we are lost in the desire to see more.
Why I left and stayed gone
The reason I left years ago is this too. Life is moving and I wanted off the track. I wanted to have a slow down. To do nothing. To have no debt or responsibilities or requirements put on me by others. Now Alin tells me to just go and be. Sounds like Jeff’s meditation feelings. And it’s why I left and stayed gone. Twenty two years in IT taught me one thing. IT sucks. It always has. Data centers and cloud and global services and critical applications. Programs cut in half for delivery times, costing way too much, staff impacted. Then I heard the CIO say,
oh we will just give that to Mike. He will get it all done. No problem.
So Life is moving and I left. Because I didn’t want to get it all done. No problem Todd. I left and stayed gone.
Life is moving. Dancing, Singing. Drinking beer at night with Khmer people or on the streets of Hanoi Vietnam. There is life. All that other crap is an approximation.
Here’s to life. Cheers.