Day 109 - Qi Pao

Thought of the day:  Being a Chinese American has its special benefits.  One of them is that you get to celebrate the New Year twice - the solar/western new year and the lunar/Chinese new year.  What seems to follow naturally is that you get to have a second chance to make a new year's resolution.  On the last New Year's Eve, I was too busy philosophizing about "the new year's resolution" to make one for myself.  Now I got a second chance, and I gladly took it.  Of course, life is an one-way street and there's only going forward and no going back, but let our mind wander for a minute: what if you get the second chance to relive every day?  I think it will be pretty boring, with the possible exceptions for days when grave misfortunes befall you.  But if you choose to relive a bad day, you may be able to avoid some bad luck temporarily, and get yourself into an even bigger trouble in the future.  The best, and the only, thing to do is to keep moving forward.  I just read a book called "The Walk" by Richard Evans.  Some terrible things happened to the main character and he lost his family, job, and pretty much everything else in a couple of weeks.  He almost gave up but then he decided to walk - to literally walk across the continent, from Seattle all the way to Key West.  Along the journey of over 3,000 miles, he learned powerful lessons and gradually walked away from the shadow of his past and into the light of his future.  Life is a walk, and he just made it literal.  Some days you walk uphill, some days you walk downhill, some days you walk under the sun, some days you walk in the snow, but no matter what, if you keep on walking, the landscape will keep changing, you will see interesting things, hear interesting stories, and meet interesting people.  That happened to the guy in the book, and that's happening to every one of us every day.  If we take life as a walk, instead of a climb or a race, perhaps we'll be more gentle, more humble, and less likely to give up on missteps or misfortunes.


Photo of the day:

Jasmine wearing Qi Pao in a Chinese New Year party.