Reminder: Progress, Not Success

It is okay to fail.

Vision: Where Believing Is Seeing

“There’s an old Wayne Gretzky quote that I love. ‘I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.’ And we’ve always tried to do that at Apple. Since the very very beginning. And we always will.”
-Steve Jobs

If you need to see it to believe it, you’re probably catching up behind me.

Limited Understanding of God

This is hilarious. You can tell that they are really going for the kill this time – they even mobilized atheists to pray!

Can simultaneous prayer take God offline?

from Net Effect by Evgeny Morozov

I don’t care if it’s “slacktivism” but this Facebook campaign is incredibly funny: launching DDOS attacks on God  by simultaneous prayer

As you may already be aware, recently the Atheist Founation of Australia and the Global Atheist Convention websites were the target of a significant DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack, which began on Monday 19 October.

This is a call to all non-believers and advocates for freedom of speech to join us in a global co-ordinated minute of prayer with the aim of inundating God (in this context, the Christian god, God, as distinct from the Greek god, Zeus, the Egyptian god, Ra etc etc) with so many useless prayers that it causes his divineness to go offline as as result of our own DDOS (‘Divine’ Denial of Service).

The prayer minute will be at exactly 8pm (Eastern Standard Time) and 9am (Greenwich Mean Time) on Sunday 8 November 2009.

Whether you are a Christian or not, I think this stuff is for FAIL blog!

A Child of Two Worlds

While I was here, one of my biggest lament is that we Singaporeans are too sheltered. Our impressions of the world are mainly extrapolation from the paintings of the media and Hollywood culture. It doesn’t help that western culture is often vilified by the government and their press – just ask the media students.

Yet, all these are true. Most of us do not have a single clue about the world we are trying to reach – especially Christians. It is like trying to conqueror the Everest that we picture in photographs – sincerely inaccurate, realistically out of whack.

It was only till when I arrived here, I understood what it mean to live as a Canadian, to adopt a western perspective and even behave like one of them. Armed with the new worldview, I was determined to bring it back to my sheltered peers. However, what surprised me today in class was the the responses with regards to the films we watched regarding China, Malaysia and Indonesia. These people talk about these appalling sights of the dirty streets and the poor living conditions with such unjust and disbelief. What seems to be the usual neighboring sights to me were different paradigms for them. The Montrealer speaks of his visits to Indonesia as eye opening and perspective altering – to me, that is just Indonesia. It’s funny, but it seems like we are not the only ones who are overprotected.

We are all sheltered from each other.

Now that I have been entrusted with this fuller picture of the world, albeit it being one that is still far from completion, I wonder how am I called to steward this privilege.

After all, I am a child of two worlds.

Sarek: [to Spock] You will always be a child of two worlds, and fully capable of deciding your own destiny. The question you face is: which path will you choose?

Punctuation Marks

They say solitude is your best teacher.

This week, I did a rough estimate and realize it takes about 15 people slots per week to accommodate to my lifestyle. Unlike some people, I simply cannot stand staying at home, hence I pack my week with activities – activities that are normally done with other peoples. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, supper. Movies, drinking, sports, chill. Teaching, sharing, playing, chatting. In a sense, it takes 15 people just to deal with one Zachary, per week.

I must be really taxing to befriend!

I obviously do not have the luxury of such company while I’m in Montreal. Yet, I have so many people envious of my 3 days week in McGill. Honestly, what would you do with the remanding 5 days? There is only so much traveling, sightseeing, exploring and playing you can pack into it. Some of my friends are “luckier”. They have mid terms, tests and homework to complete before they can enjoy a fraction of my freedom before their week ends and they turn the hourglass again.

We often ask for more time, but when we actually get it, how do you intend to spend it?

It may be liberating at the start, but it would not take long for it to turn mundane. Eventually, it would decompose into boredom and we might even turn to the desperate resort of killing time. What a tragedy! The amateur solution to the problem would be to punctuate it with activities. We institute milestones by chucking in the bungee jumps, skiing trips, watch the first snow fall and steal trips across the borders. We categorize the days of our lives into two types – the special days and the non-special days. The non-special days are spent on looking forward to the special days. Period.

It is like reading through a sentence looking for the punctuation marks. We breeze through entire paragraphs of our lives just like that.

The other way is to enjoy the unremarkable days. To find joy in the simple and the ordinary. To accept that they make up the majority of our life and to skip them would be to attempt murder on the bulk of our lives.

To enjoy both the words as well as the punctuation marks.

Loyalty & Honor

Recent events had me thinking about two very rarely exhibited characteristics of human nature: Loyalty and honor.

While I fully grasped the meaning of the loyalty – which is fundamentally commitment, the latter characteristic seems to elude my understanding.

Even though we all know it is a favorable trait, what does it mean to be honorable?

To honor your word is to keep to it.
To honor your parents is to respect them.
To uphold your honor is to have some healthy amount of pride.
To keep your honor is to prevent your enemy from humiliating you.

What exactly is this honor?

While I have always been in love with the concept of it, I’m not completely sure what it is; I always hold a person who exhibits either of these two traits with high regard.

Legendary Words

In 1983, Steve Jobs lured John Sculley away from Pepsi-Cola to serve as Apple’s CEO, asking,

“Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water to children, or do you want a chance to change the world?”

Orwellian references