Today's Brilliance

I subscribe to a site called "Inspire Me Today". The emails I get often help me start my day with a sense of tranquility, grounding, confidence, and inspiration. Today's was particularly nice.

Of all the things you can make in life, remember you make a difference. ~ Noah benShea

If today were my last day on Earth and I could share 500 words of brilliance with the world, here are the important things I'd want to pass along to others...

Noah benShea's Ten Tips for Tough Times

1. Being broke is not the same as being broken,
losing money is not the same as being lost,
and finding your balance is not something you can do on a balance sheet.

2. Don't confuse having less with being less,
having more with being more,
or what you have with who you are.

3. Slow down.
What you're chasing may be trying to catch you.

4. Prayer is a path where there is none.

5. Put your faith and not your fears in charge.

6. God only gave you two arms.
If you're busy hugging the past you can't embrace the future.
Don't let the past kidnap your future.

7. This too shall pass.
Change is the only constant.
In order to take a breath you must release your breath.

8. Do what you can,
but never forget that letting go is very different from giving up.

9. Break the rules that are breaking you.
Tough times don't require you to be tough on yourself.
Find the courage to suffer happiness.

10. Remember, remember, remember...
Things don't have to be good for you to be great.

Lessons from Lisa Ling

A few days ago, my best friend and I reunited at my alma mater, the University of Southern California, to hear Lisa Ling speak at a Women's Student Assembly event. To meet her was a huge deal for the both of us, considering that during our two years of living together, we'd skipped out on a handful of Friday-nights-on-the-town to instead cozy up to one of Ling's captivating National Geographic documentaries. (my favorite was "China's Lost Girls")

[Me, Lisa Ling, my friend]

For those who don't know Lisa Ling, she may simply be "that Asian girl on TV". You might have seen her on The View or on National Geographic, or as a correspondent on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Most recently, her sister was detained in North Korea but was released after a string of diplomatic and humanitarian efforts that happened mainly as a result of Lisa's public outcries and celebrity weight.

For those who do know Lisa Ling, she is an Asian American broadcast journalist, and a hero to many who share her heritage. When I joined MySpace seven years ago as a sophomore in high school, for example, and was asked who my heroes were, I automatically wrote Lisa Ling. She, Connie Chung, Lucy Liu, and frankly, Mulan, were the only female Asian faces I saw in mainstream media, and for that, I was proud of her. I identified with her and aspired to be the eloquent, brave, intelligent person she seemed to be.

[Stunning! Lisa had an unconventional, chic, beautiful wedding in March 2010 at LA's Union Station.]

Born-and-raised in Sacramento, CA, Lisa is 1,000% American, but has faced many issues that I, as a minority, have faced both at home and abroad. We've faced ignorant comments and jabs that puncture the soul, such as when Ling made a controversial comment on a 9/11 special on The View and subsequently received hate letters that reprimanded, "What do you know? Go back to China". But despite the misunderstanding and hate that comes with the territory of being a minority, widely-known, investigative journalist, Lisa has continued to cover stories.

And this is why.

While Lisa has a huge fan-base of Asian Americans like myself, she quite apparently doesn't rest her identity on that blaring racial factor that sets her apart. She does what she does not to represent Asians in the media, but because she simply LOVES journalism. And I'm not talking about cuddly, puppy love; I'm talking passionate, put-me-on-the-front-lines (even if that means putting my life in danger), expose-the-truth love. (Watch some of her documentaries and you'll see what I'm talking about. From Colombia, to America's most dangerous prison, to China and beyond, Ling has "roughed it", and that's an understatement.) I cannot stress enough how I hung on her every word during that hour-long talk -- not because she is a graceful, intelligent speaker; not because she speaks in what seems like poetic prose, but because she spoke every single word with purpose, and instills exactly that into her followers -- purpose.

So, rather than applaud Lisa as one of the Asian American community's finest, I want to instead thank her for showing us that if you believe in something, or want something so badly, your dream can come true. In her case, unveiling stories about the world was her dream. It's so obvious that honest, true, raw journalism was something she wanted so badly for not just herself, but for others, and to this day, will fight for.

Lesson learned. If there are ambitions or dreams or goals that you really want, like really, REALLY want, you can will them to existence. As Lisa said and did, "You can just will them to existence".

[What is YOUR purpose?]
_______________________________________________

The public would not know about many pressing issues if Lisa weren't here to deem them of importance and choose to report on them. Here are some of my notes from her talk:

-Lisa and her crew have been safe, despite being in very dangerous situations, because she respects her interviewees. They are all people and all came from a mother. She gives respect to get it.
-As a mere sophomore at USC, she had to miss a Russian-based final because she...had to GO to Russia to report for Channel 1. Before she dropped out of school, she had already reported in Afghanistan.
-Sexual trafficking is a topic that is of dire importance to her, especially that which is occurring in the USA at this very minute. She seeks to unveil the misconceptions we have, and the truth that many politicians try to hide: that "prostitution" in the USA is actually the trafficking of women. Americans have distaste for prostitutes because we often think they are criminals without acknowledging that many of these girls run away from bad home lives, only to be preyed on by bad men, or pimps, a culture we revere, especially in hip hop. If girls are trafficked in from other countries, we help them. But if they are American girls, they're left to fend for themselves, and they're seen as dirty prostitutes.
-She recommends spending a day in juvenile court. Witness the frailty of seemingly tough girls who have been arrested for prostitution; realize that they are just little girls.
-Child marriage happens in 40 countries around the world. In Ethiopia, girls as young as 6-7 years old are married off to older men and are expected to conceive a male.
-She's struggled with faith after witnessing so many brutalities and injustices. But her husband sent her an email, with the subject asking God, "Why? Why would this be?" to which He retorted, "Now that you know, you can't pretend that you don't. Why would this be? I made you".
-Spend a year abroad. It makes you smarter, well-versed, marketable in the job force, and educated.

Lisa Ling is currently shooting for Oprah's OWN 2011 documentary series, set to launch in January 2011.

She is a spokesperson for iVolunteer.org and is active on social media (@lisaling).

Honeymoon with my Brother

I just finished re-reading a book called Honeymoon with my Brother by Franz Wisner. I picked up the book probably two years ago at a used-bookstore, and I'm so glad I made that $1 purchase.

I recommend that everyone read this book. It's the story of Franz, a wealthy poster-child of Republicanism, deep from the conservative throes of Newport Beach, esteemed writer and government relations exec for real estate giant, The Irvine Company. He's days away from wedding a girl whom he met during his days on Capitol Hill when he gets dumped. Sucks. Newly single, feeling like crud, and in possession of an all-paid, extra honeymoon ticket to Costa Rica, he decides to take his brother, Kurt, instead. After some brotherly bonding and the all-too-expected high they got from their short traveling stint, Franz and Kurt decide to take two years off from their cookie-cutter lives and travel the world together. They sell most of their belongings and leave their microcosm of a world behind.

And they face the real world. Months spent in Europe, South America, Africa, North America, and Southeast Asia. The book is an account of their hilarious, touching, and actualizing adventures with each other, with strangers, and within themselves as they chuck four-star hotels for hostels; rides in limos for tuk tuks and scooters; swooning with socialites to cavorting with hitchikers. The book is refreshing, funny, and damnit, you become jealous of their lifestyles.

I love this book because Franz hails from Orange County, a community that is all-too-similar to my own hometown and one that prizes characteristics akin to materialism and consumerism that are evident in many students from my alma mater. Franz was immersed in that world, but his travels and encounters with others forced him to re-evaluate. Throughout his travels, we start to see his priorities change. Being in a world that is, as he describes it, plainly poor, he emotes and realizes that money is not everything. That, while people at home in California/USA obsess and complain about the most minuscule and petty things, the majority of those around the world -- those with close to nothing, without shoes, clothes, parents -- are still able to smile bigger, open their doors more quickly, give what limited food they own, and emit more happiness than any American he'd ever encountered.

There's so much more that this book shares and does to the reader. It made me re-assess my career opporunities and think about the potential for which I can use my God-given skills for a greater good. It made me become just a little more disgusted with American consumer/capitalism culture; pitiful for the people who are so focused on making money that they don't stop to smell the roses; hopeful that I can have similar Wisner-adventures in my own life. I know that I have to make money in order to afford the opportunity to travel, and I hope that I will with that goal in mind.

From this book, I've learned that I must, MUST go to Brazil one day. Rio de Janeiro. Carnival. (But I'll go with a guy...or two or three. To be safe.) That Africa is a must-see, especially the safaris, which more clearly demonstrate the order-of-life better than any movie or book we've ever grown up watching or reading. That life is unexepected and the outline I've created for my own may change in an instant, as Franz's did, and that everything, absolutely everything, will turn out alright.

Throughout the book, Franz highlights his conversations and visits with his grandmother, LaRue. She turns 100 at the end of their trip. She lives in a retirement home and when the brothers announce their world trip to her, she and the fellow residents of the Eskaton Retirement Center follow them, read their letters, pinpoint on a map their visits, and hang their pictures in the multipurpose room. They are so excited for the brothers and all say they had wished they had done something similar, gone to that place, how it's a shame it's too late. Their response is a nice change from Wisners' parents, who anxiously question what they will do for money to fund their travles, with their jobs, what they'll do when they get back, when they're going to get married (and have kids), etc. etc. Etc. Etc. Etc. Blah.

I can relate. Most people can relate. He writes, "Our parents' generation asks when we're going back to work. Eskaton asks where we're going next." True. Story. I understand why Franz includes his conversations with LaRue and her friends. It's called perspective. Because at the end of the road, what matters are not the numbers of breaths we take, but the moments that take our breath away. I'm glad I recognize that now.

Read the book. His newest is called How the World Makes Love...and What it Taught a Jilted Groom. Going to read it as soon as I get home.

http://www.honeymoonwithmybrother.com/

Powerful.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do."

-Nelson Mandela

A dose of travel inspiration...

The 50 Most Inspiring Travel Quotes Of All Time

1. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness.” - Mark Twain

2. “The world is a book and those who do not travel read only one page.” - St. Augustine

3. “There are no foreign lands. It is the traveler only who is foreign.” - Robert Louis Stevenson

4. “The use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are.” - Samuel Johnson

5. “All the pathos and irony of leaving one’s youth behind is thus implicit in every joyous moment of travel: one knows that the first joy can never be recovered, and the wise traveler learns not to repeat successes but tries new places all the time.” - Paul Fussell

6. “Our battered suitcases were piled on the sidewalk again; we had longer ways to go. But no matter, the road is life.” - Jack Kerouac

7. “He who does not travel does not know the value of men.” - Moorish proverb

8. “People travel to faraway places to watch, in fascination, the kind of people they ignore at home.” - Dagobert D. Runes

9. “A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.” - John Steinbeck

10. “No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow.” - Lin Yutang

11. “Your true traveler finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty-his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.” - Aldous Huxley

12. “All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries, he may learn to improve his own. And if fortune carries him to worse, he may learn to enjoy it.” - Samuel Johnson

13. “For my part, I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.” - Robert Louis Stevenson

“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” - Henry Miller

14. “Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things - air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky - all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.” - Cesare Pavese

15. “One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” - Henry Miller

16″A traveler without observation is a bird without wings.” - Moslih Eddin Saadi

17. “When we get out of the glass bottle of our ego and when we escape like the squirrels in the cage of our personality and get into the forest again, we shall shiver with cold and fright. But things will happen to us so that we don’t know ourselves. Cool, unlying life will rush in.” - D. H. Lawrence

18. “To awaken quite alone in a strange town is one of the pleasantest sensations in the world.” - Freya Stark

19. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” - Mark Twain

20. “Travel is more than the seeing of sights; it is a change that goes on, deep and permanent, in the ideas of living.” - Miriam Beard

21. “All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.” - Martin Buber

22. “We live in a wonderful world that is full of beauty, charm and adventure. There is no end to the adventures we can have if only we seek them with our eyes open.” - Jawaharial Nehru

23. “Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.” - Paul Theroux

24. “To my mind, the greatest reward and luxury of travel is to be able to experience everyday things as if for the first time, to be in a position in which almost nothing is so familiar it is taken for granted.” - Bill Bryson

25. “Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

26. “Two roads diverged in a wood and I - I took the one less traveled by.” - Robert Frost

27. “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” - Lao Tzu

28. “There is no moment of delight in any pilgrimage like the beginning of it.” - Charles Dudley Warner

29. “A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.” - Lao Tzu

30. “If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home.” - James Michener

31. “The journey not the arrival matters.” - T. S. Eliot

32. “A journey is best measured in friends, rather than miles.” - Tim Cahill

33. “I have found out that there ain’t no surer way to find out whether you like people or hate them than to travel with them.” - Mark Twain

34. “Once you have traveled, the voyage never ends, but is played out over and over again in the quiestest chambers. The mind can never break off from the journey.” - Pat Conroy

“A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” - Lao Tzu

35. “Not all those who wander are lost.” - J. R. R. Tolkien

36. “Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.” - Benjamin Disraeli

37. “Perhaps travel cannot prevent bigotry, but by demonstrating that all peoples cry, laugh, eat, worry, and die, it can introduce the idea that if we try and understand each other, we may even become friends.” - Maya Angelou

38. “Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation.” - Elizabeth Drew

39. “Wandering re-establishes the original harmony which once existed between man and the universe”……Anatole France

40. “Travel and change of place impart new vigor to the mind.” - Seneca

41. “What you’ve done becomes the judge of what you’re going to do - especially in other people’s minds. When you’re traveling, you are what you are right there and then. People don’t have your past to hold against you. No yesterdays on the road.” - William Least Heat Moon

42. “I soon realized that no journey carries one far unless, as it extends into the world around us, it goes an equal distance into the world within.” - Lillian Smith

43. “To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.” - Aldous Huxley

44. “Travel does what good novelists also do to the life of everyday, placing it like a picture in a frame or a gem in its setting, so that the intrinsic qualities are made more clear. Travel does this with the very stuff that everyday life is made of, giving to it the sharp contour and meaning of art.” - Freya Stark

45. “The first condition of understanding a foreign country is to smell it.” - Rudyard Kipling

46. “Travel is glamorous only in retrospect.” - Paul Theroux

47. “The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one’s own country as a foreign land.” - G. K. Chesterton

48. “When you travel, remember that a foreign country is not designed to make you comfortable. It is designed to make its own people comfortable.” - Clifton Fadiman

49. “A wise traveler never despises his own country.” - Carlo Goldoni

50. “Adventure is a path. Real adventure - self-determined, self-motivated, often risky - forces you to have firsthand encounters with the world. The world the way it is, not the way you imagine it. Your body will collide with the earth and you will bear witness. In this way you will be compelled to grapple with the limitless kindness and bottomless cruelty of humankind - and perhaps realize that you yourself are capable of both. This will change you. Nothing will ever again be black-and-white.” - Mark Jenkins