Thinking About Thinking

Every one should spend some time under an umbrella looking out at the most spectacular sea imaginable. With soft white sand to mush between your toes. And beach huts to sleep in with a little restaurant and a very sweet young man to get you a drink. Everything seems to stop and just hold very still. What a good place to think about what has value and what can pretty much get left behind.

So - what is important? Being able to think. Always being able to think, despite politics, prejudice, deep-seated feelings of inadequacy or arrogance or passion. Teaching others the art of to thinking in and out of the box in ways that marry technology and imagination and make people look forward to thinking, perhaps to consider thinking worthwhile. Having friends in far away places that want to join in and make it a party. That would be worth a lot of missed shopping opportunities and frequent flier miles.

Cambodia is a country that present simultaneous pictures of the absolute best and most unimaginably horrible in people. Individually, there are daily episodes of great kindness and generosity. As a society, there is not one internal charitable foundation and Buddhist Temples are a money laundering front for a Vietnamese oil company. The level of practiced corruption is breathtaking in scale. For the average westerner, concerned with making a mortgage, the possibilities for contributing are staggering. What can one person do in the face of such unmeasurable human agony? Too much and not enough. What can one person do? Truly, it comes down to the most elemental human achievements. Teach literacy and we give each individual the opportunity to think. I can hold onto that.