Off to Canadia soon!
It's been about a week. Let me follow up on the end of my last post.
World Cup, Slacklining, Bike, Book, and road tripping with my brother!
I'm guessing it'll be a long time before I hear another vuvuzuela. I wanted Brazil to win, but maybe this is what the coach gets for changing the team so much. They'd better win at home in 2014!
Slacklining is so much fun! Thank you Fedya and Brian for getting me into it. Now I can walk pretty consistently and turn around (my best so far is like 30 steps with 4 turns), and I'm trying to learn how to jump while I'm on it!
The bike's actually finally getting into the shop tomorrow, the day I'm leaving for Calgary, so that's unfortunate. I can't wait to ride it when I get back though!
And the book (again, The Monk and the Philosopher ) is fascinating!
Years ago, this became one of my favorite quotes:
"People don't realize how a man's whole life can be changed by one book." (Malcolm X)
I'm not saying that everyone has to read this book or that I'm a different person now, just that I've found it very relevant to my life, and it's helping me to ask and answer a lot of questions that are important to me. Here's the basic premise:
The Monk is Matthieu Ricard, a molecular biologist who got his Ph.D. from the Pasteur Institute, but in his late 20s, decided to drop his scientific career and has since lived in India and Nepal as a Buddhist monk. He has a great TED talk about happiness, by the way ( www.ted.com ) .
The Philosopher is his father, Jean-François Revel, an atheist writer/politician/philosopher who's published a few books (his son has as well).
The book is a dialogue between the two about what each person believes and why they believe it. They're both very intelligent and coherent, which makes for a great discussion.
In The Prince, Machiavelli writes that the book is a condensed version of the sum of his life's experience and knowledge on what a prince should do with his state. That blew my mind. And then I realized that many books have the same weight: a book that is a product of someone's entire life, something he or she has decided to condense and share with anyone who's interested. What would your book be like?
I oughta get to bed. I'll post again in a couple days from Canada! Quick overview of the trip: I'm flying up to Calgary in 6 hours, then we'll be driving down to Yellowstone over the course of a week-ish, and we'll be spending pretty close to a week there, and then I'm flying back to New Jersey and Sandeep's going to keep truckin' across the midwest.
If anyone's got any suggestions for places to go or things to do around Glacier Park or Yellowstone, let me know!
... And here's a picture of Simba after we went for a long walk. I don't know if you can tell, but he's exhausted, haha.
