What's a Vacation For?

Now that we finally got to July and being on vacation, I have at last gotten around to catching up on a few personal projects that I would like to have undertaken long ago.

One project is learning how to actually make best use of the Macbook Air that I've been blogging on for two years now. Two and a half years, actually. Micah gave me the laptop at Christmas 2011. I've been stumbling around on it ever since, managing every now and then to get a word or two that made some sense out on the 'net for all the world to consider. haha.

On this vacation, my brother-in-law John, the Mac guy, has been very helpful in this personal proficiency-improvement project, especially with utilizing the pictures from iPhone that I've been snapping to elucidate our Costa Rica vacation.

In the midst of this steep learning curve, a picture popped up on one of the Mac files, a picture that I had forgotten about, thought I had trashed forever, except that lo and behold it is still rollin' around in the Mac and so I managed to pull it out of the trash. Pat took the pic exactly two years ago on Maui, Hawaii, at the Sun Yat-Sen park, which is a small memorial to the founder of modern China, Sun Yat-Sen. Here is his statue, with me standing next to it because I think Mr. Sun was a great leader:

A little research I've done today uncovers the impressive fact that both the major factions of modern Chinese liberation--the Mao-led Communist party and the Chiang Kai-shek-led Kuomintang-- claim Sun Yat-Sen as a major contributor to their initial movements to wrestle the governance of China from the dying Qing dynesty, because Mr. Sun led the revolution that knocked the Qing out of power in 1912.

Another reason I think he was a great leader relates to a quote from him that I discovered on this very same statue-base in Hawaii two years ago. The quote is carved into one face of the statue's base:

"Search into the nature of things, look into the boundaries of knowledge, make the purpose sincere, regulate the mind, cultivate personal virtue, rule the family, govern the state, pacify the world."

This principle(s) have been bopping around in my mind for these last two years. When I saw the pic pop up in my Mac wanderings today, the profundity of this wisdom suddenly came back to me. So I spent a couple hours today trying to find the source of the quote, which turns out to be not Sun Yat-Sen himself, but rather Confucius, in an old classic called The Great Learning.

I learned this when a google search finally led me to a pdf from a biography of Sun Yat-sen by a Stanford scholar, Marie Clare Bergere. http://books.google.co.cr/books?id=vh7M1u4IGFkC&dq=sun+yat+sen+%2B+nature .

The idea of "searching into the nature of things" is one that Mr. Sun made a central part of his own way of relating to the world and trying to make it a better place. I like that strategy, and it is the essence of my writing projects, the blogging as well as the novels.

Here is another pic from that Hawaiian adventure two years ago, just to illustrate what I mean by looking into the nature of things. This pic reveals just how everything, including the earth itself is just kind of. . . stratified:

Glass half-Full

The Gift of Speech

When you've got it, you've got it.
The trick is learning how to use it, then doing it.
Let's say you've got a knack for fixing things that are broken. Then your life's challenge becomes, as you progress from childhood to adulthood to maturity:

~identifying that aptitude (as, for instance,for fixin' things), given by God and nature to you.
~learning how to develop that raw aptitude into a skill
~developing that potential through education or apprenticeship
~adding value, by the use of your improved skill, to whatever comes your way, then
~passing the "whatever comes your way" along, having improved it (ie "fixed" it)
~having acquired, now, a proficiency, using it to establish a livelihood
~serving those you love by providing sustenance for yourself and for them
~serving mankind by the use of your fully developed gift

Consider, for example, Lionel Logue, the "King's" speech therapist. Now there was a man who accurately identified his gift, learned how to use it well, and then made a real difference in the world.

We're all Lionels, if we apply ourselves and our potentials to life's challenge.

There was a point in Lionel's life when all the education that he had sought pertaining to the use of speech began to contribute significantly to improvement of other people's lives.

In his book about his uncle Lionel, Mark Logue describes this turning point of effectiveness. About Lionel Logue's early attempts at speech therapy, Mark writes, on pages 30-31 of The King's Speech:

"His first success appears to have been with Jack O'Dwyer, a former soldier from West Leederville, in the Perth (Australia) suburbs. Earlier that year, Logue had been sitting on a train next to a soldier and watched, intrigued, as he leant forward to speak to two companions in a whisper. 'Mr. Logue thought the matter over, and just before he got to Fremantle he gave the soldier his card and asked him to call on him,' a newspaper (had) reported.
"O'Dwyer, it emerged, had been gassed at Ypres in August 1917 but had been told in London that he would never speak again. At Tidworth hospital on Salisbury Plain suggestive and hypnotic treatment was tried but failed. And so, on 10 March 1919, the unfortunate man had gone to see Logue.
"Logue was convinced he could help. So far as he could tell, the gas had affected the throat, the roof of the mouth and the tonsils, but not the vocal cords--in which case there was hope. At this stage, though, it was only a theory. He had to put it into practice. After a week, Logue managed to get a vibration in O'Dwyer's vocal cords and his patient was able to produce a clear and distinct 'ah.' Logue continued, trying to show him how to form sounds, much in the same way as a parent would teach a child how to speak for the first time. Less than two months later. O'Dwyer was discharged, quite cured...
"...Encouraged by his treatment of O'Dwyer, Logue went on to repeat his success with five other former soldiers..."

And the rest is history. Sir Lionel Logue embarked upon a path of providing speech therapy to people who needed his help. Ultimately, he changed the world for good. Especially when he, seventeen years later, coached a stammering king to speak a clear message of hope during Britains's darkest hour.

Lionel used his gift, and thus captured a king's stutter, then went on, seventy-three years later, to capture the imagination of a jaded, over-stimulated movie-obsessed culture. God save the speech therapist!
...And any other person who knows what they're doing, and is willing to take a crack at making the world just a little bit better place.

CR, with new novel, Smoke, in progress