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Vipassana

  The flight from Winnipeg to Chiang Mai, with layovers in Vancouver and Bangkok, was very long, but I had enough calm and enthusiasm not to worry about it. Only when I stepped out of the Chiang Mai airport did I realize I wasn’t in Canada anymore. It was swelteringly hot, tropical trees grew all around, and green-covered mountains loomed beyond the city. The hotel where I’d booked a room for three nights was nearby, about a 25-minute walk, so I decided to stretch my legs after the flight and walk there. Chiang Mai is a beautiful city with clean air. Along the way, I saw tropical trees and plants in their natural setting for the first time and listened to the songs of birds I’d never heard before. As Thailand’s cultural capital, Chiang Mai has countless temples. Even on my short walk to the hotel, I spotted several temples in the distance and something similar along the road. Walking wasn’t very convenient. There were few traffic lights, and the sidewalk was only on one side of the...
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Concepts I Misunderstood

  There are countless words that everyone understands differently. Take the word dog, for example. When someone mentions it, each person pictures a dog—real or imagined, doesn’t matter. Everyone’s image will be different, even though a dog is something tangible with specific traits. Now imagine words like faith, friendship, love, or beauty. These concepts are usually muddied with impurities for most people. It’s probably due to a mix of factors—contradictions, desires, fears, psychological wounds, and so on. We grow up in different environments, at different times, with different people, and that’s just part of the diversity that taints simple concepts and leads to misunderstandings between us. I once had a conversation with an acquaintance about friendship. He thought I was a bit odd, probably why he assumed I had few friends and boasted that he had tons. When he said that, I asked what the word friend meant to him. He said it’s someone he fully trusts. I asked what trust meant to...
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Leap of Faith

  About two weeks before 2025 began, I had a gut feeling that changes were coming in the next few months. I can’t explain it—it doesn’t happen often, and this time it wasn’t very clear or vivid, but it was there. For some reason, I never sense bad changes or events, only something good, even if tough events come first. About two weeks after New Year’s, I got a call from the Justice Department. They said my security guard license, which I’d been expecting to renew any day since I’d applied for an extension long ago, couldn’t be renewed or replaced because I had a temporary license. To get a full one, I’d need to take a course and pass a state exam. This was news to me. When I took the course and passed the exam at the same school, I didn’t think it wouldn’t be enough. Either way, it doesn’t matter now. What matters is that to keep working as a guard, I need not only a driver’s license but also a security license. Staying in this job is getting harder. Or rather, too many tasks I don...
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People and Their Pets

  I woke up again. It was morning. Though my apartment faces east, the sun’s rays hit my window from the side, but as it rose, its light crept closer and closer to me, lying in my cozy bed, thinking about how I overate again last night. Yesterday evening, I ate a four-cheese pizza… alone… the whole thing. In the past, I’d have called that a snack, but now, since I don’t wash down food with alcohol and eat much less than a few years ago, that pizza feels like something clearly excessive, and I feel tired even after sleeping. For some reason, I remembered two dogs I saw in the elevator yesterday. They were small, one white, one brown—I don’t know their breeds; I’m not great with that. Some woman was walking them outside and was heading back home. Since it’s winter, the dogs wore special dog vests, but what caught my eye most was their dog shoes. I don’t even remember if I’ve seen dogs in shoes before. I got curious about how sensitive dogs’ paws are to cold. It was only a few degrees...
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Hello, Meaninglessness!

  Hello, meaninglessness! I’m reluctantly letting you back into my life. Or rather, you barge in uninvited, smashing everything around. Still, this isn’t the first time, so it’s almost a bit boring. This time, it happened at the worst possible moment—or at least it wasn’t part of my plans. I’d just started my two-week shift; it was the second day. Before that, I’d been slacking off, giving in to laziness, so I decided to make up for it. I stocked up on healthy groceries, made a delicious salad, and cooked rice for lunch at work. In the morning, I drank water and ate oatmeal with a mix of nuts and berries, drizzled with honey. The details of my diet aren’t important—I was just trying to eat right. I also decided to add some physical activity, so I started doing a short morning workout and walked as much as possible at work. On the first day, my smartwatch logged twenty-eight and a half thousand steps, and I decided I’d aim for at least thirty thousand in the first week, then raise t...
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Freedom

  As a kid, I always wanted to be an adult because adults could restrict me. They set the rules I had to live by. I was small and couldn’t defend myself enough. Food, clothes, a roof over my head, and various conveniences were provided by adults, and in return, I had to follow their rules. I desperately wanted to be an adult because I thought adults decided how to live. In reality, I didn’t want to be an adult—I wanted to be free from other people’s rules. I thought adults were like that, able to make their own decisions and live as they pleased. That misconception stuck with me for too long. Even now, understanding it, I don’t really want to let go of it. Or rather, I want to, but it’s hard. When I was little, my movement was restricted. I was always given boundaries—where I could go and where I couldn’t. I was allowed to play near the house and visit friends who lived nearby, but I couldn’t go too far. I was told when to go to bed and when to wake up, given a daily schedule, told...
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Serving the Lord or The Path

  My view on serving someone or something used to be very rigid. Serving is bad. That’s what I always thought. Every form of service I took part in or witnessed always led to something bad. Serving in the army often led to death, especially when the country was at war. Serving in government positions led to despair and the people’s hatred toward the person representing authority. Serving some cultists led to losing one’s own opinions. No matter how I looked at it, service brought nothing but problems. But the real issue was that I was looking at it all from the perspective of a victim. If you approach it from the standpoint of yourself and your own choices, not submitting to someone against your will, then all forms of service take on a new meaning. When a person decides for themselves who to be and which path to follow, the concept of serving someone or something stops being burdensome. In that case, the ego can’t cloud the mind. Can you be free in slavery? I never would’ve though...
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