Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) has been recognized as one of the most significant philosophers of the 16th century. Born into a privileged family and raised during the period of the French Renaissance, he was educated in a private boarding school where all his lessons were taught in Latin. Because of his family’s great wealth, he was free to devote the first half of his life to jobs serving the public sector; including volunteering as a legal counselor, advisor to King Charles IX and mayor of the town of Bordeaux.
In 1571, at the age of 38, he retired from public life to his estate, where he isolated himself from all social and family affairs so that he could dedicate his time to reading, meditating, and writing. It was in his castle’s round library room – which contained more than 1,500 books – where Montaigne probed his mind and produced two highly influential books titled simply Essays; which he published in 1580. Montaigne wrote that “I am myself the matter of my book“, and his stated goal was to describe humans, and especially himself, with utter frankness.
Some of the key topics Montaigne explored in his various essays include:
Mankind’s dangerously inflated claims to knowledge and certainty
The assertion that there is no greater achievement than the ability to accept one’s limitations
The problem of trying to locate truth in commonly accepted ideas that are false or unexamined – especially since many things we held yesterday as articles of faith today we know as fables.
The importance of freeing ourselves from outside influences, customs and opinions
His belief that the best path to understanding truth is by a careful exploration of one’s own body-and-mind.
Montaigne believed that the self, even with all its imperfections, was the best possible place to begin the search for truth, even though our identities can’t be defined as a stable thing because it is always changing. The most obvious example to him was the struggle of living with the infirmities of a human body. “Our bodies smell, ache, sag, pulse, throb and age regardless of the best desires of our mind“. It is only in acceptance of these traits that we can remain faithful to the truth of one’s being.
Montaigne isolated himself while writing his Essays but maintained the importance of maintaining contact with the outside world of other people and events because one can learn much that is useful from others. He described human beings as having a front room, facing the exterior street, where they meet and interact with others, but also with a back room where they are able to retreat back into their interior private self to reflect upon the vagaries of human experience and consider how it impacts their intimate identity.
Montaigne was refreshingly different from other philosophers and academics of his day who believed that their advanced powers of reason were a divine gift that gave them mastery over the world and a happiness that was denied to lesser educated creatures. He mocked those philosophers who were proud of their big brains and his writings come across as wise and intelligent – but also as modest and eager to debunk the pretensions of learning.
He wrote of his fellow academics and philosophers: “On our highest thrones in the world we are seated, still, on our arses” and, “…in practice, thousands of little women in their villages have lived more gentle, more equable and more constant lives than us.
He mocked books that were difficult to read. He found Plato boring and just wanted to have fun with books. “I’m not prepared to bash my brains out for anything, not even for learning’s sake – however precious it may be. If one book tires me, I just take up another“.
[note: I must admit that this sentiment makes me feel somewhat better about my decision to hold off reading the notorious difficult novel Ulysses by Irish writer James Joyce].
Montaigne was honest about the limitations and usefulness of his own intellect and attacked his prestigious academic friends for studying difficult things that were not useful to our lives.
“Difficulty is a coin which the learned conjure with so as not to reveal the vanity of their studies. Intellectuals would prefer you to study other people’s books way before we study our own minds. If man were wise, he would gauge the true worth of anything by its usefulness and appropriateness to his life”
I can’t help but wonder if Montaigne’s admiration for the working class – and life’s simple things – stemmed from the decision his humanist father made to leave him for three years when he was a small boy in the sole care of a peasant family in their town, in order to “draw the boy close to the people, and to the life conditions of the people, who need our help“.
Whatever the reason for his modest and humble personality, Montaigne comes across as one of the world’s first examples of a tolerant mind; a breath of fresh air in the cloistered and snobbish corridors of 16th century academia. He became an inspiration and encouragement to all those who felt put-upon and patronized by the arrogance of self-proclaimed clever people.
Montaigne tells us that each one of us is richer than we think. We may all arrive at wise ideas if we cease to think of ourselves as unsuited to the task just because we haven’t been classically trained or happen to lead an ordinary life.
The inscription Montagne had placed on the crown of the book shelf in his library was “I do not understand; I pause; I examine“. He had the inscription placed there to remind him of the limitations of his own knowledge and to caution him about the dangers that can result when one hastily forms opinions without careful consideration of all the facts.
Too many people today, especially since the advent of social media – which allows anybody to pass themselves off as experts – form their beliefs by adopting commonly accepted ideas or by making broad generalizations. Outside influences and political talking points trigger knee-jerk reactions from those who fail to take the time to study all sides of a topic – or to consider what is the truth and what is morally just.
It would be refreshing if more of us today, before forming our opinions, would like Montaigne, acknowledge the limitations of our knowledge, admit that we don’t fully understand a topic and then take time to examine all aspects of the issues in question using qualified experts in the field as our guides.
The danger of operating a society with uninformed or half-informed subjects was identified as early as the 2nd century by the Roman writer Publilius Syrus who said that it is “Better to be ignorant of a matter than to half know it“.
Today there are so many competing sources of information, where anyone with a computer can offer their uninformed opinions. Few people check the credentials of writers or the authenticity of the facts, and foreign actors can easily spread misinformation along via unregulated social networks.
The next time we are asked to form an opinion or make a decision about subjects we do not fully understand, we would do well to follow the sage advice of Montaigne: Do not let somebody else speak for you and do not fall prey to the pressures of biased outside influences. Instead take a moment to pause, study all sides of the issue, consult qualified experts and sources, and endeavor to reach true understanding.
If you can summon the conviction and discipline to do this, then you will be able to take solace knowing that even though you can not govern external events, you at least govern yourself.
Time is a familiar but mysterious concept. We think about and use it every day, yet it is difficult to describe what it actually is. Saint Augustine puzzled about time when he wrote, “What is time? If no one asks me, I know. But if I wish to explain it to someone who asks, I know not.”
Poets and philosophers throughout the ages have eloquently tried to capture how their senses perceive Time by using phrases such as; “Time is fleeting“, “Time waits for no man“, “Time heals all wounds” and “Time stands still“. None of these phrases, however, succeed in advancing a deeper understanding of the mystery that is Time.
My background in engineering led me to wonder about the concept of Time beyond the typical artistic and philosophical musings – to explore what science actually had to say about the mysterious subject. So, with curiosity and time on my hands, my search led me to an online course called the Physics of Time. In this month’s blog I will share some of the interesting insights I learned about Time from that course.
Time can be examined from two separate scientific perspectives. The first is a biological perspective which deals with internal human body clocks and how the brain processes and perceives time. The second is an external cosmological perspective which has to do with the origin and evolution of time in the known universe.
Human bodies and brains have a natural way to recognize the passing of time because we have predictable biological clocks – like breathing and the beating of our hearts – that exist within each of us .
With a heart rate of about 60 beats per minute and a lifespan of roughly 70 years, the human heart will beat approximately 2 billion times. Chickens have a much faster heart rate of about 275 beats per minute, and live only 15 years – but their hearts, in the end, will also have 2 billion lifetime heartbeats.
Science has observed that the hearts of most animals will beat somewhere between 1-2 billion times but there is an inverse relationship between heart rate and lifespan. In general, the faster the heart rate, the shorter the life span. I wonder if those animals who live fast and die young perceive time any differently than us longer life-span creatures.
Besides the heart and the breath, Neuroscientists have identified three kinds of timekeeping devices inside our brains. One part of the brain keeps track of what time of day it is, another part keeps track of how much time has passed while doing certain tasks and still other parts of the brain serve as alarm clocks for events set to happen in the future.
Different neuron pulses working together in the brain help us to perceive the passage of time. These pulses can be affected by stimulants, such as caffeine, and depressants, such as alcohol which interfere with neurotransmitters in ways that make our internal clocks speed up or slow down.
We experience other biological processes that don’t repeat themselves but still contribute to our awareness of time passing: We age; we think; we make choices; we plan for the future; we remember the past. All these different aspects of time are crucial to what it means to live our lives and be human beings. Perhaps the most important aspect of our awareness of the passage of time is the accumulation of experiences.
People have observed that when they are focused on a task, they don’t pay as much attention to the outside world or to their internal clock. This causes their internal timekeeping devices to slow down while the outside world speeds up. For example, I am surprised how quickly the hours elapse while I am engrossed watching my favorite sports teams compete in a big game.
In contrast, when we are bored and not focused on any one task, the opposite effect happens. Our internal clock seems to go faster while the outside world seems to slow down. For example, when I am stuck on an airplane with nothing to do, the plane trip seems to last forever.
Scientist have reported that subjects in high-stress experiments recollect that time slowed down for them during stressful events. One theory behind this phenomenon is that the more memories we accumulate, the more time we think has passed. Our brains, when we are in a high-stress situation, does its best to record absolutely everything. It accumulates a huge amount of data, so when you think about the situation afterward, you have more memories to leaf through—and, therefore, it seems as if more time has passed.
This theory gets support from the fact that time seems to pass more quickly as we age. Summer seemed to last forever when we were children, but it seems to rush by as we get older. It may be that when we were young in the summertime, such activities as going to the beach were new to us, but as we get older we experience fewer interesting new things. Our brains don’t take in as much new information and we create fewer memories than a child would; thus, time seems to pass more quickly for us compared to when we were a child.
To understand Time from a cosmological perspective is difficult because it requires the human mind to reckon with complex physical laws of the universe that were set in place at the beginning of the universe – and to consider hard to grasp time spans that are billions of years in length.
Most physicists believe Time began approximately 13.8 billion years ago with a singular event known as the Big Bang – the so called “birth” of the universe – a point where space underwent rapid expansion and the laws of physics as we understand them came into being. The Earth is about 4.5 billion years old, so it is a substantial fraction of the age of the universe.
At the beginning, all matter in the universe was densely packed and its temperature was extremely high. About 380,000 years after the Big Bang, the universe cooled sufficiently to allow the formation of subatomic particles and simple atoms. Giant clouds of these primordial elements later coalesced through gravity into matter, eventually forming early stars, galaxies and the other astronomical structures that are observable today.
The feature of matter that is inextricably linked with time is called entropy. Entropy is a way of talking about the disorderliness of “stuff” in the universe. It is the natural tendency of things to lose order over time. For example, a whole egg is very orderly, but if we break the egg, it becomes disorderly; if we scramble the egg, it becomes even more disorderly. A scientist would say that the egg moves from a low entropy state to a high entropy state.
In the long run, nothing escapes the Second Law of Thermodynamics
Entropy is the only quantity in the physical sciences that seems to imply a particular direction of progress, sometimes called an arrow of time. As time progresses, the second law of thermodynamics states that the entropy of an isolated system never decreases over significant periods of time. Entropy measurement can be thought of as a clock and things only happen in one direction of time – not the other. The past is always defined to be the direction in which entropy was lower.
The pull of entropy on matter is relentless. Everything decays. Disorder always increases. The increasing entropy of our universe over time underlies all the ways in which the past is different from the future.
It is the reason why you can disperse the scent of perfume from a bottle into a room, but cannot put the scent back into the bottle; the reason why you can mix cream into your coffee, but cannot un-mix it; the reason why cars eventually break down; the reason you remember the past and not the future; the reason you are born young and grow older; the reason you can make a choice about what to have for dinner tomorrow, but not about what to have for dinner yesterday.
When energy is in a low-entropy form, it can do useful work. When energy is converted into a high-entropy form, it becomes useless. We have fossil fuels sitting in the ground with energy in them in a concentrated form. We can extract the energy to do useful work because the entropy of the fuel is low. Once the fuel is burned it is converted to its high entropy form and it can no longer perform useful work. You can heat a room in your house by burning coal, but you cannot cool off a room in your house by unburning fuel and turning it into coal.
The common thread in these examples is irreversibility: Something happens in one direction, and it is easy to make it happen, but it does not happen in the other direction, or if it does, it is because we put effort into it. It does not spontaneously happen. Things go in one direction of time. They do not go back all by themselves.
It’s not time itself that treats the past, present, and future differently; it’s the arrow of time, which is ultimately dependent on all the “stuff” we have in the universe. It is the arrow of time that gives us the impression that time passes, that we progress through different moments. It’s not that the past is more real than the future; it’s that we know more about the past. We have different access to it than we have to the future.
Stephen Hawking combined the biological and cosmological elements of time into three distinct “arrow of time” components. First, there is the thermodynamic arrow of time—the direction of time in which disorder or entropy increases. Second, there is the psychological arrow of time. This is the direction in which we feel time passes—the direction of time in which we remember the past, but not the future. Third, there is the cosmological arrow of time. This is the direction of time in which the universe is expanding rather than contracting.
At the moment of the Big Bang our universe was in a condition of very low entropy and very high organization. That’s what got time started in the way we experience it in our everyday lives. Ever since the Big Bang, we’ve been living out the process by which the universe increases in entropy. That’s the influential event in the aftermath of which all humans live.
At this point in time the universe is in a condition of medium entropy. It is today that we have galaxies and stars and planets and life on those planets. Complexity depends on entropy; it relies on the fact that entropy is increasing. We don’t have to worry about how complexity can arise in a universe that is evolving. The simple fact that entropy is increasing is what makes life possible.
Scientists have confirmed that the universe continues to expand. Distant galaxies are moving away from us, and the farther away they are, the faster they are receding. The amount of space between us and the other galaxies is increasing.
The second law of thermodynamics predicts that the total entropy of the universe will continue to increase until it reaches equilibrium. The universe will calm down and become colder and colder. Everything will scatter to the winds, evolution will stop and we will have empty space once again. It is speculated by some that after a googol (1 x 10 to the 100th power) years from now, our universe will be empty space and that empty space will last forever.
There are some however who believe instead that multiple universes exist. According to this idea, the Big Bang was an event that is quite small in the history of a much larger multiverse. We see only a finite bit of the universe; perhaps farther away than what we can see, the universe looks very different. The fact that our own universe is inflating gives some credibility to this idea.
Those who talk about the possibility of a multiverse are simply observing that there is a barrier in our universe’s past beyond which we cannot see. Is there a finite amount of stuff out there? Is there an infinite amount of stuff that works exactly like the stuff we can see? Or is there an infinite amount of stuff and conditions that are very different from place to place? Until scientists can answer these questions, they can only speculate.
Regardless of which theory you believe about how the universe will ultimately evolve, we can say that all scientists agree that the universe is a complicated system, embedded in an environment that is far from equilibrium and that there is something called entropy that characterizes the organization or disorganization of us and our environment and results in the evolution of matter.
No discussion of Time would be complete without mentioning one of the most important contributions ever made to science – Albert Einstein’s 1905 publishing of the Theory of Special Relativity. Before Einstein, physicists thought of time as simple and absolute, a steady linear flow separate from the three dimensions of space.
Einstein showed that time is not simple and absolute but is actually influenced by speed and gravity. He stated that there is a link between motion in space and the passage of time. Space and time are fused together in what Einstein called 4 dimensional space-time.
Einstein theorized that Time runs more slowly for an object if it is in motion. Scientists proved this by synchronizing two atomic clocks and placing one clock in a stationary location and the other clock on a plane that was flown around the world. Upon landing, the clocks were no longer synchronized, the one that had been on the plane was milliseconds behind the one that was stationary – indicating less time had elapsed for the moving clock.
With Einstein’s relativity discovery, there is no such thing as one moment of time throughout the universe that everyone agrees on. Space and time are not absolute; they are relative – which means what we call time can be different for different observers.
How much time passes for an object depends on how you move through the universe. The network of satellites in space that carry precision atomic clocks for the global positioning system must be constantly compensated because they “lose” seven microseconds per day compared to ground clocks that are operating in a “slower time stream”.
The faster something moves, the “slower” it ages. Physicists call this effect time dilation. Theoretically, under its influence, a space voyager could return to Earth after a 20-year voyage to find himself hundreds of years in the future. To carry time dilation to its absolute extreme—as we approach travel at the speed of light, it is possible that time stops and immortality begins.
Space-time, Einstein’s four-dimensional reality of our universe, is a collection of an infinite number of events, just as space is a collection of an infinite number of points indexed by the three dimensions of space. Just as we think of all space as being “out there”, Einstein said we should think of all time as also being out there: “The difference between Past, Present, and Future is only an illusion, however persistent“.
I must admit that my deep dive into the science of time raised as many questions as it answered – but that doesn’t mean my study was a waste of my time. On the contrary, I gained some wisdom about life and walk away with a list of important things to remember that will help me make the most of whatever time I have left.
Remember that we are very, very small – Mankind is like a grain of sand in the vast Sahara Desert, occupying an infinitesimally small place in the universe. The astronomer Carl Sagan said that earth is nothing more than “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam and our time amounts to nothing more than a blip“. Compared to the enormity of the cosmos and the eternity of time, it is wise for us to keep an attitude of humility, remembering the short duration of our life and the insignificance of our daily struggles.
Be grateful we are alive – In a world full of matter, humans have been fortunate to form over time into a remarkable collection of atoms that are alive, conscious and capable of love and memory. As far as we know, we are the most advanced form of life in the wide universe. In his book Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut expresses wonder and gratitude for the gift it was to have become what he called some of the “sitting up” kind of mud in the universe.
“God made mud. God got lonesome. So God said to some of the mud, “Sit up!” “See all I’ve made,” said God, “the hills, the sea, the sky, the stars.” And I was some of the mud that got to sit up and look around. Lucky me, lucky mud. I, mud, sat up and saw what a nice job God had done. Nice going, God. Nobody but you could have done it, God! I certainly couldn’t have. I feel very unimportant compared to You. The only way I can feel the least bit important is to think of all the mud that didn’t even get to sit up and look around. I got so much, and most mud got so little. Thank you for the honor! Now mud lies down again and goes to sleep. What memories for mud to have! What interesting other kinds of sitting-up mud I met! I loved everything I saw! Good night. I will go to heaven now. I can hardly wait… Amen
Kurt Vonnegut “Cat’s Cradle”
Embrace change – Entropy is a natural law, we can’t repeal it or wish it away. Entropy is what helps us to evolve and it is what makes life complex and interesting. So, rather than fight change – which is inevitable – it is healthier for us to embrace the change in our life and determine how we can best use it to evolve in ways that make us better.
Be Mindful of the Present – Sometimes it can be impossible to focus entirely on the present because it comes with an echo of the past and a foretaste of the future. Our minds typically refuse to stay in the present, constantly regretting a past that can never be undone or anxiously awaiting a future that may never arrive. The mind can be trained with Mindful Meditation techniques that teach us how to live “outside of time”, focusing our attention on each passing moment, slowing our perception of time and relieving us of our anxiety over past and future events.
Get busy and try something new – Time moves more slowly for a body in motion and we perceive the passage of time as moving slower during those moments when we are creating new memories. That tells me if I want to make the most out of time I should be pursuing activities that keep me moving and learning new things.
Don’t rule out the Divine – There is agreement among scientists that the universe started in a dense state of very low entropy and that it is expanding over time towards higher entropy. The questions that still puzzle scientists however is what triggered the Big Bang event and why did the universe start in such an unlikely state of low entropy? As a man of science and a man of God, I am somehow comforted when all questions cannot be answered and there is room in the discussions for us to ponder the possibility of a divine hand in the origin of the universe.
May you enjoy your own personal time travel trip – here’s hoping that you live every moment and love every day before your precious time slips away.
Buddhism is a 2500 year old religion referred to as the philosophy of awakening. Up until a hundred years ago, Buddhism was mainly an Asian philosophy but it has increasingly gained adherents in Europe and America and today it has approximately 300 million followers world-wide.
A trio of events have recently occurred by happenstance to bring the practice of Buddhism to my attention and it has led me to dig deeper into the merits of this ancient teaching and philosophy.
The first event was my participation in an online course on Mindfulness Meditation that focused on Buddhist techniques for training the mind to detach from unhelpful thoughts that can control us.
The second event was my reading of the classic Jack Kerouac novels “On the Road” and “Dharma Bums” which demonstrated how Kerouac blended the Roman Catholic faith of his youth with the free spirited Buddhist teachings being practiced by his friends to create an interesting spiritual amalgam that greatly influenced the peace loving Beat Generation.
The final event was my reading of the book “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind“; in which the author, Professor Yuval Harari, argued that the move away from polytheistic religions towards monotheistic religions (like Christianity and Islam) had an overall negative impact on the course of human history.
Harari writes that real religious troubles began for humans with the rise of monotheism:
“Monotheists have tended to be far more fanatical and missionary than polytheists. A religion that recognizes the legitimacy of other faiths implies either that its god is not the supreme power of the universe, or that it received from God just part of the universal truth. Since monotheists have usually believed that they are in possession of the entire message of the one and only God, they have been compelled to discredit all other religions. Over the last two millennia, monotheists repeatedly tried to strengthen their hand by violently exterminating all competition.”
Harari believes that Buddhism and other enlightened eastern religions have been more beneficial to the human species because their teachings are characterized by their disregard for gods and because they do not require the acceptance of a Supreme Being to explain the origins and workings of the universe.
Buddhism is human-centered, rather than god-centered, and teaches that we must look within – not without – to find perfection and understanding. No one saves us but ourselves. Each human being has the capacity to purify the mind, develop infinite love and compassion and perfect understanding. Buddhism shifts attention from the heavens to the heart and encourages practitioners to find solutions to their problems through self-understanding.
Buddhists do not think that other religions are wrong. In fact, all religions share many common beliefs: among them that mankind’s present state is unsatisfactory, that a change of attitude and behavior is needed if the human situation is to improve and that the path to fulfillment includes love, kindness, patience, generosity and social responsibility. It is only when believers narrowly cling to their one way of seeing things that religious intolerance, pride and self-righteousness can arise.
The first pillar of Buddhist teaching, referred to as the First Noble Truth, is that life is suffering. To live, you must suffer. It is impossible to live without experiencing some kind of suffering. We have to endure physical suffering like sickness, injury, tiredness, old age and eventually death and we have to endure psychological suffering like loneliness, frustration, fear, embarrassment, disappointment and anger.
Acknowledging that to live is to experience physical and psychological suffering is so true and obvious a statement that it cannot be denied. Unlike most religions whose central concept is a myth, or a belief that is difficult or impossible to verify, Buddhism starts with an irrefutable fact, a thing that everybody knows, that all have experienced and that all are striving to overcome. Buddhism gets right to the core of every individual human being’s concern – suffering and how to avoid it.
The Second Noble Truth of Buddhism is that all suffering is caused by craving. When we crave something but are unable to get it, we feel frustrated. When we expect someone to live up to our expectations and they do not, we feel let down and disappointed. When we want others to like us and they don’t, we feel hurt.
Even when we want something and are able to get it, it does not often lead to happiness because either we lose interest in it or we begin to fear that something will happen that causes us to lose it. Stated simply, the Second Noble Truth teaches that suffering results from wanting what you don’t have and having what you don’t want. This wanting and worrying deprives us of contentment and happiness.
It is remarkable that Socrates, even though he held polytheistic views, and lived before Buddhism was established, came to the same conclusions regarding the root cause of suffering in his writings:
“If you don’t get what you want, you suffer; if you get what you don’t want, you suffer; even when you get exactly what you want, you still suffer because you can’t hold on to it forever. Your mind is your predicament. It wants to be free of change. Free of pain, free of the obligations of life and death. But change is law and no amount of pretending will alter that reality.”
The Third Noble Truth explains how suffering can be overcome and how true happiness and contentment can be achieved. It involves developing a reflective mind in order to let go of delusions and to ponder things objectively without forming an opinion on whether they are good, bad, useful or useless. By training the mind to reject, relinquish and renounce the bottomless pit of our cravings, suffering can be gradually lessened and eliminated.
When we give up useless craving and learn to enjoy each day, without restless wanting, the experiences that life offers us, patiently enduring the problems that life involves without fear, hatred and anger, then we become happy and free. It is only then that we begin to live fully. When we are no longer obsessed with satisfying our own selfish wants, we are free from suffering and we have time to enjoy the present as it is. We achieve what the Buddhists call Nirvana.
My limited look into the Buddhist faith and practices have been beneficial and thought provoking. I would recommend others to look into it as well because from my point of view its practices have been good for the world, it is praised by the wise and many have observed that when it is practiced it leads to happiness.
One factor in my consideration of Buddhism that was important to me is that I could not identify any practices of the Buddhists that would be incompatible with my Catholic faith. In fact, the two religions seem to reinforce one another and I can see how Jack Kerouac was able to harmonize Catholicism with Buddhism without becoming conflicted. He considered Jesus and Buddha spiritual brothers.
I believe in a higher power because I have personally felt a God presence guiding my steps throughout life, but I also believe in the capacity of the human mind to positively control our thoughts and actions. We all could benefit from the ancient wisdom found in both traditions.
Part of my job responsibilities as a product manager for a Technology company involved making periodic trips to different regions of the world to visit with electronics manufacturers who were using our test equipment in their factories. Whenever I traveled to Asia I was usually accompanied by our Asia Application and Customer Support manager. He was a Singapore native and one of the most remarkable people I ever met.
I used to marvel at his approach to life and the interactions he had with the diverse people he dealt with every day. He took a genuine personal interest in everybody he met and he seemed to remember all the details of their life – the name of their spouse, how many children they had, the date of their birthday. I don’t know how he did it, but it came naturally to him.
I experienced his generosity of spirit many times over the years. After a long flight to Asia he would usually meet me at my destination airport and personally arrange my transportation to the hotel. He would take me out to dinner at night and make a point of immersing me in the culture of the region, he would take me on sightseeing trips to show me the attractions of the area we were visiting (the Great Buddha statue of Hong Kong, the National Palace Museum in Taiwan, Merlion park in Singapore, the glittering beaches of Pattaya Thailand). During our time together he would inquire about my well being, my family and my life philosophy. Every year he would send me a note or some thoughtful gift to wish me a happy birthday.
I learned through our time spent together that he didn’t just do this for me – he seemed to do it for everyone that was part of his life – his family, his co-workers, the people that worked for him and the customers he supported. Because of his engaging personality he had one of the strongest circles of influence within the company. The application and support engineers that worked for him loved and respected him and would expend herculean efforts to successfully complete projects that he assigned them. The sales administration personnel would go out of their way to do things to make his job easier. Customers chose our company over competitors simply on the strength of their relationship with him – they trusted him completely and were confident that if any issues came up, he would make sure that they were addressed.
Despite his powerful influence he was the image of humility in all his dealings, never taking credit for successful projects or sales wins – instead he downplayed his role giving credit to other individuals on his team. When things were not successful he would never assign blame – instead he would shield others from criticism and take personal responsibility for the failing outcome. His out-sized influence did not come from his job title or the company’s organizational structure but from his ability to get things done and the motivational effect he had on a talented team of individuals to get them to work at their maximum potential. He had what I refer to as “soft” power rather than “hard” power.
I mentioned this to him one day during one of our dinner conversations and he looked at me with one of his knowing smiles and he said “Soft is stronger than hard”. It made me smile because he would often interject short bits of Hindu and Buddhist wisdom scripture or eastern philosophical sayings into our conversations (like “Water is stronger than Rock” or “Cow is my Friend”) that seemed simple at first but had much deeper meanings. This came from his long practice of Taoism, an ancient eastern philosophy that focuses on living in harmony with all things and living a life of moderation and humility.
Yin-Yang Symbol: Harmony of Contrary Forces
I often think back to those sayings and reflect on the merits of his life philosophy, especially during those times when I encounter situations that are made worse by people trying to get their way by imposing their will through force, fear or guilt. Too often it seems to be the American way. So many people resort to hard tactics to accomplish their objectives when a soft touch would be much more effective.
I also find similarities between my Catholic faith and those of the eastern philosophical traditions. Christianity too teaches us to be humble, to die-to-self and to be compassionate and caring. Jesus was always merciful to those he encountered and he did not force anyone to follow him. Instead he said…
“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.”
Because forced love is not love – it is slavery; and work that is performed based on a sense of love and gratitude is never a burden. So, I try to keep my friend’s advice close to heart during my daily interactions with others and remember that nothing is so strong as gentleness.
Words to Live By... 
