Far East Reflections

I’m just back from two weeks in the Far East. It was an amazing travel-writing trip for me, my first to Asia. (By the way, I want to again thank Zach Ziskin of Funny Monkey Enterprises for his help in updating the website daily during my absence.) I began in Thailand, moved on to Vietnam, then to Brunei (not exactly a common stop for travelers), Malaysia and finally Singapore. In each place, the cities and countryside were vibrant, the food was excellent, the people were beautiful and very friendly.

I’m mentioning my trip for a reason. This journey gave me a great chance to reflect on some new things. Or maybe it was really some old things viewed from fresh perspectives. Here was one of those perspectives: I crawled more than 120 feet while some 15 feet underground through a tiny tunnel built during the Vietnam War for Viet Cong soldiers. It was a hole barely 2 ½ feet tall and maybe 1 ½ feet wide, just enough for me to squeeze through. During the war, 20,000 people lived in this 120-mile complex of tunnels and miniscule underground rooms. Literally, lived there. I’m planning an upcoming podcast on the experience, but I can tell you that this greatly strengthened my ideas about the incredible emotional toughness and adapability of human beings.

I also learned once again that people are basically the same everywhere. We all struggle with self-doubts and we look for ways to feel good about ourselves, especially to feel somehow important in this world. I’ve seen those same traits in folks at 11,000 feet in the Andes of South America and I saw them again in Asia, just as I notice them all around me each day in the United States. It’s a universal human issue. In Asia, though, individuality seems less prized than community – the idea of serving a greater cause. I think that’s why the Viet Cong could live in those hellish tunnels for so many years. They were working for something they felt was bigger than themselves, more important than their own personal needs. And I think this helped to crystallize my thinking about the individual’s place in society. The Humanity Project wants to build a better society by helping individuals become better. Maybe the best way to do that is by helping individuals serve something bigger than themselves – service to society, to humanity itself. We’ll have a lot more to say about this in the weeks ahead. Stay tuned.