I spent this past weekend in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Not to get away from the floods here in Bangkok though – I’d booked it long ago after seeing a cheap deal on Air Asia. Although Cambodia has also suffered badly from floods this year, its capital remains unaffected for now.
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Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink
– The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
You may have noticed that Thailand is suffering its worst floods in fifty years.
If not, click on the picture above or follow this link to see some very powerful photos from The Atlantic.
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No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. #
–Steve Jobs
1955-2011
You know when you attempt to walk past the fridge, but you catch your little toe on the corner, and you collapse in agony, curling into a foetal ball and whimpering, convinced that your toe is at the very least broken, and possibly entirely severed from your foot?
And then you look down, through the tears and anguish, and see that actually it’s fine, and you’re just being a big girl?
Well, this was a bit like that. Apart from the “actually it’s fine” part.
I had always wanted to break a bone. In doing so, I had finally fulfilled both of my medical ambitions (the other was to take a ride in an ambulance). Unlike the ambulance ride, this was less fun than I had anticipated.
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Well, that was a bit of a blur.
Five years ago today, I packed the unsold remains of my life into a suitcase, carefully rolling my trusty Mac Mini up in a beach towel, looked back one last time at the little Victorian two-up two-down mid-terrace that had been home, took a deep breath, then headed to Heathrow airport where I took a one-way flight to Bangkok, Thailand.
