Blogging Say What?

Who remembers blogging? It seems like we were all doing it between 2008-2012, and if you are curious, you can check out my blog from that era: racingawareness.blogspot. I cringe at the nutrition, health and fitness advice I dished out even though I don't have a degree in any of those fields. I also cringe at how self-absorbing blogging seemed to be. But from blogging, I made some amazing friendships, like one of my best friends, Charisa. When Charisa invited me to stay with her in Carlsbad for a training camp, I remember thinking is it normal for people to invite someone they met on the internet to stay in their home for a weekend? Haha! I met many of my fellow bloggers in real life and the potentially sketchy situations never played out, and in fact, the risk of meeting a blogger turned out to be way less risky than someone from a dating app (so I hear). In the last couple of years, blogging has crossed my mind more often, or more specifically, just having the option to write down some thoughts rather than just posting a picture with a caption; and so, here we are. But I've learned a couple of things from my first go-around at blogging and will take these lessons into this round of blogging.

You will notice the title, Sample Size of One. In science, a sample size of one is very unreliable, and that's exactly how I want you to treat all the information I dish out on this blog. These are the musings of one person, one unqualified person. Blogging also started to feel like a duty and that's why I ultimately stopped. This time around, I'm just leaving this here to give me the option to write when I feel like saying more than a caption to a photo. That's it. 

For my first post, I want to share a message a colleague shared today in honor of the Lunar New Year and the first day of Black History Liberation Month. It's just a cool little write-up:

Today is the first day of Black History/Liberation Month.  It is also the lunar new year.  (In Vietnamese it is called Tết--as in The 1968 Tết Offensive)  So I would like to start February 2022 by celebrating two friends and visionaries in a specific historical moment.

On April 4, 1967 at Riverside Church in New York City, exactly one year before his assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, gave one of his most powerful speeches (now known as Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence), in which for the first time he connects the Civil Rights movement to the war in Vietnam.  The speech is incredibly lucid about the situation in Southeast Asia and is well worth the read or the listen (see link).  In an incredibly tense moment in American history, Dr. King still manages to highlight joy: "And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history."

Speaking of the ravages of war of the people of Vietnam, he says: "We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing -- in the crushing of the nation's only non-Communist revolutionary political force, the unified Buddhist Church."

The unified Buddhist Church is the institution founded by the late Vietnamese buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh, whom people call Thầy (meaning teacher).  Thầy in South Vietnam, through his School of Youth for Social Services, promoted a kind of buddhism that was socially engaged (instead of hermitic or reclusive) as an alternative to the dictatorial Diem regime and subsequent juntas.  Both Thầy and Dr. King were social activists who believed in effecting change through compassion, love, and non violence.

Their relationship began in 1965 when Thích Nhất Hạnh wrote an open letter (In Search of the Enemy of Man) to Dr. King.  They met for the first time in May 1966.  In January 1967, Dr. King nominated Thầy for the Nobel Peace Prize (which ended up not being awarded that year) and in April delivered his famous "A Time to Break Silence" speech.

I will leave you with one final quote from Thầy to Dr. King: "Martin, do you know something? In Vietnam they call you a Bodhisattva, an enlightened being trying to awaken other living beings and help them move towards more compassion and understanding."