Skip to main content

JOY to the world

Another Christmas/holiday/winter break come and (nearly) gone.

This year, my break started with the metro, a train, a plane, a bus, another plane, a car, and nearly 22 hours to get from door to door.

The three days I had before Christmas were filled with baking, decorating, and wrapping presents. I also managed to see friends from high school over those few days as well. The real celebrations kicked off on the 23rd with one side of the family; continued into Christmas Eve with the traditional lunch with my mom, and going to see the children's pageant; and concluded on Christmas day, which was filled with maple-glazed cinnamon rolls, a new camera, and dinner with the other side of the family. Not too shabby I'd say.

The family also went up north for a few days. My original intention was to enjoy the snow, and my only chance for what I consider to be a "real" winter this year, except Northern Michigan was hit with a thaw a couple of days before we arrived, and the only snow left was the mounds created by snow plows. It was a tad disappointing, but I still got the opportunity to play with my new camera during a walk on the beach. Here are some of my favorites (click to enlarge).

Sunset from the balcony

Waves crashing against a mini-pier


It was so windy on the beach, my mom went full eskimo




After the time up north, I drove over to Ann Arbor with my sister, so we could celebrate New Years with our respective friends. Even though I was there for less than 24 hours, it was so nice to visit, and see my crazy friends again. We got dinner at Frita Batidos (highly recommended for anyone who has the chance to go), and spent the rest of the night playing games, laughing our heads off, and taking ridiculous pictures.





That pretty much brings us up to speed on the events of the break, but I also wanted to talk about the book I've been reading over the past 2 weeks: The Book of Joy. This book is a collaboration between the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu, where they focus on, shocker, how to bring joy into your life. Of course, there are some slight ideological differences between these two religious powerhouses, but the similarities and sincerity are so great that I almost forgot these two men were raised with completely different faiths. Throughout the book, both the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Tutu highlight the importance of compassion and gratitude, citing these as two of their pillars of joy, and stress viewing others first and foremost as fellow human beings, instead of seeing status or labels. 

After such a tumultuous 2016, I highly recommend this book to anyone who is looking for a ray of hope for humanity, or just an example of a wonderful friendship. While I'm not really one for resolutions, I hope I will be able to carry what I have learned from this book, and add just a bit more joy to the world.

gif from bookofjoy.org
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thesising: The First 2 Months

Most (if not all) of the people reading this already know that I'm in the throws of writing my Master's thesis. What you probably don't know is what in the world my project is about, and what I'm actually doing with the 5-or-so months I have to finish up the most important paper of my life to date. Let's start off with the topic. It wasn't until early February that it had been finalized, so my apologies to anyone who asked over the holidays what it was about! Basically, my project can be boiled down to trying to answer a small part of the question what do bilingual-to-be infants pay attention to when learning their languages?  Since that's a huge question, and I only have 20 weeks, it needed to be narrowed down just a tad. I'm sure everyone is familiar with the jokes that stem from Japanese-speakers pronouncing r's and l's incorrectly. It turns out that when they were infants, they could tell these two sounds apart, but because the differ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Life Update No One Asked For, But You're Getting Anyway

The past month and a half has been a lot of staring at a computer screen, stowed away in a basement, occasionally getting some fresh air if the weather decided to cooperate. My thesis is progressing slowly, but surely. I have one week left of testing, and then it's a sprint to the finish by the end of June. As I've been editing the same 20 page document for the past 5 weeks, I've also had some visitors! A friend from high school who I hadn't seen in 4+ years was doing a bit of a Euro-tour, and stopped by Utrecht for a day, and a week later my Canadian friend who I met in Nepal, but currently works in London came for the weekend. It was lovely to see both of these ladies, and pull out all of the stops when it came to giving them a truly Dutch experience - any excuse to eat a pancake, right? But the excitement of having visitors couldn't completely distract me from a larger life development. Several weeks ago I received a job offer for a lab manager posi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Why I Marched

Saturday, January 21, 2017 I believe will be written about for years to come. Whether it be in op-ed pieces or academic research, the Women's March on Washington and its subsequent global movement was too vast to ignore. Looking at all of the posts on social media and several news articles, I can't help but be moved by the incredible outcome, and support for the cause. I have gone through several different versions of this post, but none quite capture everything that is in my head. I've come to accept that no matter how I write this, I won't be able to perfectly represent all my thoughts, feelings, and opinions on this movement - please, bear with me as I try to do my best. -------------------- Why I Marched I marched, not because I was against our current president, the man, but because I am against the divisive rhetoric of his campaign. build bridges, not walls I marched, because decisions about my body should not be made by people who do not know me or my...
Post a Comment
Read more