My wife MJ Lee decided to devote her career to nursing and medical care last year and we moved to North Carolina; today, another MJ made a contribution as well to medical care in America: Michael Jordan, yes THE Michael Jordan, announced he was building 2 medical clinics in Charlotte, NC. A very nice gesture by the basketball legend and something he wasn't seeking attention for, or getting good press, or some other ulterior motives, he seemed to be genuinely interested in giving back to underprivileged communities with inadequate healthcare. Often when current sports stars (like Lebron James) do charity work, I appreciate that they are doing things outside of just the sport they're engaging in but I do sometimes wonder if their motivations are genuine, and sometimes they seem misguided, something that was brought into focus one Lebron tweeted recently that Daryl Morey's Hong Kong tweet was "misinformed." Quite a lot of people got upset at LeBron for criticing Morey's freedom of speech and apparently backing China and the enormous amount of money and financial wealth tied to basketball in the country; Lebron was apparently "selling out" and turning his back on free speech. I'm not in the camp that says basketball players and other sports stars should just "play basketball" and stay in their lane, I think they have a very important role to play as leaders of communities and celebrities that children and young adults look up to growing up more than even presidents and world leaders can because of the cultural acceptance of being an international superstar (more people know Lebron than Democratic Presidential nominee frontrunner Elizabeth Warren, for example), so they have a responsibility to be a good citizen (unlike Charles Barkley, who famously said that "he's not a role model"). Lebron is generally a good role model and does great charity work, but he often takes positions on social media that are not all that helpful or impactful and sometimes even, dare I say it, "misinformed."
The title of the post is a Chinese saying that basically encourages one to experience life and see something for oneself instead of reading about it. It's a good philosophy in theory and really good for the travel industry, but now with Youtube and travel blogs and so many videos of so many places on earth, I don't know if people really need to go everywhere in the world or travel 10,000 miles, it could be just make 10,000 clicks. Especially with air fare and hotels and everything, it's expensive to travel to too many places. And people definitely aren't going to read 10,000 books in their lives anymore (by my rough estimate, I've probably read around 3,000 books in my life, give or take, and that counts my childhood years when all I could do was read books). One online publication I wrote said, "it's good to read 10,000 books AND travel 10,000 miles"- I actually do this and my most memorable experiences reading books are during vacation- I read "Murder on the Orient Express," a mystery novel by Agatha Christie, on a train somewhere, and I read Hilary Clinton's autobiography in my most recent trip to Korea/ Taiwan.
Nowadays, I wonder if there's almost too much of a backlash against books and traditional learning and actually sitting down and studying. Everyone's emphasizing hands-on, real experience, "finding oneself" that it might have gone too much the other way. Kids nowadays have these "Montessori schools" where they learn kind of what they need to learn when they want it, a free-flowing sort of curriculum, college students take many gap years and breaks to "find themselves" by traveling to other countries and experiencing other cultures. These are all valuable experiences, but if you're constantly doing this, aren't you just avoiding studying and responsibilities? There's a famous resignation letter by a teacher in China a few years ago where she quit her job by writing simply, "the world is so big, I want to have a look." It was a nice catchphrase and many people worldwide related to her sentiment because we all agree that we shouldn't be cramped in our workplaces and watch the seconds of our lives tick by and want to be free, experience new things, but now it's become a catchphrase among Chinese students when they want to skip school or just don't feel like going to school, they say, "the world is so big, I want to have a look." That's just shirking responsibility, so at that point the sentiment has gone overboard. Try reading one book before you go on that journey of 10,000 miles.
Fantasize on,
Robert Yan
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