| What is your most memorable childhood experience? | I had a very happy childhood overall. My parents say I was a very easy child, and would be content just playing in the garden on my own or wandering around the house. There aren’t a lot of dramatic events from before age seven or so – most of the things that come back are small flashes of otherwise normal incidents. Playing backyard cricket with my Dad on a sunny Saturday morning, and hitting the tennis ball over the fence. Putting on a mini theatrical performance with my brother and sister for my mom one morning involving us and our toys (that my older sister, who was in charge, had organized us into). Bouncing on the trampoline in the backyard and flying really high. Saving up my allowance for weeks and buying an Optimus Prime Transformer figure, and then crying because it wasn’t as good as I thought it would be, and having my grandma comfort me and say that this would be a very valuable lesson. Flying unaccompanied across the country with my brother and sister to visit our grandma, ordering lots of cokes from the waitress, and getting excited when the airplane would drop due to turbulence. Driving down late on a Friday night to our small country property several hours away, falling asleep in the back, and waking up when the car stopped. Having Dad carry me in to the one –room wooden shack, and sleeping in the loft in sleeping bags. Waking up next morning to the silence of the bush, and seeing the hand-written inscription on the concrete near the fireplace where my parents had written “May all beings be happy.” Around such flashes of memory the rest of the narrative gets built.
Still, one of the most memorable was in grade one, when I ordained as a samanera (a novice Buddhist monk) for a week. My parents both went to India in the 70s together and did meditation there, but, unlike most of the hippies of their generation, found it important and life-changing and so kept it up long after they’d given up everything else about hippie-dom and become fairly conservative in most other aspects of their life. So my whole family was raised Buddhist (and we all still are). Ordaining as a samanera is considered quite auspicious in Burma and Thailand for boys to do. I remember the strange, scratchy feeling of the straight razor as the senior Burmese monk shaved my head, and watching the hair fall into the sheet below. The weird cold stickiness of my scalp when I put my hands against it and felt skin on skin. Taking the precepts in Pali with the monks, and putting on the unfamiliar orange robes. Then, because we were only kids, most of the rest of the week was spent hanging out in the sleeping room with the other young boys who had ordained, eating candy from the alms round, playing Gameboys, and excitedly meeting everyone from around the world who’d come for the event. Going back to school with a shaved head until it grew out again. |
| What immediate family member do you closely identify with and why? | Probably my mother. She used to say that she understood me, because we thought the same. She was valedictorian of her school, but had decided to do physiotherapy instead of medicine, just because the degree was shorter (as she later said, she wished someone had told her that university wasn’t like high school). Her father had died in a helicopter crash when she was young, and so she’d wanted us to have the stay-at-home mom experience she didn’t get (though she spends a lot of time on volunteer work).
She read a lot, and would have all sorts of intellectual magazines around the house that I started reading when I was a young teenager. I got my love of reading from her. She was also very keenly focused on our character, and our sense of right and wrong. In my case, there was never any major trouble at school or anything, but most of the chiding in my teenage years involved me having done something inconsiderate and self-centered, usually from not fully thinking about how my actions would affect other people. I always found it interesting that she said we were the same in that respect, because I never felt she was self-centered at all – she’s very generous of spirit and considerate. I actually took that as inspiring – if you work at a bad trait long enough, eventually those that meet you will be surprised you claim to have it.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve developed my own sense of how the world works, becoming a man involves making up one’s own mind. But my gut instinct of what’s the right thing to do in most situations still comes from the things she taught me. |
| What character traits do you admire in an individual? | I always thought the best description of how one’s character ought to be is in Marcus Aurelius’s “Meditations”. The book was written as his private journal, while he was Emperor of Rome, and actively leading his troops in campaigns, and is one of the classics of Stoic philosophy (they don’t make world leaders like they used to).
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2680/2680-h/2680-h.htm
At the start, he lists all the character traits he learned as being important, and which of the people around him showed him each one. They make an excellent list. But the meta point is the most important one, I think. Kindness to those around him, a tendency to see people’s good qualities not just their bad ones, and above all gratitude, to the world, and to everyone that helped him.
Less loftily, the other trait I admire is just having something interesting to say about the world. |
| What is the funniest thing ever to happen to you? | Oh man, I can’t think of a great wacky story, and most of the things I remember involve me being a jerk. So with that in mind, let me tell some unflattering yet also not that funny stories about myself.
When I was travelling through France with my brother, we were planning to get a train from Paris to Brindisi, but due to poor planning got to the station and were told it was full. In logic that seemed obviously correct to me at age 20, I thought “No way, I’m not missing a day in Greece, I’ve got a Euro-rail pass, I’ll just get on anyway and figure it out.” Train went along, we found some seats next to some cute American girls. Success! Then the instructor came by and asked us for tickets. We showed him the Euro-rail passes. He said, yes, but where are the seat reservations? We didn’t have any. He yelled at us and made us stand in the corridor for about twenty minutes without explaining what was going to happen to us. At that point, I thought, why not go back and keep chatting to the girls? When he came back, this made him furious, and he threatened to arrest us both and kick us off at Dijon. After some pleading, we apparently were able to pay to upgrade to first class, and we got the ferry to Greece after all. In hindsight, we probably should have considered more the possibility of having to call our Dad from a French prison and explain “Yes, we’re locked up in Dijon. No, not the mustard, the place. Can you somehow figure out a French lawyer to bail us out?”.
I remember when I was a teenager on holiday in Burma with my family, and we were staying at a river village near a famous temple at the top of a hill. We climbed up the many stairs, and got to the top, where there were a lot of small monkeys playing in the tree a few meters away, as we watched from behind a railing. For reasons I can no longer recall, I decided that it would be a good idea to try to scare one of the monkeys, by making a sudden movement towards him with my hands, expecting him to be scared off like a seagull. It turns out monkeys don’t work that way, and that this was in fact a very serious challenge to his masculine standing within the group. So this monkey, which couldn’t have been more than a foot tall, comes charging along the branch towards me, ready to bite me with his rabies filled mouth. At this point, I basically run away, hoping nobody saw. Of course, they did, and referred to me as the monkey king for the rest of the trip.
In my last job, I used to enjoy pranking a few of my colleagues by replacing their office name plates with slightly mis-spelled versions of their name, and seeing how long it took them to notice. The best was seeing a hand-corrected version where my ‘o’ had been turned into an ‘a’, which stayed up for a month, because he hadn’t figured out that the old one was just underneath. |
| If time and money were not an issue, where would you travel and why? | Mars, though only for very long amounts of time and very large amounts of money. I remember seeing the photos of the blue Martian sunset from one of the NASA rovers, and thinking how amazing it would be to see that in person. It’s a tough one, because you’d want to wait until the industry was sufficiently developed that there was a fairly low risk of you dying in a space ship crash, but not so developed that Mars got filled with Disneyland and Wal-Mart.
On earth, I’ve done a lot of travelling already, being fortunate enough that time wasn’t an issue (the benefits of not growing up in America, where everyone has to be doing internships from age 15 onwards!). So I don’t have a long list left. The places I enjoyed the most? Tokyo, which is like an alien civilization. Eastern Europe, mostly the former Hapsburg Empire, which had the most wonderful architecture – Prague, Budapest, Zagreb. Buenos Aires, which is still elegant, if run down, and the people are all beautiful. Naxos, in the Greek Islands. New York City, which is one of the great wonders of the modern world (even if they can’t collect the trash properly). Rangoon, with my family when I was young. |
| When and if you ever have children, what would you like to pass on to them? | I think this is a hard one. Everything I’ve heard about raising children reminds me of Mike Tyson’s quip about boxing – everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. Before you have kids, it’s easy to have grand ideas of how they’ll turn out. And then you have them, and realize that they’re all different, and they’re not really at all quite what you imagined in all sorts of ways, and the actual important thing about being a parent is being able to help them be the best they can be given who they are, and to make the most of their potential. Perhaps more than anything else, I hope I’m able to keep that perspective when I actually have children. |
