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Birth and Death of the Trivial Kind

There is magic in birth and death. In birth, the magic is in the enormous potential of the unknown. When you look at your newly born child, there is no way you can know what he or she will become. Later on, you might have some glimpses of their future selves, but in that very first moment, all that there is, is hope, the potential for greatness. It is very similar, and yet very different at the same time, when we look at death. On one side, it is the end; on the other it is the beginning for something new. But above all, it is an opportunity for closure. Even in the very last moment of a life, the dying person can say or do something that could change the lives of the ones present. A simple look sometimes can make us see things in a different light. I will never forget my dad’s last days. We took him to a terribly expensive and a terrible private hospital in Bulgaria. I had the feeling that the staff there only wanted to extract the maximum amount of money from us without giving much b...

Merry Christmas!


I am drinking my warm Glögg wine (a novelty), listening to Dylan’s Christmas album, which we always do on Christmas Day, and I am thinking of faith. Being a Buddhist does not make me insensitive to the beauty and compassion of the religion, which has created almost everything of any value in our modern western world. And I am thinking, or dreaming, of a time in which all religious people will unite and stand against the madness of modernity, against the utter self-gratification and selfishness of our present; I am dreaming of the time in which all religious people will realise, that even if they are not the same, all good religions in the world have, up to a point, similar paths. Love, peace, compassion, devotion—aren’t those what most religions teach to their devotees? And even if the object of devotion differs, giving oneself up to a higher being, the emotion, that is the same. The love and compassion, innate to human beings, is the same.

With this in mind, I would like to wish all my Christian friends a Merry Christmas! However, as I am fully aware that not many Christians will be reading this, I would simply say ‘Merry Christmas to me’!


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