My personal philosophy now has a catchy acronym – LOVOS.

… oriented to health and sustainability; and … critical of consumption and consumerism. …

Unfortunately it doesn’t really dovetail with my new religion, the Missionary Church of Kopimism.

“In our belief, communication is sacred.”

Ben Breedlove was an Austin teenager who had a popular YouTube channel (“OurAdvice4You“) where he gave dating advice to viewers. He also had a life-threatening heart condition he fought every day growing up.

The brave 18-year-old lost his life on Christmas night from a heart attack. The week before, he recorded the below videos where he shared his feelings about death, after “cheating” it three times. …

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

To see part 2 and part 3, click over to HuffPo – Ben Breedlove, Teen Tells Heartbreaking Story Week Before Death

Are you setting any New Year’s Resolutions?

One stunning fact: in several studies published in peer-reviewed journals of 150+ people, about 40% of participants in each study who could be reached at 6 months said they were still being successful with their resolutions.

The Bottom line: You CAN make change your life and plenty of people succeed in setting New Year’s Resolutions

Jason Shen – HOW TO SET GREAT NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS (BACKED BY SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH!)

(via Ali Arnold on Facebook)

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube. (4 million views)

Published 1976, it’s still relevant today:

… Living with Nature
Self-confidence
Self-sacrifice
Expecting too Much
Expecting too Little
The Virtues of Work …

… you get the idea.

What I like about the book is what I like about Buddhism, it addresses a philosophy of life. How to live best. How to live the most fulfilling life.

Amazon

I’ve seen some good ones. Especially in India.

My philosophy on how to deal with beggars is posted here.

On the world famous resort of Boracay, Philippines you’ll meet many kids like this.
They wear torn, dirty and hilariously over-sized t-shirts. It works for me.

See more of Dennis Lee’s photos and find out what happened when he gave a mother enough money for food for a week.

These cute, tiny ragamuffins are the best beggars I’ve seen since the Chicklet girls (PHOTO) of Mexico.

A Chicklet girl, going restaurant to restaurant, might earn more than a Mexican police officer.

Randor has a Boracay blog. On one post he mentions that a beggar can easily earn more than a chambermaid at your resort ($.18/hr).

Before you hand that little guy a dollar, think on how that makes YOUR personal employees feel. Instead leave that dollar for your hotel staff (under your pillow) when you check-out. Give the little guy an orange.

Don’t reflexively go all Holier than thou, like this guy — Boracay Native Child Turned Beggar due to Island Invasion — ask the locals what’s really happening with the beggars in front of their shops. They know.

It’s more complicated than it first appears.

In Manila I stayed at a 5 Star hotel for a week. On Saturdays a vehicle pulls up and delivers a row of pitiful looking mothers with tiny babies. It’s business. You have to wonder how much of the money they collect the ladies get to keep.

I saw the same exact same mothers & babies on Sudder street, Calcutta.

The baby is not necessarily the child of the mothers. They mix and match to get the best donations.

These are near indentured slaves who toil day-after-day at labours they would never do voluntarily.

The sad thing is … they believe they are free. For some reason they cannot see the chains of mortgage, dependents and pets non-Robotic. They kiss butt with a smile.

The only upside is that astonishing compliant beings can be taught amusing tricks.

Click PLAY or watch them on YouTube.

Quite similar is his follow-up, The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto. (1991)

When Pico Iyer decided to go to Kyoto and live in a monastery, he did so to learn about Zen Buddhism from the inside, to get to know Kyoto, one of the loveliest old cities in the world, and to find out something about Japanese culture today — not the world of businessmen and production lines, but the traditional world of changing seasons and the silence of temples, of the images woven through literature, of the lunar Japan that still lives on behind the rising sun of geopolitical power.

All this he did. And then he met Sachiko.

Vivacious, attractive, thoroughly educated, speaking English enthusiastically if eccentrically, the wife of a Japanese “salaryman” who seldom left the office before 10 P.M., Sachiko was as conversant with tea ceremony and classical Japanese literature as with rock music, Goethe, and Vivaldi. With the lightness of touch that made Video Night in Kathmandu so captivating, Pico Iyer fashions from their relationship a marvelously ironic yet heartfelt book that is at once a portrait of cross-cultural infatuation — and misunderstanding — and a delightfully fresh way of seeing both the old Japan and the very new.

I read it in Kyoto.

Pico, from the UK, studied at Oxford and taught at Harvard before becoming a vagabond. He ended up living in Kyoto, living with the lady of the book.

… “Japan is therefore an ideal place because I never will be a true citizen here, and will always be an outsider … “

These days he writes for Time, New York Review of Books, New York Times, National Geographic and others.