Stars I Put in my Sky to Live By

By Minh Tan

Stars I Put in my Sky to Live By is a contemplation on 100 quotes I had written for myself to guide me through life when I hadn't been able to find a satisfactory quote or philosophy. If one's North Star were a metaphorical guide to life purpose, these quotes are metaphorically the other stars I had put in my sky to help me find my way through life. After all, no one ever navigates solely by by the North Star. Of the 100 quotes in the book, 71 has each a single page of stories, notes, and questions for readers to contemplate from to their perspectives and experiences. Topics covered include life, death, love, learning, mistakes, attitudes, regrets, passions, purpose, society, humanity, among others, with some challenges to conventional wisdom for being more convention than wisdom. Rebuttals to conventional wisdom served as the inspiration for more quotes in the collection than any other source. Stars do move in the sky over time, and many from past charts are no longer accurate today, requiring me to put up my own stars to live by.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Minh Tan
• Release date: Jul 31, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005907457

Minh Tan

Minh Tan is a creative and analytical jack of many trades who likes to look at the "big picture" of everything. He aspires to have a greater impact with his creative output, supporting its development in the meanwhile as a government strategist in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.

Book preview

The best thing

you can give

someone

including

yourself

is a chance

What’s the best thing you can give someone? Love? Time? Kindness? There’s no answer to that question that is 100% correct, but I’m going to make a case for a chance because it could represent all those other things, while allowing someone to form part of their identity to someone else.

Growing up, the thing I wanted the most often was a chance to do something, for which I was often denied. Sometimes this was for good reasons like lack of family finances. Other times, it was not, like discrimination on my ethnicity or small stature. However, I was fortunate to have been given the chance to do a lot of things, many of which I didn’t ask for, but for which I am most grateful. That’s why when I saw a quote in my early 20s stating the best thing you can give someone is a chance, unsourced, I embraced it as a life philosophy. It generally worked well, except one question irked me. What if nobody gave me a chance to do what I wanted, whether nobody present to do so, or nobody because someone denied me the chance?

By my late 20s, as I worked to acquire resources to do more things in life, I realized the only way I was going to get the chance to do some things was to give myself that chance. Far more than just the resources, though, I was going to have to give myself the time, faith, support, love, motivation, and kindness should I fail or suffer along the way, and so on. In giving someone a chance, you also give them that, with some of the qualities being more blind than in giving them to yourself, if you didn’t know that person well. So I tweaked the quote the best thing you can give someone is a chance, to add including yourself, in the middle to reflect that and made it my #1 life philosophy.

Treat everyone

fairly

not equally

Do you still think of treating everyone equally as the way to attain a just society? If you don’t, can you describe how people should be treated to attain said just society?

Long before recent memes showing the difference between equality and equity came out, I realized they were different, even if I could not articulate it. As a child in a family that barely scraped by in Communist Viet Nam, I saw adult and child beggars, and understood they needed more help than my family, with the child beggars needing even more since nobody took care of them as my Parents took care of me. I remember asking my Mom to help feed some children beggars, to whom I could relate more than the adult beggars in being a child, while rarely asking her to help the adult beggars, all the while not realizing how vulnerable we actually were ourselves. My poor Mom was torn between the compassion she saw in me, and her inability to always show that compassion at the expense of our family’s survival, while unwilling to tell me the full and true nature of our family’s situation to justify this.

Then came 1980, when my family escaped Viet Nam by boat and we arrived in Canada as refugees. We were now the ones needing more help than those already living here. That was generally speaking, of course, but it was a certainty to me as an eight year old. Fortunately, for my family and I, a lot of Canadians, and even some refugees, treated us unequally in positive ways. Unfortunately, there were also numerous situations where we were not treated equally in negative ways, albeit far less so than in positive ways. However, all we would have ever asked for was to have been treated fairly.

Life isn’t fair

live to

make it fairer

I think most people know that life isn’t fair, whether in English, in another language via an analogous expression, and/or intuitively. Yet, I’ve rarely heard anyone respond to life isn’t fair with fighting words. I’ve only generally heard people begrudgingly agree with the statement and/or curse the fact.

I was once one of those people who only ever agreed with the life isn’t fair idiom, accepting it as conventional wisdom. That was until one day in my early 30s, when I was bemoaning some grave unfairness in life. At one point in a typical psychotherapy style conversation I often have with myself to debrief matters about which I’m not happy, my defiant side came out to challenge the victim me to ask So what? What are you going to do about it? Everything then changed, with me not being the type to back down from a good challenge.

Reflecting on my defiant approach later, I decided I was going to stop merely accepting that life isn’t fair. It isn’t fair, I will accept that. However, I wasn’t ever just going to leave it that way again, either. I was going to do something about it, whether enough to rectify it or not, since I knew I would not be able to rectify it fully every time. Further, I wasn’t going to wait for when life treated me unfairly to initiate a reaction to it, either. I realized there were plenty of unfair things in life I could take my pick to make fair, or should I fall short, make fairer. By the best of chances, the English language gave me a beautiful pun in the word fairer to make this quote. That fairer had a justice and beauty definition to it, both relevant to my quote, only made my fair response to life isn’t fair, fairer.

Conventional

wisdom

is more often

convention

than wisdom

What’s the difference between wisdom, and conventional wisdom? Shouldn’t wisdom be sufficiently universal and timeless you shouldn’t have to qualify it with anything? And why conventional, of all qualifiers, meaning generally accepted as if common sense rather than wise knowledge known to a few? In that sense, conventional wisdom