A few days ago marked the one month anniversary of the launch of this site. Not that I’m still in some this romanticized state of celebrating anniversaries like I’m in junior high, but it was more so a reflection of how things have developed and changed within such a short period of time. While I wasn’t necessary reliant on metrics, I was more than happy with the traffic that flowed through despite the fact I wasn’t able to update it as frequently as possible. I guess I still need that quantifiable progress. While I undoubtedly have the good fortune of having a pretty free-reign over at Hypebeast, there is still an agenda there at the end of the day. However, with EK.com, it really is 100% truly my platform and I can talk about the most pointless or ridiculous shit at the end of the day, virtually anything to my heart’s content. Not to be ignorant or egotistical, I go about things not so much in hopes that people pick up on it, but if they do… cool. It’s like the designer who maintains virtually 100% his own creative direction and focus and luckily he has the ability to create a strong following (*cough cough* Hiroki Nakamura and visvim).

Any frequenter to Hypebeast realizes the confines of the site lies within fashion and to a lesser degree art and other miscellaneous aspects of popular culture. The confinement of this seemed a bit stifling at times and maybe more so in an increasing manner? I’d like to think that mindless product fodder that proliferates the front page is far from something that is the strongest representation of myself. As I’ve touched upon in the past, the conceptual and “journey” aspect of things really interest me. In the last year, I started developing a certain path to which I wanted my life and my shit to go down. This was actually pretty weird, it seemed as though the last 18 months of my life were seemingly much clearer than the previous 23/24 years of my life PERIOD. I’m still a bit shocked how it has happened and I can’t find the catalyst. I’ve fallen into this perspective and ironically enough I’ve managed to link up with two people from opposite sides of the world who both share some commonalities in regards to perspective and thinking. Despite being a largely irrelevant to Hypebeast’s culture in terms of working background, I ended up sharing some comprehensive emails with the very first person to hit me up following the launch of EK.com. I exchanged a grip of emails with @nuttyjas who simply stumbled upon Hypebeast awhile back. We needed up talking about things such as living abroad, moving back home or to a new place, general guidelines to how you approach your everyday and life etc. As I outlined my own personal-derived initiatives and thoughts, it started to become clear that this actually took form under something greater. Well shit, I guess I’ve some how stumbled into this often-heard but little known form of organized practice known as Buddism. Knowing far more about kung-fu monks than what the whole premise was, I really knew little about Buddishm and its philosophies, so it was rather shocking to find out the parallels between my own thoughts and Buddishm. It sort of reinforced my notion that no idea is truly ground-breaking, however the context continually changes and finding that context is one of the big questions in the grand scheme of things. Cutting to the chase, @nuttyjas hooked it up with the following book seen above, “The Art of Happiness” by The Dalai Lama & Howard C. Cutler.

I tackled the book this past weekend, taking small 15 minute opportunities here and there while commuting. On a sidenote, having been an EXTENSIVE online reader, going back to print is a bit difficult, or perhaps its the way the book was actually written versus my usual objective, factual based readings in newspapers etc. But all in all, 100 pages in, I felt like I’ve already developed some new ideas as well as reinforced pre-existing ones. The book is based on a series of meetings between both The Dalai Lama and Howard C. Cutler. What is great about it is that Cutler’s scientific and psychology background continually try to poke holes in the Buddhist philosophy as The Dalai Lama offers what is seemingly an answer at every turn. Along the way, I’ve developed some questions of my own as to how things work within everything but maybe they’ll get answered before I turn over the last page. I’m really a beginner to everything, so we’ll see what comes of this following the book’s completion.

One thing that I sort of worried was, while I knew that I would never transform into a full-on practioner of Buddhism and drop everything to run to my local monaestry, where could I incorporate this level of spirituality which favors things that are contradictory to my current lifestyle? Is it possible to be only 58% down with what Buddha preaches? But upon further introspection and discussion… Ah I’ll leave it to @nuttyjas to lay it down:

I don’t really think you need to FULLY utilize, accept or even adapt to it (Buddhism)….take it as a form of enlightment and different thought process, pick up the good stuff that you think resembles your reasonings and principles. In this age, its impossible to become a true advocate of buddhist teaching unless you wanna be a monk…we don’t live in caves and spend our time in meditation. We’re humans and because of that ..we go our needs and wants which makes it hard to look beyond the mateialistic stuff, it’s a fine thin line… but I do think its possible to create that balance of materialistic needs and emotional, spiritual happiness. Do I even make sense here? Haha…

Ok I can sleep easy now… thanks a lot for everybody’s support over the last month. From the emails to the Tweet, shit’s been dope. Hopefully people can see there’s more to life than t-shirts, sneakers and flannels haha.

-Eugene

P.S. When I’m done, I’ll be sure to pass the book along to the next person…