TED Community

I am drawn to anything that helps me understand the world a little more clearly. Books do that. They let you borrow the hard-won wisdom of people who made mistakes before you had the chance to make them yourself. Reading, at its best, is not escape. It is leverage. It lets you travel through history, strategy, failure, faith, invention, and human nature without needing to learn every lesson the expensive way. Food does something similar. I love food, but more than that, I love the craft of food. I think chefs are the new rock stars. The difference is that you do not have to stand in a stadium with 20,000 people to experience what they have made. You can sit at a table, take a bite, and listen for the story they are trying to tell. Food tells you where you are in the world. Sometimes it takes you somewhere else entirely. A dish can move you across a border, into another culture, or back into a room you thought you had forgotten. It can return you to someone you love, or someone you loved. In that sense, food is one of the most underrated time machines we have. Travel expands that feeling. The more I see of the world, the smaller and more connected I feel. Travel reminds me that I am a speck of dust standing on the shoulders of people who sacrificed, built, fought, loved, failed, and endured so that the rest of us could inherit something larger than ourselves. It also reminds me that people are not nearly as different as we are sometimes told. Across countries, languages, and customs, the deepest things tend to rhyme: God or purpose. Family. Friendship. Love. The desire to matter. The need to belong. And finally, I am passionate about who I am becoming. That may be the real subject beneath all the others. Learning, food, travel, faith, relationships, ambition, discipline. They are all part of the same inquiry: how do we become more fully what we were created to be? I believe we are always changing. The question is whether we are changing by accident or by intention. I am interested in the intentional kind.

I love playing the piano during my free time and an interest I have found quite recently and am working on, is the genetics research.