Paths Less Travelled: A Scholar Warrior's Journey as a Spy, Teacher and Healer | Inspirational Story for Personal Growth & Self-Discovery

Hon K. Lee’s memoir Paths Less Traveled is an interesting read on two levels. On one level it is a reprise of Lee’s nearly seventy year long journey of self-discovery and actualization and on the other it’s a peek into late 20th century and early 21st century America from the perspective of a middle-class man who happens to be a first-generation American born of Chinese parents. While no one would confuse Lee’s spare, even choppy, writing style with the river-long sentences of, say, novelist William Faulkner, both in their own ways convey a sense of time and place that, in the end, leaves the reader with the satisfied feeling of having “been there.”“There” runs all the way from New York City’s Chinatown, where Lee was born and raised, to Norman, OK, where he graduated from the University of Oklahoma, to various Marine Corps duty stations, including Quantico, Virginia, I Corps Viet Nam and several posts in California, and then to numerous undisclosed locations around the world in CIA service, as well as to its headquarters in northern Virginia, where he ultimately retired and dove into his later-life passions of Chinese martial arts, acupuncture and Chinese medicine.And all the things he did “there” over the course of his astonishingly productive life almost defy counting. As I wrote this review I found myself with an arm-long list of CIA postings that he held, kung-fu styles that he mastered and Chinese herbal remedies, mind/body disciplines and acupuncture techniques that he acquired and still uses today. Ultimately I decided not to include them here, both because you can read them for yourselves and because my brief synopsis could not begin to do them justice, especially the accounts of the obstacles he overcame along his lightly-traveled paths and the people who influenced him so profoundly on that journey. One interesting thing I noted about Lee’s life is that the older he got, the less traveled his paths became. With most people the opposite is true: they do exotic, sometimes wild and crazy, things when they’re young before settling into predictable, even dull, routines as they get older. But not Hon Lee. His life is as lively and challenging today as it was the day he joined the Marines almost fifty years ago.If you’re curious about how a highly accomplished person manages to do it all, and if you want to see what a life well-lived looks like, Paths Less Traveled is the book for you. It paints the picture of a man who, in Sheryl Sandberg‘s words, “leaned in” to life and as a result has a tremendous amount to show for it. I’m envious. You will be too.