Notes from the Abyss

The problem of Unfairness

2010-05-15T20:42:00.000-07:00

The problem of unfairness has two parts: there’s the practical set backs to your goals, and then there’s a metaphysical part which is described by a psychologist as follows:

"Confrontations with violence challenges one's most basic assumptions about the self as invulnerable and intrinsically worthy and about the world as orderly and just. After abuse, the victim's view of self and world can never be the same again: it must be reconstructed.to incorporate the abuse experience."

People don’t realise that their suffering comes mostly from this level. Injustice tears a hole in meaning, leading directly to meaninglessness. How can you reconstruct meaninglessness into your view of the world? I’ve written before that we act a play of meaning because that’s the admission price of life. But reality is meaningless, there’s a duality. And the greater the unfairness the more severe this paradox – it brings you face to face with an existential crisis which is always there.

Weirdly enough this means there’s no reason to give up because nothing has changed. Unfairness feels like a terrible destruction of everything we know and believe, but in fact it was produced by the same universe with the same laws as before, when you were happy. It’s a strange comfort maybe but a very solid one. You still live in the same reality.

You do however need to change where you place hope. I don’t believe in replacing one opiate with another, platitudes like ‘move on’ or ‘make lemonade out of lemons’ are only temporary shelters. Again a much more solid comfort comes from revaluating from its foundations what it means to ‘believe in meaning.’

Usually it means that we believe meaning makes up the majority of life, and that’s the way it should be. But this is totally wrong.

Meaninglessness it the norm, and meaning is the exception. Our fair and just world is a man made construct that occupies a tiny pinprick of the universe where the rocks and water, stars and planets exist with no reason, no beginning, no end, no life and no meaning.

Meaning is not the way it should be at all, it’s an anomaly. There’s a war going on, and it has been ever since life struggled to existence. Meaning is a direct assault on reality and it has to be created against the odds.

And the only reason it happens is because we have an instinctual, compulsion to find it beautiful.

‘Believing in meaning’ is a leap of faith, a commitment to aestheticism. I can’t say it’s a ‘belief’ really because you enter into it with both eyes open, you choose to value it even whilst you know it is only a creation, a fallacy almost, validated by nothing external.

We light a small fire that pushes back the darkness. We stare at that small fire so intently that we forget the darkness is all around us and all pervasive. Why be discouraged if you happen to glance up and see reality? Or realise how small the light is. Keep staring at the fire because it’s important to you, and protect and nurture it precisely because it’s small and fragile.
And then the only problem that unfairness poses is the practical one of how to work around it.

The Superfluous

2010-05-15T07:00:00.000-07:00

"How could those who never live at the right time die at the right time? Would that they had never been born! Thus I counsel the superfluous. But even the superfluous still make a fuss about their dying; and even the hollowest nut still wants to be cracked."

Finding a niche

2010-05-11T05:07:00.000-07:00

At last it seems blogs have made dreams and passion valuable for the masses, and to the masses. According to Six Pixels of Separation, to leverage it to make a living you need only write about your most passionate interests, no matter how obscure. Passion, at the end of the day, is what we all crave and gathering a large following from pure passion will lead to profits by numbers. But to hit the spot you need to find a niche, a voice. After the last century of oppression by mass production, the individual is raising its head and heart again, paradoxically through the internet.

(Just look what Twitter is doing for Chinese democracy.)

So what’s my niche? Architecture, design and environment is my working beat, but philosophy is my secret love. Maybe I can combine the two. There are crossovers in how the philosophies of our built environments reflect what we think and how we make sense of ourselves in the world.

My first philosophical thought about architecture and design is this: we should build from the inside out.

New Media, New Meaning

2010-05-11T05:04:00.000-07:00

I've been delving into new media as a way to save my dying industry – or really just my own skin. I met with a multi-media entrepreneur recently about this, a dodgy American former sports journalist. He said to me, "There are two kinds of people in the world: hunters and farmers, and I'm a hunter." I just thought that meant he is sleazy. His company seems to be staffed by beautiful women.

Still he gave me some good ideas about how the internet is the one place where you can effectively combine text, audio, and video together. It is truly multimedia. I always feel like time flies faster than an arrow, whilst I stay behind watching the sun set across the sky. I would be happier in the age of Tolstoy, where all you had was pen and paper and a steam train to transmit your ideas to the world.

But now those degrees of separation between people have gone. We're all whores in a way, inappropriately close to one another. And so this leads me to blogging in the mainstream press. I read the blogs of foreign correspondents of the big English papers, and they're really just articles – a bit shorter and at blog intervals. They're impersonal, they're political/socio-economic. But that's not what people read blogs for.

Blogs fascinate because it's the voice of an individual, not filtered through the voice of a paper, not filtered through their litigation department, nor edited and cleansed. It's about their personal journey, whether life makes them or breaks them. Anyone who wants to blog has to give up a part of themselves to cyberspace. Even when it's professional it needs to be personal. It has to extract that price. I wonder if journalists are really willing to do that, and if that's why none of their blogs are as captivating as Brazen Careerist where she shares – in between career advice - her divorce, remarriage and miscarriages.

One day I'll do that … maybe.

The first idea

2010-05-11T04:59:00.000-07:00

I'm turning into a philosopher of unhappiness – it captures my imagination. Not the gothic, adolescent kind of unhappiness. I mean the difficult, nuanced kind about the huge task of unfolding potential, and potentials unrealised - partly because of our own limitations, and partly because each individual is the product of the whole of human progress. Meanwhile we live with making choices and their sacrifices, and inarticulate longings that echo down the ages.

What is 'potential'?

Bits and pieces of it surface in every blog, I didn't know it but all roads led to it.

The acorn always grows into an oak, but human beings - as the most sophisticated of all machines - can become anything. In nature I've noticed sophistication is measured not in strength but flexibility and versatility.

In terms of natural equipment that's the only advantage we've got – but what an advantage.

We are a blank slate, a book where everything is contained. Particular environments pull particular parts and combinations into existence. It's almost impossible to find universal values (the more multicultural my experience of the world, the more different I find cultures, and not all of them equal). But all the other possibilities are still there at the same time, shimmering like unread words in the book, like invisible ink undecoded.

Limitations of the age

We all suffer from our point in history, maybe it's one of the most insidious sufferings. Imagine if you had been born before writing was invented – you would have been and thought and done a fraction of what you could have today. Similarly a human from 3010 may look at us like worms struggling in the mud, seeing only a tiny sliver of sky.

Maybe we will have by then tools to dissect human behaviour or the brain, and human nature won't be a mystery or an art anymore.

The final thing about potential is it's inextricably linked to freedom. We have made major mistakes by not looking at freedom this way, because then we only consider 'freedom from' something, not what the 'freedom to' do something means.

Freedom to unfold potential – but who has studied what that involves? Just because you're free to compose music doesn't mean you know how. Freedom has two sides to it, one of which opens the door to fear, panic and cruelty.

Understanding the vastness of potential leads to the search for 'freedom to' – and the end of the myth that we know who we are just because the chains are removed. Maybe then we will understand those many, many who are still potentials unrealised because of the walls in their minds.

Happiness, potential

2010-04-20T07:01:00.001-07:00

This blog seems to reflect my unfortunate personality: months of silence followed by ranting that no one understands. Even though I bang on about change, I’m really not sure anything has changed from the sad little person I was three years ago. Why did I come here? What did I achieve?

Instead I have pet theories about the most abstract things. Still I think understanding the abstract level can change the world. If you keep stepping back, eventually you’ll see the whole picture.

I’ve been thinking a lot about happiness and its discontents. Why is it the things we want the most can’t be pursued directly? Love is an example, happiness too. The ‘pursuit’ of happiness is really misleading.

Hunger for happiness in and of itself is what utopias are made of – and utopias always turn into dystopias. They are what Nietzche calls “the wretched contentment.”

Even people with the most simple dreams find, all the time, that happiness doesn’t lie at the end of their journey. The woman who has always wanted to be a housewife feels bored and dis-respected when she gets there, the person who pursues money and status eventually finds them empty. We are terrible at predicting what will make us happy.

If happiness was a solid object, which we are apt to think it is, like a gold bar, or a journey destination, we should be a lot better at predicting how to get it by now. It was the point of the whole of human progress.

But our failure so far just goes to show it’s totally wrong. What if happiness is only a byproduct of something else and has no substance of its own? Like a mist that retreats with the dawn, we can only ever experience it intermittently.

The problem is we are not really built for happiness. We have it the wrong way round. We don’t exist to experience nice emotions, emotions exist to pull us or push us towards things that help survival. They only point the way, like candy they’re awarded for good behaviour. Happiness is sweet but it’s shallow, and the time it’s in your mouth is short.

We are however built for the less glamorous task of integrating our potential. But this is really complex because the potential is completely open. If there’s one thing in common in all peoples it’s versatility and adaptability. As I said before our natures are really like Mutant of the X-Men. We are like machines with an inbuilt panel that can be re-programmed to make anything. That kind of power is on a whole different level to even the most powerful machine that only makes one thing.

Everywhere in nature, versatility has won over brute force. But it’s not obvious, it looks gentle and soft on the outside, it’s a secret weapon.

Integrating all its strands may be impossible, but the more you can include the more successful the individual, or culture, civilization. We weave our lives like a wide plait of multicoloured threads. Its patterns determine our direction. The smoother, wider, more inclusive the weaving the more comes back to us. But what this weaving means in practical terms is another post – or another 10 posts. It takes some figuring out.

Happiness is incidental to this process. It’s only a boomerang that you throw in one direction and hope it comes back from somewhere, you don’t know for sure. It’s only a possibility.

So my conclusion is: don’t pursue happiness. It sounds bleak but the message is not nihilistic. The message is that it’s natural to experience happiness only intermittently. Don’t sweat the lack of happiness, your task lies elsewhere. Your task is bigger than happiness, life would be too shallow if this candy was what we strived for.

It’s like my theory on meaninglessness. Everyone would be more relaxed if you knew it’s inevitable. The real, worthy object for your striving doesn’t lie in trying to destroy that feeling, it doesn’t lie in eliminating the lack of happiness. Instead we are meant to take the difficult path, that’s why the reward of happiness exists. And so, paradoxically, along the way happiness is likely to boomerang back to you – though that’s only a possibility.

The rich, older man

2010-04-11T09:13:00.000-07:00

Yes, I know I haven’t posted in months. But I’ve been busy doing things worth posting about, working on a special report you could say.

I have somehow become an accidental gold digger, and my special report concludes thus: it seems that being a gold digger isn’t easy.

The rich, older man and young woman combination is such a cliché in this city and so widespread, it was just a matter of time. Here’s how I got drawn into it.

Two months ago I was introduced to the CEO of a private equity business. Let’s call him Mr.X. Many things about him didn’t make sense: why did he have the time to take me out to lunch? Why did he make so much effort to be charming? And why did he stay in touch? In my naivety I thought he just wanted sex. He flirted a lot and talked to our mutual friend about me. All my insecurities were activated. I thought I had found a mentor of sorts.

But through all the graciousness, he had the most intense stare. His eyes fixed on me with blue-gray steel. He said he was good at reading people, but I didn’t know what he was looking for, and what he had found in me.

Now I think maybe it’s this. Female journalists are supremely placed to meet rich, older men, and, for the sake of the job, to charm them. After years of doing this two or three times a week, you also become quite good at it. Worst of all normal people doing normal things begin to bore you.

You find ways to escalate experiences, to find the extremes.

After a period of ‘courtship’ he made his real move – he introduced me to his client, Mr.Y, an even richer, older man. This man had been the real object of his courtship for an investment of US$ 3 million. He also happened to go to the same school as me in London twenty years ago, and was divorced and lonely. Given his cold and fastidious character, an ordinary whore would have been too vulgar. He needed a high class escort without the escort label: i.e. a well educated, cultured, gold digger.

Yes, I’m the perfect fit – except for the motivation. I’m motivated not by money but by what? I don’t even know. Curiosity perhaps, validation. I was a welcoming present, an object.

I went on a date with Mr.Y – where he changed the time to fit his schedule, and changed the location to his building. On these dates the man gets it all his way, they’re not really interested in you. That was how he related to the whole world: when he says jump, everyone says how high.

I found all the gatherings of this circle to be sad, surreal affairs - a mishmash of oddly matched people who had nothing to say to each other, but who were still desparate to be there. Young, beautiful local women sat in silence like they didn’t exist while the men talked shop. Young guys hanging on to their every word, the lackeys, the groupies. A friend became one of them, a young man who was changing before my eyes from a sweet hearted kid.

But crazily enough I consider continuing. Perhaps because I’m used to self abuse. Or because the story isn’t finished yet. Curiosity always has me in its grip, and I’m compelled to open the blinds.

At the same time I walk away from innocence.

Two meanings

2010-01-10T04:25:00.000-08:00

Two meanings

I have an inconvenient tendency to look behind the curtain - it makes everyone uncomfortable. Increasingly I’ve been trying to find where biology ends and philosophy begins, and philosophy is backed into an ever shrinking corner. Maybe there is only a tiny gap that makes us human, or the concept of being a uniquely chosen, sacred species is only an illusion.

Even the search for meaning, our most profound (and profoundly vague) goal can be better understood with evolution. In fact confusion surrounds this issue because there are two meanings created over different periods of evolution, and they often conflict.

The older, stronger one is about survival. It’s nature’s way of challenging us to use and explore all our complex abilities to flourish as a species. It’s like a special exam the teacher only gives to the brightest kid in the class, a secret weapon to make him use his potential.

The newer sense of meaning comes from the conscious brain, specifically self consciousness. It reflects on the beliefs inherited from nature and spots flaws and logical incoherence – of which there are plenty in the old version of meaning.

But both have in common the definition of meaning as a process rather than the goal. The key to understanding it is the emotion of anticipation – which is a much cruder, older version of the same process.

Instinct for meaning

Our compass in the search for meaning is feelings and instincts. You can believe these are cosmic truths given to us by some cosmic force. But it’s far more likely that they evolved, like everything else in our bodies, for survival.

Emotions of pleasure and pain signals gain or loss. Anticipation and fear points the way to future gain or loss. The sense of meaning can be seen as another emotion, one that developed with our conscious brain and our ability to string together complex learning behaviour. The instinct for meaning drives us to make the most of our powerful brains, motivating us to start and persist in extremely long term, complex planning and delaying gratification.

Even in modern times, meaningfulness is very clearly associated with these things, like long term career development, learning something new and difficult, overcoming challenges, investing in a family and bringing up kids.

What are we directed to accomplish with this complex planning? Either one of two things: a) using as much of our innate abilities as possible, the ultimate example is creativity or, b) building civilization by supporting the set of conventional moralities.

a) Using our abilities is both the goal itself, and also the way we achieve the goal. Creativity therefore is its ultimate representative. New ideas are an end in itself, a pure expression of what the brain can do. But at the end of the day, even creativity has evolutionary uses in the extremely long term, it’s the ultimate long term investment. For example pure research science and philosophy.

b) Morality is associated with meaning because it allows us to organize and utilize large, complex societies. Civilization is probably the most important factor in our evolutionary success so far. Morality evolved to help us with social organization, how to balance between individual impulses and compromising for the good of the group. Search for meaning often involves building families or communities on the one hand, or fighting for causes that upholds the rights of the individual.

If that seems bleak and unromantic then stop reading, because the second type is bleaker.

The paradox of meaninglessness

Consciousness is built to search out accuracy, whereas the older brain makes whatever sense it can from whatever material is at hand. It’s one of the greatest ironies of life that consciousness will eventually find there is no meaning.

Self consciousness therefore comes to the conclusion that we are absurd.

Reality and nature is a big pool of everything mixed together, differentiated by no good or bad, or any values in between. Is one rock better or worse than another? Is the sea better or worse than the sky? Are the solar systems a good thing or a bad thing? The questions aren’t applicable, things in nature just ARE. They exist that’s all. They have no meaning. Reality is meaningless.

Then life came along, and it differentiates from the rest of nature. Life values life for itself, and assigns the value of good to alive, and bad to dead. Then it goes on to impose values on everything according to whether it helps you live or not. But it’s an imposition on reality, not reality itself.

All living things thus live in created meanings, like a story or a play. Man comes along and he is the most complex form of life, and naturally he creates the most complex form of theatre. He is an actor in a play but he doesn’t know he is acting in a play. He thinks the play is reality.

BUT the truth seeking consciousness can’t help but work out the internal incoherence of this state of affairs. Self consciousness then causes us to realize ourselves as actors in the play. But this realization conflicts with many, older and very strong instincts. Though it’s more accurate, it’s only allowed to surface from time to time.

This is why everyone has at some point felt that life is meaningless. It comes and goes. But the more self conscious you are, the harder that it will pound on your awareness. Like Neo in the Matrix.

Speaking of the Matrix, is the answer then to take the red pill? i.e. leave the matrix (the play) and go in search of the truth? The harsh answer is no because unlike the Matrix, there is no bigger story outside of the story we have woken from. Reality is meaningless - it has no stories. We have no where else to go. (And this is why the Matrix sequels are so bad, they completely lost the plot).

This is the existential crisis that’s part of the human condition. Everyone one will always have to deal with it.

The actor who realises he is acting must continue to act. The only choice is whether to embrace the acting or see it as an unsolvable trap. Only the first choice offers any chance of happiness. As a self conscious actor he can actually embrace the fundamental absurdity of life, and put all the passion he can muster into the role. He can also change his role and the play to suit his tastes.

The conscious search for meaning therefore involves creating meaning. You can choose anything and then create its meaning with the act of devotion. The more you make something important, the more value it will have. Both parts are a kind of defiance of absurdity. It’s all in the attitude.

How do the two meanings add up? Well they often conflict, especially at the existential crisis. People will be a lot happier if they knew it just exists and got comfortable with it. But choosing and creating your meaning fits in quite well with the set tasks of evolution, which was designed to draw out our creativity. Most need some of the conventional moralities to aim for, but a lot of creativity can be worked into that.

(The spanner in the wheel is modern cubical jobs in mega corporations. By being so specialized they eliminate many of the key features of meaning. Our powers of social organization have evolved faster than our emotional brains, but that’s another post.)

Since the older brain trumps the new for emotional power every time, the key is to put its requirements first. But not forget also to deal with the fallout from having our newer intelligence.

From this I can deduct a pretty clear and detailed definition of how to find meaning:

Engage in a long term project that requires complex planning and delaying gratification. It needs to be challenging enough to stretch as much of your abilities as possible.
The goal can be either stretching your abilities itself, creativity, or building society (any set of the conventional moralities).
Really devote yourself to it.
Build in as much choice and creativity as possible.
Be aware of the feelings of meaninglessness that will come up, and continue regardless.

Should I change?

2010-01-10T04:17:00.000-08:00

The conscious mind has indirect methods to exert huge influence on the subconscious - if you know how, but since the brain works like a computer it’s a matter of technology rather than philosophy.

But I’m not interested in tools and technology. I’m interested in decisions – that tiny space in our thinking left for free will and change. At the intersection of conscious and unconscious lies change. And the crucial question with regard to change is, ‘should I change?’

It’s very hard to answer yes to this question, because it protects us from a lot of things. The pain of adopting new habits is well documented. But beyond that yawns even more abysses – a glimpse into reality without our delusions, a terrifying alien terrain of complexity and meaninglessness, and freedom.

I said before that motivation relies on a tripod of questions: Is change possible? How much can I change? And should I change?

The first two are to do with worldview, and the last with self image. To answer yes to should I change, we implicitly have to accept two scary consequences: a) that a consistent and stable self does not exist and b) we are our own creators. This brings up both a fear of death, and a fear of life.

The Buddhists have long discovered that there is no such thing as ‘I.’ If every physical cell in your body is growing, dying and being replaced at every moment, then what is a fixed, physical ‘I’ based on? Our thoughts, feelings, opinions, memories and experiences are also constantly changing – so what is this fixed concept of the self based on? It simply doesn’t exist.

But to us who have so much invested in a concept of ‘I’ any significant change holds the threat of annihilation. It’s a step towards death which is a return to nature, or reality which has no ‘I’ - it only has endless change in an indistinguishable soup of all things, all meaningless.

This is one reason there’s so much resistance to change.

The other is taking responsibility for change.

Being responsible for our own creation brings a great deal of hassle and effort – it’s like you’re constantly being reborn, and you yourself is also the midwife. It’s the end of an easy life of ignorance and dogma.

Also endless choices organized by no one else in any order again touches on unpalatable reality - an indistinguishable and meaningless soup. Having the responsibility to order this for ourselves prompts the fear of freedom, which is essentially the problem at the heart of being alive.

The word ‘should’ throughout history with its moral associations has always been a barrier of some sort – both against great fear, and against great progress.

How to change

2009-12-28T20:14:00.000-08:00

When it comes to change the first hurdles are always mental. Firstly people don’t believe it’s possible at all. Then even if they concede it’s possible, they doubt how much can be changed.

Being the fundamentalist I am, I wouldn’t be interested in change if the answer to all those questions wasn’t a complete and utter yes.

I propose change of almost any part, and any proportion of your actions, mentality, and personality is possible. Far from being a mutant, Mimic from X-Men, is really the most truthful representation of human nature.

But there is a third question, which is also the trickiest one: ‘should I change?’ If we have the power to create our own characters should we use it?

This is the most philosophical, and complex, and interesting question of all (and deserves a post of its own).

Here I’m arguing that absolute change is possible. So, how exactly?

It lies in the interplay between the conscious and the subconscious. Character is formed in the subconscious by integrating millions of strands of experiences and meanings, like candy floss, or a ball of wool, into a somewhat coherent whole.

People think there’s a wall between the two minds, and the subconscious is a dark, tumultuous source of problems and instincts they can’t control. That’s where the blueprint of their personality has been set, ‘that’s just who I am’ they say.

Psychologists compound the problem by blaming your shitty early upbringing, parents or biological settings for current problems. Of course it’s in the past which can’t be changed.

But there are many hidden doorways between the conscious and subconscious. With these the conscious mind can reach in and slowly unravel that ball of wool, then reintegrate and re-engineer it to whatever form you want.

The doorways are not obvious because the subconscious is such a complex, amorphous thing, there’s no direct path to its door. I also think it contains much more than just our character. Rather it’s our oracle containing scripts from millions of years of evolution, and all our potential in the future. It’s a box that we haven’t come close to unpacking yet.

One doorway is art, which opens that mysterious potential. It generates ideas and is a bridge between this world and the next. But it’s very fickle with unpredictable results.

To consciously craft who you are, you need a more humble but reliable channel that goes from the conscious mind to the subconscious.

I used to think it was just repetition, but this blogger does a much better, more thorough analysis of it using computer programming. I totally agree, being a former programmer as well (long story, former life I'd rather forget). I tried it, and I'm the most sceptical person in the world, but it changed my mind like flipping a switch.

Thus you can shine the light of self consciousness on the dark corners of your nature.

If this is done over a wide enough range, then it changes an entire worldview. Even the most deeply ingrained character traits can be worked out like a knot with enough repetition, time and effort.

But that doesn’t mean it’s easy, and here is where traditional motivation strategies fail.

Repetition is a deceptively simple concept to grasp, but the hardest thing to actually do because it involves the deeply philosophical questions of motivation – the same three questions posed at the beginning of the post.

Moreover it’s not enough to answer them just the once. For every change you pay a price of time multiplied by effort – quite often the time of change takes years. During that time those three questions will come up again and again, and you will have to constantly re-answer them.

Of the three the last, ‘should I change?’ is the deadliest, and is the crux of motivation.

But at some point the subconscious takes over – and that’s when change really starts, it gets compounded and magnified and escalated. When it gets into the realm of the subconscious, character has been unravelled and reintegrated.

Change asks a lot from the conscious mind, but that’s the price of courting the powerful subconscious.

Change

2009-12-23T04:22:00.000-08:00

I’ve always changed continuously beyond recognition. A curious, slippery chameleon character, I discard identities at every stage of the past. People now don’t recognise me from five years ago, or even a year, or six months ago. I imagine this is what it’s like to be an international spy, putting on a different array of masks and wigs and fake passports. In the end you become the process of change itself, that’s the only thing left to you – leaving friends at their limited place in time in the past, staring after you.

Why is virtue defined as having unchanging values, when the ability to change is the greatest of all human abilities?

An acorn always grows into an oak tree, but a person can become anything. It’s evolution by design, adaptation by learning. We don’t have to wait for death or mutation to find better solutions. It’s the result of wielding self consciousness like a tool.

Character takes shape like a tangled ball of wool. It’s integrated and wound, knots and all, over time. But with enough time, decision and courage any part can be unravelled and reintegrated differently.

This makes me ultimately mouldable and rescuable.

Can you rescue people from a lack of ideas?
- from a lack of love?
Can you rescue people from themselves?

Of the array of life’s defectives sitting on the shelf, it’s a wise investor who picks me out to take under their wing. I return hope for hope. I promise. My black, greedy eyes are searching out those who feed me even a little of what my potential can be, so that I can grow stronger than they can handle.

I see the hungry future like an eagle flying over the landscape. But reality moves at the pace of evolution, over millions of years, through small accumulations of changes, sedimentary rocks and geological shifts, moving tiny, inching steps forward.

Does the worm writhing in transformation also feel the way I do? Does it struggle to see through the chrysalis its tiny patch of sky? Trapped on this side of what I want to be, claustrophobic. We are arrows of longing shooting for the other shore.

Nothing can happen soon enough because, as the Smiths said, “How soon is now?”

The artistic type

2009-12-01T17:30:00.000-08:00

“There are times, when my crimes
Will seem almost unforgivable
I give in, to sin
Because you have to make this life liveable” - Strangelove

This week I’ve been in a strange state of disarray. I took up dancing recently and met someone with the artistic temperament. He’s basically an unpleasant person - bad tempered, unfriendly and inconsistent. But when dancing he becomes totally different – gentle, warm and creative.

This is what always gets me about artistic types. The duality of extremes. You get a glimpse of the naked soul across an abyss of masks that’s impossible to cross. They are trying to reach for themselves, like a mute trying to speak.

There’s a desperation and romanticism in it that captures my imagination. It reaches into my unconscious and rearranges things there. Some connections reach right into your soul, sidestepping all the usual checks and gatekeepers. But it threatens to open boxes in my psyche that I went to a great deal of trouble to close – like the dangerous tendency to rescue.

In the Unbearable Lightness of Being, the soul is described as the crew of a ship that hides, fearful below decks until something or someone calls it forth. I’m normally unashamedly selfish and uninterested in helping other people. But rarely and inconsistently I see sparks of trapped, frustrated potential, beautiful and fragile, and it’s like making sudden eye contact with that fitful crew.

I see myself in my earliest attempts to be a person and to learn to love. I see the same sparks that no one saw in me when I needed it the most.

And then again, I’m interested in desperation. If sex and relationships are only a reflection of who we are, then desperation forms the core (at least for me).

One of my favourite films is The Piano Teacher, famous for its explicit and perverted sex scenes. But people miss the point because it’s not actually about the sex. It’s about the desperation of her hopelessness and lack of control, isolation and inability to connect with any other person in the world.

Connection

2009-11-28T04:45:00.001-08:00

There’s a great deal of talk about relationships and sex as if it's this fixed concept that can be applied across the board. As if it has rules. But being a relativist as always I think a better analogy for a relationship is a book. Though every book has two covers and letters on a page, the similarities end there. The content of each and every one is different, so is its mood, its depiction of the world, its view of reality.

There are endless possibilities and varieties. Maybe that's why some people are addicted to new relationships. How can you ever read enough books? There is always more to learn.

Similarly sex is not a thing in itself. It can be as complex, and varied and take on as many forms as the individual person who engages in it. It is a mirror held up to the soul. Anything ugly or beautiful in a person, will be reflected and intensified in sex. When people talk about what sex is, I think they're missing the point. Rather I want to ask them, who are you? What can or can't you express?

We are owners of souls like a big house with floors and stairwells and rooms we don't even know exist. The public sitting rooms and master bedroom are for the official spouse (someone who can help you pay the rent), but what about exploring the whole house?

I've always found this duality between appropriate partner material – financially or personality wise – and the inappropriates. But connection has nothing to do with that distinction. It's much wider, more flexible, more capricious than that.

The inappropriates slip in easily by the back door. They take me by the hand down unused corridors and unlocks secret rooms. And inside I look out of a whole new window with a completely different angle on that house, revealing endless facets of myself.

Monogamy is neither natural nor unnatural, it is simply one of many possibilities.

Two Lessons

2009-11-17T17:54:00.000-08:00

Recently Iveve taken up two hobbies: running and investing in stocks. They teach me surprising and contrasting lessons about life.

Running is about determination, planning and controlling your life. The stock market is all about unpredictability and not being able to control the wider world.

There's a saying that life's a marathon – I can definitely see how this is true. Running is like a simplified version of life where you can see your self doubt, self sabotage and sheer laziness at work. It's not the running that's hard, it's self management.

At the heart of self management is planning and persistence. Planning gives you a picture of the light at the end of the tunnel so that you don't lose hope. Persistence is simply tolerating immediate frustration to get to the end of the tunnel. Doing something well repeatedly is the key as it forms habit.

Without all the above, which makes up discipline, I realised I wouldn't be able to keep something good in life even if it came along and slapped me.

Actually it's not hard to understand, or even do. But most people trip up at the ‘repeatedly’ part – which is also the most important. I found it almost magical that profound changes in life are made through mundane habits like these.

I guess running is a lesson in how to order our own lives and the space within our control. By contrast the stock market is about complexity and chance.

It's unpredictable because there are so many inputs of information, forming so many combinations of outcomes – just like life itself.

Yet bafflingly it's also highly rational. Every number is based on certain criteria. In the long term there are even patterns, prompting money managers to think they can outperform the market. Of course they consistently fail.

This is also true of life. There seem to be patterns, and yet we can't predict much about the future. Chaos theory and determinists battle it out over whether things happen for a reason, and whether we can control or change fate.

The way to deal with the market is to go with the flow. Obviously it's futile to insist on it doing what I expect it to do. Yet this is what many people expect from life. You can only try to time the market and ride the waves up and down, hoping the millions of other conditions will come together fortuitously to a high. Then you sell your stock and get out quickly before those conditions dissolve again, which it will inevitably.

In life we also need to learn how to shift gears – between hard headed determination, and learning to let go, waiting for the time to be ripe.

Between this world and the next

2009-11-13T21:47:00.000-08:00

The lifelong business of self creation involves two things: looking for new possibilities and bringing them into reality.

We are driven to create something new, and uniquely ours – this is evolution by design. We are innately creative.

In imagination we can consciously find new versions of ourselves. But there's a much greater, deeper pool of possibilities contained in the unconscious. To be the most that we can be, we search in these pools of potential and realise them through action. We move constantly between that murky world and the cold light of reality.

Self creation is difficult because it is balancing between two worlds: the imminent and the transcendent. It's all too easy to get lost in one or the other, and madness is the result.

Dreams

Artists for example live most of the time in potential, with neglected material lives. They explore the realms of possibility until they are lost. Madness in artists is no longer even a surprise.

There's an ingrained romantic myth that living in dreams is somehow more noble than being a materialist. The most famous Chinese novel, "Dream of the Red Chamber," is about the struggle between Taoism and Buddhism (on the side of transcendence), and Confucianism (realism). Like many dreamers the hero gives up the world to become a monk in the end.

But potential is only ever an empty promise until it is realised. It is a ‘nothing’ because nothing exists except in reality. It is a dead end.

Plato dealt in ideal forms – some greater truth out there we can neither see nor touch. Aristotle in contrast collected evidence of what he saw in the real world – and gave birth to science which changed our world beyond our wildest dreams.

There is a complex interplay between imagination and reality – they change each other.

Reality

The other example is interesting. Relentlessly materialistic people who spend their lives pursuing wealth and success are just as likely to be unhappy when they get there. This is a different kind of madness – that of never exploring alternatives.

Buddhists say this is the fault of endless desire, even when we get everything, we want more. Therefore they say desire is bad. But I think this is missing the point. Endless desire comes from our endless potential – which is simply a part of human nature.

Desire is the driving force of life and meeting its challenges with grace is the stuff of adulthood.

It's like a tug of war. We can get lost in either world, but for the pull of the other one pulling you back. It's strange how opposites melt into each other. Try to escape from reality through art or religion and you get lost in endless, empty potential. But try to cling to reality and you find it is itself a manifestation of endless potential.

The only real solution is to face endlessness directly.

This requires coming to terms with freedom and choice (more later), which is the only remedy to being lost.

Who am I?

2009-11-08T17:51:00.000-08:00

Say there was a god that made the world in seven days, including all the animals, and then he made human beings. Each species gets to choose a gift. The cow chooses many stomachs to digest grass, and the big cats want physical strength and agility.

But man chooses something strange and abstract. He chooses adaptability and potential. He is a blank slate on which anything can be written, and from which anything can be formed.

Human nature is like Pandora's Box containing infinite potential, and its slow unpacking is the unfolding of human progress.

But how do these big ideas about human nature help with everyday life?

That's my roommate's complaint when I talk to her about philosophy. "Life is just about two things: finding a good career, and a nice family," she says, being a practical girl who works in finance.

It's simple according to her - but I despise simplicity, and here's why.

When you look at any self evident truth closely they slither and multiply, becoming impossible to pin down.

Finding the right career and the right partner, or even knowing what 'right' means, leads directly to the big, existential questions of who you are and what you're doing with life.

Our adaptability creates many solutions to any problem. If that Pandora's Box is full of mysterious creatures, our various potentials, life involves picking the things you want to unpack from the box.

If we are a blank slate then life is writing a narrative, bringing ideas into black and white from an infinite sea. It's creation of a story and of a person. We are self-creators
and it's our longest, biggest, most complex project.

'Who am I?' is our challenge, and our handiwork. We are all project managers.

Of course complex projects are never easy. It requires discipline, delayed gratification, big picture thinking, and persistence. Many try to escape from the task (more on neurotics later).

This project is also unavoidable because life must have meaning (more on why later).

The idea that human life is inherently suffering has been knocking about in religions since forever. Maybe it's related to this difficult, long, and unavoidable task hanging over our heads, and which comes with the package of human existence.

Imagine how traumatic birth is, but we are constantly being born. Existential self creation is one of the roots of suffering.

A related suffering is how we pick potentials to realise, and which potentials to forgo.

Complexity

2009-10-30T21:34:00.000-07:00

I often define depth as 'sensitivity to complexity,' or what Keats terms 'negative capability.' It's a theme I'll return to again and again, because there's such a bias in conventional thought that the most profound truths are simple.

But why would you say that about human beings, when you wouldn't dream of saying it about space travel?

Yes, space travel.

I make this weird comparison because space travel is the most high complexity technical system we have. And human life is even more complex than that.

Take the Grant Study for example, an extraordinary longitudinal experiment that followed a group of 268 promising Harvard students from 1930 until they died. Their lives turned out to be utterly beyond prediction.

As one NYT columnist said in this article, "There is a complexity to human affairs before which science and analysis simply stands mute."

A good analogy is a PIN number. Just four digits and you can create millions of combinations that a supercomputer couldn't crack. But there are many more than four elements in the make up of a person – like background, physicality, temperament and random experiences.

Societies and economies are even bigger PIN numbers as they combine millions of hugely complex individuals. This is why stock markets, and history itself, is non-predictable.

But that's not all. A ball rolling down a hill has many forces acting on it, and yet science can tease out its basic course by separating and simplifying them all, then adding it back together.

This works well on the physical world, but human nature has the added dimension of free-will. There is a mysterious gap between cause and consequence in human actions that does not exist in the natural world. It's a gap for which, as yet, we have found no tools to investigate.

And it's this mysterious gap that defines human nature, and which I want to explore.

Self rescue

2009-10-28T18:24:00.000-07:00

I've always been in the business of self-rescue. Not just self help, or self development but a massive intervention in the cycle of dysfunction, abuse and despair.

But I did it mostly without therapy (and a bankful of money), or the great industry of self help. Instead I leaned on the ancient art of philosophy.

Some people say that in the post-modern world philosophy is dead. But I want to show with this blog that it weaves every strand in the narrative of life.

I've been absent for a while because blogs have been banned here. But the distance was good because I realised I need greater focus.

So I've decided to tackle self development because it's simply a travesty. Commercialization has made it a flippant, shallow industry of new age nonsense and charlatans.

But really changing reality is the most ancient, and complex project undertaken by the human race. It calls on our most profound ability - philosophy - to decisively intervene in the tyranny of fate and nature.

Also I have a problem with shiny, glossy, catchy motto's. They ignore the darkness that give life shape and dimension. Positive psychology reduces the magnificent beast of life into a squeaky, plastic toy.

I want to document the narrow path of change with the abyss lying close on either side.

..that thing is love

2009-04-01T06:17:00.000-07:00

"I'm not frightened, not of anything. The more I suffer the more I love. Danger would only increase my love, sharpen it, give it spice.

I will be the only angel you need. You will leave life even more beautiful than when you entered it."

- The Reader

I've been thinking about love in a relationship, and desire. It struck me these are quite different things. A long term relationship, by definition, has to be practical and maintainable. It's like finding a joint venture partner. It's about the practicalities of how you want to live and where you want to end up. But desire is a totally different beast.

Desire ignores appropriateness because it worships different laws.

It is that door at the end of that corridor one flight up and at the back of your house.

It answers the siren call of black holes that were never filled.
Things lost and paths not taken.

Why would any of these things coincide with practicality?

They say in this sex obsessed society, that you can have one night stands, but it won't make up for a real relationship. What about the things real relationships can't possibly cover? It's far more than sex.

The French knew the lost art of the 'Affair' - and the difference between an affair and a one night stand is like the difference between a French Arthouse film and a porn film.

A haunting book I read once about love was titled simply, "Open the Door!"

Metropolis I

2009-02-21T20:32:00.000-08:00

Big metropolises are a special world unto themselves, especially Asian metropolises where the forces of development, inequality and globalization come together. What does this do to the individual? I wanted to write a series of vignettes to explore this issue, but then days of self loathing got in the way. Inspiration comes and goes, and self doubt steps in to fill the remaining minutes and hours and days. Anyway I finished the first one of the series, based loosely on a conversation I had on the top floor of the Jinmao Tower. Comments welcome.

So many aspects to look at...

XXX

Clinking between cocktail glass and gold clad table, 85 stories above the city. We were laughing absurdly, carefree at the top of the world. For once the blur of speeding highways that took me from party to party, bar to bar wasn't an echo of bleeding loneliness. A wide-eyed companion was by my side and we moved at the speed of light, with the beat of the metropolis, hearts pulsating neon.

He looked out of 360 degree windows at the man made world glittering madly outside. The skyscrapers were alien giants winking lewdly back at us. "This view is amazing," he said. He was leaving in two days. "It's my favourite place here, and I wanted to show you." He turned to me with dark eyes holding something as other-worldly as the night outside.

I turned away. My absurdly expensive rings clinked against my absurdly expensive cocktail. "It's progress, and potential," I said turning the conversation to the abstract, "but pursuing potential is not the same as happiness."

His eyes refused to let go, "potential for what?" he asked.

And that's when I knew he really was an innocent who believed there was a difference. Potential for good, potential for evil.

***

In the spring of years ago I arrived - it was bitterly cold but bright. I was one of a great movement from countryside to city. The girls used to giggle, "maybe a rich city boy will fall in love with us." Our fertile, human hearts couldn't help receiving the seeds of spring.

But in the great seas and seas of human lives I soon realised I was just another dot. And in the crowded dormitories shared with ten other girls, snoring loudly after days of backbreaking work, I stared at the dark patches where paint had peeled and rust had come through on the bed posts.

I thought of my days in the countryside - escaping from school to steal oranges and dropping out at 16 with dreams of the city. My grandparents who lived with their illnesses because it was a choice between medical fees and eating. And I thought of the sister after me given away because she was a girl and there were already too many girls in the world.

And I knew I had nothing to offer.

But this machine of concrete limbs and fleshy heart pumped on, its metal mouth gaping open and hungry.

***

He was from a wealthy family, but he never talked about it as if he never cared. His mind was on other things and he threw away his birthright like handfuls of gold dust. I clutched my low cut designer dress - always successful - and the white gold necklace a gift from another man. All of it suddenly felt cheap. Like I had taken my
mother's heirloom to a pawnshop and got back two dirty notes.

"What happened to you?" he asked.

In all our previous 24 hours together he had asked questions, one after the other. Breathlessly curious it was all new to him, as if his imagination could devour all the night stars blazing. He thought he could uncover the truth about this convulsing human mass with just his open, searching heart. But it was he who brought humanity within him to our gaudily lit farce.

I tried to think of a plausible story. But what came out was the most impossible yarn, yearning to tell the truth.

"My family and I were moving to a better place, and we packed everything we owned on a boat," I fabricated, talking through layers and layers of years wasted and steps taken from that first spring.

"On the sea the boat sank, taking everything and all their lives. Except me. I survived on a tiny boat, just me between endless sky and endless sea."

The metropolis was waiting for me, always waking, arms and legs open. Every weekend a one night stand that I called paradise.

"When you have lost everything important, and still survived," I heard myself say through the giddyness of the height and the alcohol and the glittering madness, "you realise you never needed it in the first place."

He listened. He had no answers.

So eager was he to pose questions he never listened to the replies. That was the ephemeral nature of his being, his questions, and his passing through.

But he paused then.

And the heart of the machine missed a beat.

My muse

2009-01-21T03:14:00.000-08:00

I found my muse.. a fact I can't talk about in real life so it's spilling onto my virtual world. A guy so deliciously unsuitable, and yet so poetic. A person I met in the depths of the Chinese winter, and who melted my heart. But by spring who knows if I'll need him anymore as the whole world thaws. That's the tragedy of muses.

He's a migrant worker, the lowest of all classes in this class concious society. But his spirit is unbroken, unlike these pampered, white collar kids who have grown up as emperors in their families. He has a wild streak, and yet no opportunities. He's smart but vulnerable and he remembers every single thing I said. I find the differences between us endlessly fascinating. I want to go with him to his native Henan province, see what it's like to grow up close to nature and the community.

We met at Christmas time, and when I came back to my real life to go to the parties, sip the drinks, and pretend to laugh with the people in my world all I could thinkk about was, "life has got to be more than this." I was just bored, bored, bored without the struggle and the injustice that opened a window into what really mattered, and who I could be.

But I don't have the courage to go forward with this. I'm a coward and a hypocrite and a liar. There's a reason why middle class Chinese people treat these workers like they're not human. There's too many people and too few resources in this country. Wasted lives and wasted potential is just par the course.

There's a danger to treating everyone like a human being. You can be polite and generous to the lowly waitress, or the scruffy builder but it's only at the very basic end of treating someone like a human being. At the other end is falling in love.

I don't want to fall for someone that can't even afford a coffee. Sounds bad but how can it possibly work? And it's worse because I know I'm capable of falling this way, ever since I decided to follow my heart.

It couldn't possibly end well.. and yet I am a moth to a flame.

The road less travelled

2009-01-14T03:14:00.000-08:00

Everyone remembers these two lines from the Robert Frost poem, "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - took the one less traveled by."

But I looked at the poem recently and the more important part is the verse above:

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

When I was at my soul destroying finance job many people advised me to stay there for three years, get a professional qualification and then pursue my dreams. Others justified their lives there by dreaming about some vague time after retirement.

In my mind this is about as logical as planning to marry a rich man, wait til he dies and leaves you all his money before marrying the poor painter you're in love with.

But this simple minded solution was an incredibly difficult and frustrating thing to argue against, because it papers over a point that no one wants to hear. The point made in that verse - that choices lead to other choices and you will never come back to that fork in the road again. It's impossible to keep the other road for another day.

It's impossible to have it both ways. And nowadays, that's a very controversial thing to say.

I recently met an aspiring, female writer in her late twenties. She was looking for a husband, and with it all the trappings of surburban respectability - 2.4 children, house and white picket fence. She concluded that the only way to have it all is to find a highly paid businessman who would support her while she writes. In her words "there can be only one artist in the family."

I wanted to shake this woman so hard - she's symptomatic of all that's wrong in the world.

What kind of writing would she produce with this kind of set up, this kind of mentality? Maybe she'd write great chick lit about women finding rich husbands. A conventional life produces conventional work. She didn't seem to understand that her means have defeated the ends because writing is a mirror for the soul.

Being an idealist, an artist, means really living on the edge of life, reporting back from the extremes of human experience. The edge of the abyss.

For me it's not about being a writer, it's about being that type of person. Writing is only the wrapping for a present. Too often I read bloggers who want to be writers with long, winding entries that have nothing to say, no point to make. Like a gorgeous present that's empty when opened.

I blame in part the relentless consumerism of modern life that tells us we should have it all because we're worth it, and we can have it all if only we try hard enough. But in that case what's the meaning of decisions? How do you find out who you are? Or what is worthwhile vs what's not?

The road less travelled leads to inbalance, and I'm struggling to accept my choice. To be unafraid of extreme experiences, and to not require the conventional.

New Year, Old Problems

2009-01-03T00:24:00.000-08:00

... and here's is my problem in a nutshell:

"they danced down the street together like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, beause the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop"
- On the Road

On a brighter note, one of my new year resolutions for 2009 is to enter a ktv competition! (which I'm actually quite good at) followed by visions of me making a side-living crooning at jazz bars...

Shallow rivers

2008-12-27T06:51:00.000-08:00

I've always thought men are like shallow rivers, easy come easy go, no long lasting emotions. They always mean it at the time, but when it ends - it ends and they move on. Like daily newspapers, they move with the times.

I thought it was a peculiar and cruel curse of being female to feel deeper and for longer. Unable to forget, we linger on even the thinnest hope of love.

But recently I find myself changing. Maybe it's a sign of growing up, or learning to make decisions. But gone are the days when I loved the same person for four years, even continuing when he dissappeared for a year, even when he had no more interest and it was me alone in my fantasy of a relationship for the last year. Gone are even the days when I ruminate over a mistake for two years and a relationship that could have been.

As I mature I have less and less time. Feelings are no longer all encompassing, they are now compartmentalised into a certain time a certain place. The infinite has become finite.

A year ago I dated a colleague for a while. The time was spent struggling to decide whether to take it further. On one side of the scales were all the criteria - right age, single, nationality, socio-economic background and staying in Shanghai. But one the other side were some unpalatable values, showiness, messy way of handling problems and style over substance. I decided to end things, but continued to linger and obsess over that decision for a good 7 months.

Meanwhile I decided to alleviate boredom with a younger guy, a freshman at college no less. He was fun, but had a girlfriend which was surprisingly hurtful. At the time I did really like him, to the point of needing to have some contact every day. I thought the chemistry was crazy.

But with the nagging discomfort of the girlfriend situation I gradually cooled off, and when he went back to the US it was a clean end for me. Six months later I've had only faint desires to contact him, which I never acted on, and now I honestly can't remember what I saw in him. The age gap was so great, we really had nothing to talk about. And having a girlfriend but cheating like that really made him a despicable guy in my eyes.

Next was a guy, an exchange colleage I'd already known for a few months by then. We hung out a lot, and the more I got to know his personality the more I admired him. But it was 5 months into his 6 month placement that we had a deep talk where we found more and more in common. We read the same books, like the same obscure topics like philosophy and religion. Each time further that we meet it was closer to something. On his leaving party on the last day, something happened. But of course he was leaving and never coming back. I contacted him once just with a polite message to say goodbye.

I spent the next week moping. Even the next two weeks going over the depth of feeling and connection we shared. Surely, I thought, by all rights, this is the real thing.

But, three weeks later I have a new crush, and a totally different kind of chemistry. And I'm convinced this is the ultimate type of person for me, though again, sigh, this particular example is not. Right person, wrong situation again. Now I look back on the last one and think, it wasn't really right.

I've gone from four years, to two, to one year; then 3 months, now 3 weeks.

I'm making progress. I'm getting adept. I'm practicing the skill that keeps you sane and makes it possible to risk it all - the skill to survive the cycle of falling in and then falling out of love.

Another factor here is decision making. Life lessons are all about that. There's a great line in Chinese: 不走回头路 literally 'never backtrack on a past path'

It means making decisions clean. Make it carefully at the time, but never look back.

What is wealth?

2008-12-17T07:22:00.000-08:00

This is a weird one, bear with me...

Being wealthy is when you would still want to do what you are doing now if you won the lottery tomorrow

Because it means the things you have now is worth about the same as that $10 million, or maybe even more. It means you already have that wealth.

On the subject of worth and wealth...

It always surprises me how people make these decisions, how much is something worth, and how much they would exchange for it.

Like my father who always said to me 'Not many people are geniuses, you're unlikely to be one of them, you're unlikely to be special'. He was really trying to convince himself. I think he really could have been a genius, could have been special. He was already starting to gain national levels of recognition and fame when he married my mother - chaining himself to a deeply flawed and problematic burden. That bad decision cost him his life purpose.

But in order to justify it to himself, or just to avoid admitting it to himself, he gave up the whole idea of being special, or even the existence of greatness. So that he didn't have to admit he was wrong and make changes.

It always surprises me that people can give up things of the greatest worth for things that are worth really nothing at all. By some magic, some slight of hand, some trick lighting, somewhere along life's path one can appear as the other.

Or maybe that value judgement is really the hardest test.

Birthday Letters II

2008-11-12T05:38:00.000-08:00

Great expectations of those we rescue and those who rescue us. The old house where we wait, and the time the exact seconds, minutes, hours standing still. The wedding cake still as it was. The windows shut, the blinds blind to the filth, the cobwebs and the darkness. I was. Still the one the most right one for you. The one who wanted to make you envy, hate and break you. The moon that tries to eclipse the sun. The warmth that shatters the blinds. The youth that whispered to me of things as they could be not as they were. The seed that sprang green a thousand winters of the heart.

I was. Still the one you've always wanted, was a ship that somehow always passed each other by. We looked. One the day, and one the night. Summer dreaming of winter, and winter longing for summer.

I longed for you, secretely in an igloo underground cave of shelter from the howling blizzard. Slashing all the deadwood of my surface, was the violence of longing. But my prayer is that of the primitive tribe to the sun, as the human yearns for religion, as the earth-bound grass envies the clouds.

And I still write you birthday letters about which you never know. Which I sign, with atonement, with love.

Birthday letters I

2008-11-10T05:35:00.000-08:00

By the firelight, in an hourglass, we are travellers old and weary before our time. You say you're a story teller, you see the stars. You tell stories by life's roadside inn where always a time apart from its journey relentlessly going, forward, diverging. Though the past is spent, you leave your broken family behind. You see the mongolian planes, the steppes for galloping horses and lonely wolves cries. In your words lie sleeping potential furled, and unfulfilled I knew you as the greatness that contained the sea.

With you my emptiness was just a dream. Though I have been saying a long goodbye ever since, the day I came to find you in that room in that dorm with the white sash curtains flowing in the breeze. Every night a different dream where someone else was in your place. Your face a receding memory of a friend on an old ocean liner, waving goodbye from the other side of the world.

A wanderer always has his own path relentlessly going, forward, diverging. But under the moonlight, bone white, our paths cross once. Your lamp a spotlight in the night.

I prefer

2008-10-25T21:25:00.000-07:00

I prefer idealists to pragmatists

I prefer backpacking to business trips

I prefer extroversion in others, and introspection in myself

I prefer lightening that interrupts the humid summer

I prefer to shed my skin like a snake

I prefer to cry in movies

I prefer jazz and black coffee on sunday mornings

I prefer people whose cups are overflowing

I prefer a leap of faith

A (stormy) day in the life of a journalist

2008-08-25T01:50:00.000-07:00

The worst thunderstorms of this year hit today, waking me at 7am with bellowing thunder and flashes of light. The rain reached epic proportions, pounding my window panes and flooding Shanghai's unsuspecting streets.

As I drifted in and out of sleep, I fervently hoped that no freak storm could last 3 hours, as I had scheduled today that most nerve wraking thing: an interview, in Chinese, with one of those arty types that rarely make sense.

By 11am I was walking through the ongoing rain, ankle deep in flood waters that smelled suspiciously of sewege (and ruining my favourite yellow heels) to meet the Famous Chinese Orchestra Conductor. Having left my dictating machine in the office last week, and failing miserably to get a taxi this morning, I arrived soaked to the rehearsal hall of the Shanghai Opera House.

There I found the conductor in full flow, conducting a hundred musicians and singers, and nowhere near finished. An hour later the rehearsal ended (and I had dried). As I rushed up to catch his attention the conductor told me the hour long interview I had prepared had to be squeezed in to 15 minutes before he left for another meeting.

Such is the glamorous life of a journalist.

Before I became one I imagined it was like mingling with the stars, picking the brains of the sucessful, being invited to media parties, and attending press conferences to a backdrop of cameras flashing.

The strange truth is all the above is true, but there's a cloud to every silver lining.

It was at a media party that I realised journalists occupied the bottom rung of the glamour ladder. Maybe it was when russian models with no brain cells flounced passed us with a breezy, "we don't need tickets, we're models". Or when I saw drunk, rich people ignoring us and behaving badly, making passes at each other's wives and propositioning above mentioned models with promises of private helicopters.

I realised we are perennially the fly on the wall, the observer of those who have done things with their lives, those who have made it. Like being a narrator in a play, you never figure in the plot.
But then as this morning's whirlwind interview ended (I had managed to squeeze another 4 minutes out of him), I was reminded of why I love this job regardless.

Despite his success my interviewee was nice and interesting and had things to say. He loved music, he was passionate and he was living his dreams. He told me about struggling to earn a living at music school, sleeping in metro stations in the winter and working at restaurants. He told me about success, and how, if you prepare for it, luck and fate will surely come.

As I had lunch in a nearby dim sum place, with the rain still going strong, and jotting down interview notes, I thought I was really damn lucky. I come and go as I please, and I write what I want to write. Well, not exactly if you count censorship, but I mean, I'm free to make sense of the chaos of life in words. And I'm free to give my take on it's meaning.

That's what makes it so great, not the glamour, but the nature of what you do day to day. That's what makes worthwile the exhausting days out running around town in torrential rains or blistering heat.

Back at the office it's another day of not knowing what to expect, and who I'm going to meet.

what I did today

2008-08-20T02:33:00.001-07:00

My posts are so damned instrospective and self absorbed. It reflects a life of too much thinking and not much doing. I look at other bloggers and they just talk about what they did and what they ate. Why can't I be normal like that.

Ok so this post is about what I did today. I got up too late and couldn't be bothered to go to the gym. Then I went to work and tried to write an article about travelling on a budget in Asia. Also had a mild panic attack like I do every week since I had the idea, about my over ambitious article about culture gap between East and West. I wanted a salad for lunch but there was a monsoon outside so I went to the disgusting canteen instead, it wasn't so bad though the whole place smells of cabbage.

Last night I watched the American version of the korean film My Sassy Girl, and for some reason it really depressed me cos it was so bad and the original was so good. Today my room mate has some function to go to so I'll be at home alone, probably watching another movie. And doing my laundry.

And I decided to blog the last hour of work cos it was taking up too much of my evenings.

And I'll go to bed again and wake up again and have this unreasonable sense of futility. Cos really, there's nothing bad about this. What's about this? Nothing. Sometimes it's just the circular nature of life, the waking up and going to bed. Every night I swear, I've done this a million times already, and it seems never to take me any closer to happiness.

Things change, but then again they don't. Or maybe I just can't see it.

Aaaargh, I'm thinking too much again.

Notes from the abyss

2008-08-19T06:23:00.000-07:00

Why do I associate existentialism with the abyss? Here's something of an explanation. It was a philosophy developed at the turn of the century, in reaction to the breakdown of religion as the thing that gave human life meaning. Having no meaning is like staring off the edge of a cliff, into a neverending darkness. The chaos of freedom breeds madness. Why did people always need the external authority of god and religion? Because it allows us not to look at the madness, and live like it doesn't exist. But existentialism is based on that abyss, on facing up to its entirety. The victory lies in overcoming the hopelessness of our lonely race, and to create something from the absurd. Instead of finding meaning in a meaningless universe, we create it when nature never meant it to exist.

And on this issue of 'becoming' - particuarly appeals to me. It's not simply making yourself who you want to be, but it says, there's no one way you are supposed to be. No one way you'll always be. It frees me from destiny.

Quotes and more from the abyss

2008-08-16T01:16:00.000-07:00

Well I started this blog partly to indulge my obsessions with certain dusty, dead, dark and nihilistic, turn of the century philosophers. Actually I never had the guts to do the useless philosophy degree that I desperately wanted (instead I did engineering), so really, maybe, I actually know fuck all about existentialism. But I have read about it, went to some evening courses, and the guy I was obsessed with at 18 for the next 4 years was one. So that's the sum total of my great knowledge on this subject.

But I figure actually, the less the better. What I know I strongly identify with, and what I don't know I'll recreate to be my own brand of philosophy, which, after all, is the point of life.

So I have, over the years, come across a few quotes that hit me in the guts and took my breath away. Perfect prose and love are the only two things that can do that to me. So I'll be sharing some of this with you, but treating you to it little by little, in a controlled release.

This is the one for today:

"There cannot be a God because if there were one, I could not believe that I was not He." Neitzche

An honest alcoholic

2008-08-03T05:21:00.000-07:00

Days when I wake up at 5am are usually grappling-with-depression days. But I don’t just grapple with it, I think about what it means. I figured it’s being at some sort of crossroads – go forward or go back? Make something of your life? Or destroy it? Suicide takes a certain resolve, and planning. Going to live in a cave and grow your own food so you don’t have to interact with the world takes determination. Actually living life takes even more work, a life time of positive thinking and problem solving.

This is where I clench my fists and rail against the sky: why is nothing easy??!

Then it occurred to me the easiest option is to be somewhere in between living and giving up – i.e. wallowing in misery. Never quite making the decision to sever ties, but not having to make the effort to make things better. Yes, misery is the escape of hypocritical choice. It’s great to know that I’ve chosen this scenic route for great chunks of my life, when I could have been just an honest alcoholic.

Why I hate saturdays

2008-08-02T05:22:00.000-07:00

Every situation in life can be summed up with a line from the Smiths. Every Saturday can be summed by this: “so you go to a club, and you stand alone, and you go home, and you cry and you want to die”. It’s not just the rake thin girls dressed like sex dolls in clubs like Muse, or the men with only one thing on their minds. It’s the nature of hope. The definition of madness is doing the same things hoping for different results. If so, hope = madness. Saturdays when I try, and fail, to meet new people on a meaningful level repeated ad nauseum makes empty spaces in my head for bad things to happen. Things that make me wake up at 5am the next day. Like how I’ll never find someone who knows me, who gets me, who chooses just me. Like how men and women are no more than what you see on the outside – dolls and predators.

The mental health profession

2008-07-31T05:24:00.000-07:00

I know the mental health profession far to well. I’ve been taken in by the system and spat out the other end. I’ve had more therapists than boyfriends. I’ve taken pills and weaned myself off pills. I’m glad to say I’ve never been hospitalised though I know people who have, and I know members of my family who should have been hospitalised but never were. And I know most of them are crazy themselves. Not just crazy, they’re dangerous. And I know because my mother is one, and she’s the reason why I needed therapy in the first place. Next time I have to find a therapist I think the tables should be turned. I’m going to ask them questions, uncomfortable ones. Questions like: why were you attracted to the profession? Have you ever had major depression? What were your parents like? Are you married? Are you happy with your life? Do you have a personality disorder???

The alcoholic and the journalist

2008-07-30T07:20:00.000-07:00

You get to learn a lot about alcoholism as a journalist, because so many journalist tend to be alcoholics. I, a journalist, often have lunch with a friend, an alcoholic, and also a journalist, and we talk about the disproportionate relationship between the two. He says it’s a practical hazard of the job – getting your sources drunk and talking. But I think it’s something deeper. Something to do with the fast lifestyles and shallow, wandering attentions of the journalist. Something to do with its former glory as a profession. Like the alcoholic who coasts on that special, alcoholic charm – what’s underneath is the incompetence, the years wasted, the unwashed, uncared for mess of a person.