The Little Man Must Go On

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Live accord­ing to the sea­sons
In the town where I was born
Things have gotta have a rea­son
The sun don’t come before the dawn

(Thanks again, Antje.)

How did I lose another week? Another week of that snow smell and gui­tar lessons and Nordique red­heads I never asked out again. Lost to the trap­pings of life. So much has hap­pened, and yet noth­ing has changed, though things will be dif­fer­ent soon enough. And while I wish I could say that I had more to say about it all, I don’t.

teas in spoons

 

tea-table

 

tea served

Sublimity in a teacup.

Over some ancient moon­light white tea, Heather asked how my belief in Taoism was going. It made me real­ize I hadn’t thought about it in a while, which is exactly the point. I’ve been try­ing not to try to act, and just been act­ing. Doing my best not to over-think things. Taking it one call, one con­ver­sa­tion, one day, one week at a time.

Protected: round my hometown memories are fresh

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The Process (or why a tree is not a tree)

Take a leaf off a tree. Is it still a tree? Take a sin­gle twig off a tree. Is it still a tree? Remove an entire branch from a tree. Is it still a tree? Take off half of the branches. Is it still a tree? Cut down the whole tree, leav­ing only the stump. Is it still a tree? Many peo­ple would say no, it is no longer a tree, though the roots may still be in the ground. Well, where did the tree go? Removing a leaf, it remains a tree, but not by remov­ing all of the branches and the trunk?

In the real world, there aren’t any things as we com­monly think of them. A ‘thing’ as we refer to it is only a noun. A noun is merely an idea, a men­tal con­struct. These ‘things’ exist only in our minds. There is no tree, there is only the idea of a tree.

—Anonymous

I’ve been writ­ing here for almost a decade, pour­ing 10 years of my life into this blog. I recently con­sid­ered clean­ing up the con­tent by delet­ing a sig­nif­i­cant chunk of my old entries; I’m not the same per­son as when I wrote them, and I don’t even like who I was back then. Not to men­tion the fact that some are rather embar­rass­ing, like read­ing your old diary in high school when the biggest prob­lem was what peo­ple thought when you wore your uni­form cause you for­got it was a Civvies Day.

The prob­lem I was faced with was decid­ing what should be deleted. People aren’t sta­tic; they’re processes, events, evo­lu­tions, made up of cells that con­tin­u­ally renew them­selves on a daily basis. At what defin­able point can I say these entries are no longer me? It could be argued that even posts as recent as a few months ago aren’t an accu­rate rep­re­sen­ta­tion, though there may still rem­nants of the old me in the habits of my thoughts.

Then I came across this pas­sage in The Tao by Mark Forstater, on the sub­ject of how using human lan­guage to encom­pass and describe a con­cept such as the Tao is log­i­cally sus­pect: “Reality can’t be enclosed and described by words. Symbols aren’t real in the way that a tree is real, and how­ever much we may delude our­selves that they are, we’ll even­tu­ally find that the word ‘water’ won’t quench our thirst.”

I came to accept that the things I write here have never been and never will be a com­plete reflec­tion of who I am, so I’ve decided to keep all the entries. The ones writ­ten by my old self serve as a reminder of who I was, and at the very least, they tell me where I’ve been and how far I’ve come.

Arrows with no target

I don’t view my projects the same way any­more. I used to work towards a goal, an idea of what I wanted to achieve. But more recently I stopped car­ing about the end result, prob­a­bly due to this new per­spec­tive on…every­thing.

It’s a strange jux­ta­po­si­tion of know­ing that what you’re doing is ulti­mately insignif­i­cant, and find­ing enjoy­ment in doing it any­way. Like a child stack­ing a pile of blocks, only to knock them down.

The wikipedia arti­cle on wu wei explains feel­ing this bet­ter than I can:

The goal for wu wei is to get out of your own way, so to speak. This is like when you are play­ing an instru­ment and if you start think­ing about play­ing the instru­ment, then you will get in your own way and inter­fere with your own play­ing. It is aim­less action, because if there was a goal that you need to aim at and hit, then you will develop anx­i­ety about this goal.

Zhuangzi made a point of this, where he writes about an archer who at first didn’t have any­thing to aim at. When there was noth­ing to aim at, the archer was happy and con­tent with his being. He was prac­tic­ing wu wei. But, then he set up a tar­get and “got in his own way.” He was going against the Tao and the nat­ural course of things by hav­ing to hit that goal.

(This also reminds me of a verse from Leonard Cohen’s True Love Leaves No Traces: “Through win­dows in the dark/The chil­dren come, the chil­dren go/Like arrows with no tar­gets/Like shack­les made of snow.)

Nowadays, I do what I feel like doing and don’t stress out about not fin­ish­ing a project, cause I know I’ll feel like work­ing on it another day. It leaves me more loose ends, but I don’t mind. Luckily, I love cre­at­ing things. Trying dif­fer­ent medi­ums. New ways of express­ing myself.

29 6/12: The Arrival

I haven’t had much to say lately. Suffering has always been a pre­req­ui­site for my cre­ativ­ity, as I only need to write when unful­filled or unhappy, and lately I haven’t felt either.

The real­iza­tion that I was happy only came when some­one asked how I was doing; I responded with my usual, generic, “I’m doing well, thanks”, and for the first time in as long as I could remem­ber, I didn’t feel like I was lying.

Self portrait at 29 6/12

 

Not that the desire to write has left me com­pletely. I still want to, though only because it’s an enjoy­able exer­cise in itself, not because I need to get some­thing off my chest. The world finally makes sense, and I won­der if it’s nec­es­sary to have this blog a place to sort out my thoughts anymore.

I’m sat­is­fied with the per­son I’ve become. I’ve stopped try­ing to change, or con­stantly fig­ur­ing out how to improve. I like me.

The seren­ity is get­ting bet­ter still, almost to the point where it’s an uncon­scious state-of-mind. Things don’t bother me the way they used to. I can dream with­out desire, I can live with­out bias, I can give with­out expect­ing, I can think with­out worry, and I can enjoy with­out guilt.

I turn 30 in half a year, and I finally feel like I’m where I should be.

The Turning 30 Series

29 2/12: The Lachrymologist

I used to be a crier. Any strong emo­tion, good or bad (though more often the lat­ter), could bring on tears like a reflex. Now, I can’t remem­ber the last time I cried, which means it’s been a while. More than a year, I suspect.

Getting misty-eyed doesn’t count; that’s too easy. A poignant scene in a movie, the right song at the right moment, even see­ing some­one demon­strate a Tai Chi move­ment with mas­terly detail and pre­ci­sion can cause my heart to swell, but the feel­ing only lasts as long as a few blinks after the blurred vision. When I refer to cry­ing, I mean when the tears are enough to over­flow and leak.

Self portrait at 29 2/12

 

When I was young, the kids in school would laugh at boys who cried — much less socially accept­able in this cul­ture — but I was never embar­rassed about it. I thought it was nat­ural, the way some peo­ple are gay or Caucasian. I thought I’d grow out of it, the way one grows out of a fear of the dark grad­u­ally and sub­con­sciously, but I kept cry­ing well into my 20s.

I’ve always won­dered if my dad has ever cried, even as a child. I can’t pic­ture him doing it, not even when my grand­mother dies. He’s so care­free and log­i­cal that I can’t see any­thing affect­ing him emo­tion­ally. With my dad as my early model for a man, I’m sure this is part of the rea­son I don’t feel like an adult yet. Society teaches us that adults, or male one’s at least, aren’t sup­posed to cry.

I’m not sure why it’s been so long for me. Maybe the ther­apy, com­bined with my study of Taoism, has evened out my ups and downs, help­ing me acknowl­edge my weak­nesses (so I’m not as hard on myself), as well as the uncon­trol­lable nature of life. Maybe my life is sta­ble enough now that I didn’t need that kind of release.

I turn 30 in 10 months, and I won­der when I’ll cry again.

The Turning 30 Series

Protected: Letting Go

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Five Year Timestamp, Revisited

On the last entry, my Uncle Joe posted this comment:

You’ve changed a lot. More mature, more sta­ble, more tol­er­ant. 5 years back, you paid more atten­tion to your appear­ance, now you care more about what you do, what you observe. Now you’re a bit sloppy :)…and I like that. Your spend­ing habit is so much different.

I don’t know what caused all that…work expe­ri­ence? Parents’ divorce? Love life? Tai Chi and Taoism?

The causes of my changes were too big to cover in the small box, so I said I’d cover them in their own entry. Here goes.

Therapy

One of the sig­nif­i­cant things my ther­a­pist helped me with was the abil­ity to not sweat the small stuff. It took a few thought records for me to real­ize that there are things out of my con­trol. I used to be really moody, where if a small detail didn’t go right, I’d get really grumpy. Now that doesn’t any­more, although I do occa­sion­ally have to remind myself of this idea, as it’s not a com­pletely nat­ural reac­tion (yet). This is prob­a­bly what Uncle Joe noticed as me being “sloppy”, as I’ve stopped wor­ry­ing about things going wrong, so a bit more care­free when it comes to details. Even Bronwen said she’s noticed the change.

I also had inti­macy issues, where I’d push my girl­friends away if they got too close. I’ve since learned to let some­one in, even if it means it may hurt me in the end, and there’s a great com­fort to be had in know­ing this. In fig­ur­ing out what went wrong, and being given the hope that my future rela­tion­ships won’t end due to my old inti­macy issues, which I’m sure was buried in my sub­con­scious before.

Taoism

Taoism has given me the same rough mind­set as ther­apy, in terms of let­ting go of the lit­tle things that don’t go my way. But it wasn’t just due to the fact that things are out of my con­trol, but also the idea that things don’t really mat­ter. I’m still work­ing on other tenets, like spon­tane­ity and wu wei, but what I’ve been able to under­stand and apply so far has helped a lot.

When I’m hav­ing a bad day, I can go to the Tao Te Ching, find a verse that’s appro­pri­ate to my sit­u­a­tion, and for some rea­son my heart finds such con­tent­ment in the words. Perhaps it’s even more than the indi­vid­ual tenets, and the fact that I now have some­thing to believe in that brings com­fort, sta­bil­ity, and hap­pi­ness. A non-religious opi­ate, if you will.

Relationships

Having been through two good rela­tion­ships with two good peo­ple, espe­cially with the mem­o­ries I have now, has given me a lot of sat­is­fac­tion. Sure, they may have ended, but I never thought I’d be in a good rela­tion­ship, prob­a­bly because of my child­hood with my par­ents, along with con­fi­dence issues. I think some peo­ple go their whole lives with­out ever hav­ing the sort of love that I did, or being able to expe­ri­ence the same won­der­fully inti­mate moments. This has given me a con­tent­ment I wouldn’t be able to find any­where else.

Wong Tai Sin Temple

As a Taoist, I felt it was only nat­ural that I visit the most famous Taoist tem­ple in Hong Kong while here.

Maybe I was being naïve, but I was pic­tur­ing some­thing like Washington Square Park, except instead of chess board tables, there would be peo­ple sit­ting around, dis­cussing Chuang Tzu’s para­bles, or sprightly con­ver­sa­tions about the hap­pi­ness of fish. Instead, it was more like a gigan­tic fortune-telling, wish­ing well extrav­a­ganza. People go there to wor­ship Taoist deities by burn­ing incense, pray­ing to them for their wishes to come true, and have their for­tunes told through the prac­tice of kau cim, which is when they shake a con­tainer full of bam­boo sticks until one falls out, and the char­ac­ter on the stick is inter­preted by a sooth­sayer1.

It amazes me how vastly dif­fer­ent the Taoist phi­los­o­phy is from the reli­gion. I couldn’t relate to any of this at all. The Taoists here are try­ing to get a hol­i­day — on Lau Tzu’s birth­day, if I under­stand cor­rectly — because other reli­gions get a day off. This strikes me as some­what strange, since Lao Tzu is still dis­puted to be a myth­i­cal fig­ure, with an unknown date of birth. I also have to won­der if Lao Tzu would approve of such a ritual.

At one point, there was an old lady wor­ship­ing at the entrance of a build­ing, and a woman came out and said, “Ma’am, this is the infor­ma­tion booth. You don’t need to wor­ship us.” My uncle and I couldn’t stop laughing.

(This was a quiet day in the mid­dle of the after­noon. Apparently, on spe­cial days of the Chinese lunar cal­en­dar, it’s packed, and the incense smoke too thick to breathe. Superstition has always been a part of the Chinese culture.)

  1. That’s the part of the video where the peo­ple are kneel­ing, and you can hear the bam­boo shak­ers. It’s a short clip because I wasn’t allowed to film there. []

Seasonal Cycle

It’s been snow­ing for three days now, the first real snow­fall of the sea­son. It’s a won­der­ful feel­ing to look out­side and see it falling1. Winter brings it’s own sort of cozi­ness, like the way sun is for sports and rain is for movies.

A lot of peo­ple don’t like the win­ter, whether it’s because they get tired shov­el­ing, they’re late from clean­ing the car, they don’t like deal­ing with the messi­ness, or they sim­ply hate being cold. To me, it’s all part and par­cel of liv­ing in the Great White North. The sum­mer brings as many unpleas­ant issues — burn­ing car seats, sti­fling heat, unavoid­able sweat. I wouldn’t be able to appre­ci­ate one if it wasn’t for the other.

I tend to get tired of the weather only at the end of each sea­son, because they seem to drag on for so long2. It’s a never-ending cycle of enjoy­ing the new sea­son, then miss­ing the next one.

There’s this great poem by Shioh T’ao I think of when try­ing to explain this:

Spring comes, and I look at the birds;
Summer comes, and I take a bath in the stream;
Autumn comes, and I climb to the top of the moun­tain;
Winter comes, and I make the most of the sun­light for warmth.
This is how I savor the pas­sage of the seasons.

My ver­sion would go some­thing like this:

Spring comes, and I admire the blos­som­ing fem­i­nine beauty;
Summer comes, and I go for a drive;
Autumn comes, and I fall in love with every­thing;
Winter comes, and I cher­ish the warmth.
This is how I savor the pas­sage of the seasons.

This is why I love Canada. I wouldn’t want to live any­where else.

For now, I’m enjoy­ing the snow.

  1. Admittedly, it’s been a mild win­ter so far; maybe I’ll feel dif­fer­ently when I have to scrape ice off my wind­shield at –40°C. []
  2. There’s a say­ing that Canada has only two sea­sons — win­ter and con­struc­tion. []

Tai Chi/Taoism Paradoxes

Another cor­re­la­tion between the phys­i­cal expres­sion of Tai Chi and philo­soph­i­cal ideas of Taoism is the ubiq­ui­tous exis­tence of para­doxes in both. There are con­tra­dic­tory answers to many ques­tions, and at the same time, the answers are very sim­ple (a para­dox in itself).

An exam­ple from Tai Chi is the pos­ture of the p’eng shape. If you’re too stiff, you can be pushed over eas­ily. If you’re too relaxed, you can be col­lapsed eas­ily. People make the mis­take of think­ing that you have to be one or the either — that you’re either resist­ing a force or let­ting it move you — with­out under­stand­ing that there exists a “some­where in between”. It’s dif­fi­cult to explain how some­thing can be struc­tured and relaxed at the same time.

A Taoist exam­ple is the idea of wu wei, or “action with­out action”. Practically speak­ing, it’s the con­cept that you don’t do any­thing that isn’t nec­es­sary, and by remain­ing reac­tionary you let nature (or the inter­ac­tion of Heaven and Earth, as Taoists roman­ti­cally say) run it’s course. In doing so, “noth­ing is done yet noth­ing is left undone”.

Last class, my teacher said “Tai Chi is easy, that’s why so few peo­ple do it well.” His words reminded me of verse 70 of the Tao Te Ching.

My teach­ings are very easy to under­stand
  and very easy to teach
yet so few in this world under­stand
  and so few are able to practice

The answers remain elu­sive and dif­fi­cult to explain because they must be felt, as in Tai Chi, or expe­ri­enced, as in Taoism, a char­ac­ter­is­tic of the para­dox­i­cal nature of both the ancient Chinese mar­tial art and philosophy.

A Reason For All

The crooked become straight
The empty become full
The worn become new
Have lit­tle and gain much
Have much and be con­fused
So the Sage embraces the One and becomes a model for the world

Verse 22, Tao Te Ching

Yesterday, I woke up from a nap at four in the after­noon. Usually, when I wake up from a long nap, I feel groggy and uneasy, but this time I was bright and rested.

When I went out­side, the rain had stopped. It washed the bird poop off my wind­shield, it filled the air with the lin­ger­ing scent of clean­li­ness. In my car, Becky started singing in the stereo.

I had You Broke My Heart by Lavender Diamond play­ing here

And every time she hit me with the words “cav­alry of light” in her waver­ing vibrato, I had to sing at the top of my lungs along with her, my voice crack­ing, my dig­nity left behind me.

I can’t even remem­ber the last time I’ve been so happy.

This morn­ing, I was run­ning late for work. But by the time I got to the car, the sun had been out long enough to warm the breeze. I could roll the win­dows down and let the air in. The traf­fic made me even more late, but it let me take my time too. It gave me the chance to enjoy Lenny croon­ing to me about how true love leaves no traces.

It’s like I’m wait­ing for some­thing to go wrong, because I’m not used to things going this well. But nothing’s going wrong. Things are be work­ing out. Everything has a rea­son, no mat­ter how small or trivial.

Taoist the­ory says that sur­ren­der brings per­fec­tion. Don’t force any­thing. Allow things to hap­pen, and they’ll nat­u­rally bal­ance out. Perhaps I’m finally believ­ing this, instead of sim­ply under­stand­ing it.

When things are going badly, you’re not really behind.

You’re just wait­ing for the good that wouldn’t be pos­si­ble otherwise.

Tattwo

Part of The Tao Tattoo Series

  1. The Meaning
  2. The Experience
  3. The Background
  4. Tattwo

The tao tattoo

Concept

Some peo­ple ask me whether I feel more Chinese or Canadian. While some first-generation Canadians say that they’re nei­ther, I feel like I’m both, because I appre­ci­ate and under­stand things from both cul­tures. I have the best of both worlds.

I already have a the hanzi char­ac­ter for “tao” on my right wrist, so I got the word “tao” on my left in English. This tat­too serves two pur­poses: as an expres­sion of this dual her­itage, and as another reminder for me to fol­low the tao.

The Operation

I went back to Jay at New Moon, who did an awe­some job on my first tat­too. When I walked in, he had the lat­est Mars Volta album on, which I didn’t even know was out until that day. Most of the time was passed com­par­ing them to Tool, two of our favourite bands1.

Can you tell when he’s going over my artery? (Hint: I start to swear)

Typography

tao typography

The three-letter word is writ­ten in Avenir. As the Humanist, sans-serif type­face designed by Adrian Fruitiger (also used for the title and menu of this site), it’s my favourite font. Clean, sharp, min­i­mal­ist, and leg­i­ble. The most dis­tin­guish­ing part, as with most good fonts, is the double-story “a”, which increases legibility.

I had over a dozen vari­a­tions, at dif­fer­ent point sizes, kern­ing val­ues, and weights. I wanted the weight, size, and posi­tion to bal­ance with the one on my right wrist. In the end, I went with one that was 63.78 points, and the 35 “light” weight.

Read the rest of this entry »

  1. Tool was a favourite until Lateralus came out, and I dis­cov­ered Dream Theater. Ænima remains one of my top albums though. []

Hold Fast

I was late for work this morn­ing. The weather was beau­ti­ful on the drive in. There were thick, dark clouds hang­ing omi­nously in the dis­tance and high in the sky, but the sun was out, bathing every­thing in bright­ness. The wind was refresh­ingly cool, so I had to roll the win­dows down.

In another weird phase lately. Hyper again. Currently feel­ing this part from verse 35 of the Tao Te Jing:

Hold fast to the Great Form within and let the world pass as it may
Then the changes of life will not bring pain but con­tent­ment, joy, and well-being

Sometimes, I feel like I’m being tested. It hasn’t really been going badly, but it’s cer­tainly a mix of ups and downs, res­o­lu­tions and frustrations.

I started to notice that I’ve been talk­ing to myself when alone. Sometimes I laugh aloud too. I once read an arti­cle about a young man who did a solo transat­lantic jour­ney by boat that took sev­eral weeks, and he said that talk­ing to your­self is nor­mal; it’s when you start to answer your own ques­tions that you should be wor­ried. I think I’ll be alright.

I’ve come to accept the way things have turned out. I’ve felt this way before, but it never lasted more than a cou­ple months, some­thing that hap­pens when I lose sight of the tao. Hopefully it won’t be so ephemeral this time. I just need to remem­ber that things will con­tinue to work out on their own. To stop try­ing to force things to hap­pen. To breathe.

And to hold fast to the way that can­not be walked.

Psychoanalytic Reflections 03

My ther­a­pist is on vaca­tion now. When he gets back, I’ll start to see him on a bi-monthly instead of weekly basis. At first he sug­gested that we slow down only once I get a han­dle on my anx­i­ety, but when I explained that the ses­sions were putting me in a neg­a­tive cash-flow sce­nario, he under­stood and agreed1.

  • My depres­sion is gone. Most likely, it was a side effect of my anx­i­ety, or gen­er­al­ized anx­i­ety dis­or­der, which is mostly gone now.
    • The root of this is from my habit of pre­dict­ing neg­a­tive out­comes and ask­ing too many “what ifs”, which I’m still learn­ing to control.
  • There’s this idea of learned help­less­ness that I strug­gle with. The big­ger issue is that when I feel help­less, I get depressed as a result, about things out of my con­trol such as the weather.
    • I love how the prac­ti­cal side of psy­chol­ogy falls in line with Taoism. In this case, I think of verse 29 of the Tao Te Ching:

      Allow your life to unfold nat­u­rally
      Know that it too is a ves­sel of per­fec­tion
      Just as you breathe in and out
      Sometimes you’re ahead and other times behind
      Sometimes you’re strong and other times weak
      Sometimes you’re with peo­ple and other times alone
      To the Sage all of life is a move­ment toward perfection

  • One issue I had a hard time under­stand­ing was my belief that attempt­ing some­thing is a waste of time if I don’t suc­ceed. I sup­pose that it seems rather silly now that I think about it (such as avoid­ing get­ting in a rela­tion­ship just for the fact that one may get hurt), but I spent an entire ses­sion on this sub­ject alone. It’s a prob­lem because I give up on cer­tain things before I try, and lose impor­tant oppor­tu­ni­ties as a result.
  • I’m start­ing to become more aware of my auto­matic thought pat­terns. I’d auto­mat­i­cally avoid cer­tain sit­u­a­tions because they would give me anx­i­ety, or pre­dict how other peo­ple would react based on past expe­ri­ences, with­out even real­iz­ing it. This is wrong.
  • I was a lit­tle skep­ti­cal about the use­ful­ness of thought records at first, but now that I’ve fin­ished about a half-dozen, I notice a change in my thought process. Every time I get flus­tered, I think in my head of what I’ll write down later (sim­ply because I don’t have time to write it in the moment) and just doing this helps a great deal.
  • My ther­a­pist is a fan of Chappelle’s Show (which is gen­er­ally con­sid­ered to be a low-class and crude form of humour), because it breaks social bar­ri­ers by mak­ing fun of stereo­types, thereby rob­bing them of their sig­nif­i­cance. This makes him the coolest middle-aged white guy ever, and makes me want to smoke a spliff with him.
    • He also calls weed, “grass”, which is cute.
  1. We’re both baf­fled by the fact that the ses­sions aren’t cov­ered by OHIP, whereas phys­i­cal health prob­lems are. []