May 27, 2010

Arrows with no target

7

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.

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May 13, 2010

29 6/12: The Arrival

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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

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January 13, 2010

29 2/12: The Lachrymologist

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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

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May 7, 2009

Protected: Letting Go

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May 3, 2009

Five Year Timestamp, Revisited

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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.

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March 17, 2009

Wong Tai Sin Temple

10

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. [↑]
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November 27, 2008

Seasonal Cycle

3

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. [↑]
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June 18, 2008

Tai Chi/Taoism Paradoxes

2

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.

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June 2, 2008

A Reason For All

4

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.

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May 27, 2008

Tattwo

15

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. [↑]
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May 15, 2008

Hold Fast

2

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.

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March 26, 2008

Psychoanalytic Reflections 03

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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. [↑]
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February 14, 2008

Psychoanalytic Reflections 01

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It’s a full seven days between ses­sions, and at this point, my pschol­o­gist is just start­ing to know me. In between, I can never stop reflect­ing. I’ve always believed that I know myself well, but these ses­sions are prob­ing ideas and mem­o­ries I haven’t thought of in a while, and open­ing up com­pletely new areas of reflection.

And while I could write for days about these thoughts and epipha­nies, I sim­ply don’t have the time, so I fig­ured I’d briefly touch on them in point form.

  • I need to respect my psy­chol­o­gist in order to accept help from him. i.e. If he was a Freudian and I was a Jungian, I wouldn’t be able to agree with any of his methods.
  • I get very anx­ious when I’m in his office. This is because I don’t like to admit to myself that something’s wrong with me, but when I’m in there, it’s a very tan­gi­ble reminder that I have men­tal problems.
  • I’m very con­flicted on sev­eral issues.
    • I don’t want to lose my emo­tions because I need to suf­fer to cre­ate. Yet the emo­tions are bad enough that I don’t want to have them any­more (or have them in mod­er­a­tion at least).
    • I want to love and be in a rela­tion­ship, and at the same time I cling to being sin­gle because I’m scared of being hurt (in addi­tion to the fact that the free­dom is intox­i­cat­ing). I do this by push­ing oth­ers away from me or cut­ting them off.
      • This stems from two sig­nif­i­cant child­hood mem­o­ries, where I felt betrayed in friend­ship, as well as my rela­tion­ship with my parents.
    • I want to be set­tled and have some sta­bil­ity (in terms of sched­ule, rela­tion­ships, finances etc.), but the strug­gle to be set­tled is what makes me grow and be stronger.
    • Many of these issues can only be resolved from deci­sions I should make. (i.e. No one else can make the deci­sion for me)
    • Turning to Taoism, which is very para­dox­i­cal in itself, has only helped so much.
  • Without my cre­ativ­ity, or my desire to express myself, I’m nothing.
  • I don’t want to “blame” my par­ents for con­fi­dence prob­lems or per­fec­tion­ist ten­den­cies, but I’m slowly start­ing to find out that they’ve affected me even more than I thought before.
  • As a hedo­nist, my great­est fear is los­ing my joie de vivre. If this hap­pened (and it has once), I would con­sider killing myself. This is because the joys of life bal­ance out all the bad and makes it worth living.
  • I’m depen­dent on other peo­ple for hap­pi­ness. I don’t see my friends often enough for me to be sat­is­fied, and it’s a sim­ple fact of life. They all have sig­nif­i­cant oth­ers, and I’m the only one left sin­gle. I don’t blame them for not spend­ing enough time with me, but it makes me very sad.
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November 25, 2007

Becoming Pat

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At the core of our beings, Pat and I are the same person.

What sep­a­rates us is our emo­tion, or lack thereof. Pat’s the log­i­cal one, I’m the emo­tional one. I’ve always looked up to him — his strength, his morals, his per­son­al­ity — with­out really under­stand­ing why.

It’s only in the last year that I’ve come to real­ize Pat is a Taoist. This comes with the real­iza­tion that I’m a Taoist myself, and explains why I try to be more like him.

The inter­est­ing part is that he doesn’t even know that he’s a Taoist — sort of like Winnie the Pooh — which is exactly what makes him a true Taoist.

One of Chuang Tzŭ’s para­bles illus­trates this point. In an abbre­vi­ated ver­sion, Knowledge seeks a con­scious reflec­tion to know the Tao, and asked Silent Do Nothing and Reckless Blurter, before ask­ing The Yellow Emperor (ahhh, the Romantic per­son­i­fi­ca­tion of Chinese fables):

Knowledge said to The Yellow Emperor, “I asked Silent Do Nothing and he kept quiet. Not only didn’t he answer me, but he didn’t even know how to answer. I asked Reckless Blurter, and though he wanted to tell me, he didn’t, and even for­got my ques­tions. Now I’ve asked you, and you know all about it. Why do you say that you’re far from it?”.

The Yellow Emperor said, “Silent Do Nothing was truly right, because he didn’t know any­thing. Reckless Blurter was nearly right, because he’d for­got­ten it. You and I are far from right, because we know far too much”.

The same is true for Tai Chi1, or any mar­tial art for that mat­ter. Dissect it too much, and you lose the mean­ing. Think about it too much, and you don’t react. As Michael Babin wrote in his arti­cle on self-defense train­ing:

It is sad but true that real skill comes from seem­ingly end­less drilling of the basics and then learn­ing how to transcend/forget most of what you have so patiently learned.

In other words, learn­ing struc­ture is essen­tial to learn­ing to react to a com­plete lack of struc­ture (i.e. a real fight); but if you focus on struc­ture for too long it becomes counter-productive to “being with­out struc­ture” in mar­tial terms. One of the many annoy­ing para­doxes in the inter­nal arts.

One of the many para­doxes in the Taoist phi­los­o­phy as well. As much as I try to study it, learn it, and apply it, I find myself think­ing about it too much. As a result, I occa­sion­ally stray from being cen­tered, and lose my balance.

It’s the con­scious reflec­tion which Knowledge is seek­ing that pre­emp­tively dooms his search. This is my prob­lem as well. I buy Taoist books with a thirst for knowl­edge, but they’re all telling me the same thing now. Not that the books haven’t helped at all, but I feel like I’ve reached a limit. Perhaps even the sim­ple act of writ­ing about this is counter-productive.

I have the under­stand­ing, but I can’t apply it with­out think­ing about it first, and it’s the attempt to apply it that ruins the point. I’ve yet to reach a stage of pure reac­tion and spon­tane­ity, like Pat.

But I’m get­ting there.

  1. Yet another exam­ple of how Tai Chi is the phys­i­cal expres­sion of the phi­los­o­phy. Or per­haps this could be reverse-generalized, and said that the Taoist phi­los­o­phy is reflected in every­thing, such as mar­tial arts. [↑]
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November 9, 2007

Privy To All The New Shit

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I’ve been in the strangest mood lately. Killing my Top Rated playlist every­where I go, yet I skip through 90% of the songs, try­ing to find the right one. Talking to myself. Replaying con­ver­sa­tions in my head.

I don’t quite feel at one with the Tao. I’ve been let­ting small things get to me. It’s as if I’m falling back into my old destruc­tive habits, but upon real­iz­ing this, I fight against it. The strug­gle, when observed objec­tively, is quite amusing.

These are excit­ing times. Along with the excite­ment comes ner­vous­ness. It’s turned me into a jum­ble of emo­tions, bit­ter­sweet, and unlike any­thing I’ve ever expe­ri­enced before.

Wish I could do some­thing with this feeling.

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