Posts tagged with "self-evaluation"

To Grow from Yielding

The most yield­ing thing in the world
  will over­come the most rigid
The most emp­ty thing in the world
  will over­come the most full
From this comes a les­son —
  Stillness ben­e­fits more than action
  Silence ben­e­fits more than words

—Verse 43, Tao Te Ching

Sometimes, tem­per­ance is the great­est weapon.

When some­one attacks you with words or tries to make you feel any less than your­self, you mere­ly need acqui­esce.

In doing so, you dis­arm them. You rob them of their only weapon — anger — and their words lose all mean­ing and sig­nif­i­cance.

Tai Chi, as the phys­i­cal man­i­fes­ta­tion of Taoist philoso­phies, fol­lows the same idea.

Then you will under­stand the flow of inter­nal pow­er, and, hav­ing repeat­ed­ly prac­ticed and refined your tech­nique and explored your own aware­ness, you can use and con­trol your inter­nal pow­er at will.

The T’ai Chi prin­ci­ple is as sim­ple as this: yield your­self and fol­low the exter­nal forces.

—Waysun Liao, The Essence of T’ai Chi

When your oppo­nent expands, con­tract. Create a void in your stance, and let them fill that void. By absorb­ing your oppo­nen­t’s ener­gy, you reduce it to noth­ing.

No one proves them­selves more inane than one who match­es ener­gy with ener­gy, force with force.

I’ve final­ly come to ful­ly under­stand such an idea. The the­o­ry made sense, but I nev­er put it in prac­tice, and prac­tice is what makes the under­stand­ing com­plete. It was only recent­ly that I had the chance to apply it. The old me was hot-head­ed with too much to prove. When faced with insult­ing, patron­iz­ing words, I would have react­ed, instead of fol­low­ing the prin­ci­ple of wu wei. The sit­u­a­tion was a test of myself, and I passed.

From this I’ve learned how much I’ve grown.

Transparent Actions

We were watch­ing Boogie Nights, and in the movie, Scotty’s wast­ed at the New Year’s par­ty. He tries to kiss Dirk, but Dirk throws him off. I asked her if she knew Scotty was gay. Until that point, I thought he nev­er gave off any such sign.

“Of course”, she said.

“How could you tell?”. I had to ask, because I could­n’t tell. I’ve watched Boogie Nights with dozens of peo­ple before, and they’ve all asked if Scotty was gay before it even got to this scene. It must have been the 20th time I’ve seen this movie, but I still did­n’t see what so many oth­ers did. My gay­dar can’t be that bad, I thought to myself.

“Just from the way Scotty looks at Dirk all dreamy”.

Dreamy? So Scotty was­n’t being par­tic­u­lar­ly flam­boy­ant, he was sim­ply attract­ed to Dirk. It was obvi­ous to every­one but me.

Then I recalled Pat telling me a few years ago that a cer­tain girl liked me. He did­n’t have some kind of inside knowl­edge, he said he could tell just from the way she looked at me. I nev­er believed him, of course, because I had no inkling of such an mes­sage. I nev­er believed him until she gave me a writ­ten con­fes­sion.

It made me won­der, am I that obliv­i­ous? More impor­tant­ly, do I ever give myself away, do I ever make myself so vul­ner­a­ble, with such a look?

It took me almost a year to be com­fort­able enough to pho­to­graph Jenn (let alone get­ting over being so tongue-tied around her), because I was afraid of being too trans­par­ent. I always thought that by ask­ing to take her pic­ture, every­one could see how attract­ed I was to her. I would go around Aaron’s par­ties and pho­to­graph any­one but her. Now I real­ize that in doing so, I prob­a­bly gave myself away.

It’s scary to think that peo­ple may read me so eas­i­ly from sub­con­scious body lan­guage. A girl­friend once said that her mom asked how she would feel if I asked her out, about a month before I did. To this day I won­der how her mom knew I would. All we did was have din­ner togeth­er on Sunday’s. Did I steal glances from across the table? Did I look away when she looked at me? Did I lose myself in her face and stare?

Am I that trans­par­ent?

I’d like to think that I can hide such things, but how can I when I don’t even rec­og­nize what it is I’m doing.

How can I hide my heart, when I don’t even know that I wear it on my sleeve?

What Can I Say?

Things have changed.

I don’t write the same any­more, or about the same things. I’ve lost my fer­vent ver­bosi­ty. Every time I sit at my com­put­er, my mind blanks. Writing has become a chore. Even this entry has tak­en me days to think through. I find myself writ­ing and rewrit­ing every point, every para­graph.

In the begin­ning, blog­ging was a form of cathar­sis. Developing cog­ni­tive­ly beyond my ado­les­cence was an emo­tion­al peri­od, filled with con­fu­sion and grow­ing pains. The only way I could make sense of it all was to write out my thoughts, forc­ing myself to reflect and learn from every chal­lenge.

It was also a use­ful tool in fig­ur­ing myself out, as a part of my life where I could approach things with the con­vic­tion that I lacked in the rest of my life. Now that I’ve gained enough con­fi­dence, it does­n’t seem so nec­es­sary to prove myself with words any­more. It would seem that I’ve become a vic­tim of my own self-assured­ness.

I could fill this blog with entries, find­ing solace in the writ­ten word, when I was going through some­thing as sim­ple as a bad day. As time has passed, I’ve elim­i­nat­ed most of the things that both­er me enough to turn to this medi­um. It was a slow and sys­tem­at­ic process, both inter­nal and exter­nal. My new-found seren­i­ty has left me with lit­tle rage. I’m hap­pi­er now, and hap­pi­ness is too hard to write.

It would seem that I’ve run out of things to say.

There have been few epipha­nies, and even less inspi­ra­tion, in the last while. Maybe it’s because I’m in the mid­dle of a tran­si­tion. It takes a foun­da­tion of sta­bil­i­ty, some­thing I haven’t had in months, to grow. My life has­n’t quite set­tled yet.

Writer’s block is a sign that I’ve stopped grow­ing, a tes­ta­ment to what and how much I’ve been through.

But more impor­tant­ly, it’s a sign that I’m approach­ing where I want to go in my life.

What To Accept?

They always say time changes things, but you actu­al­ly have to change them your­self.

—Andy Warhol

Many of my rela­tion­ships, roman­tic or oth­er­wise, are often approached, at least par­tial­ly, based on the hope that the oth­er per­son will change. This change can take the form of some­thing as sim­ple as prompt­ness, as frus­trat­ing as tidi­ness, or as grand as self-cen­tered­ness.

Change, syn­ony­mous with improve­ment, has been the basis of my life. It takes a self-aware­ness of my faults, com­bined with a desire to change these faults, to improve. Assuming that oth­ers are the same way has been one of the biggest mis­takes I’ve ever made. When the veil is lift­ed, and I real­ize that some­one is stuck in their per­son­al­i­ty, I lose my faith in human­i­ty. For the frac­tion of peo­ple who are con­scious enough to know that they need to change, (and I mean this in an absolute sense, where almost any­one would agree that some­thing needs improve­ment, such as tem­per or closed-mind­ed­ness) only a frac­tion of those are actu­al­ly able to do so.

It’s not that some peo­ple have willpow­er and some don’t. It’s that some peo­ple are ready to change and oth­ers are not.

This means that when I meet some­one, I either have to accept or reject them for who they are, because that’s most like­ly who they’re going to be for the rest of their lives. I have to stop accept­ing some­one based on the hope that they will get bet­ter.

Acceptance, which has always been a dif­fi­cult thing for me, thus becomes the most impor­tant thing in my rela­tion­ships. It also remains one of the most hard­est things for me to change.

So should I learn to accept this about myself, the way I should learn to accept things of oth­ers?

The Inconclusive End

Over break­fast, a gen­er­ous gorg­ing of sausage links, over easy, and hashed browns, the real­iza­tion dawns on me that out of the eight peo­ple seat­ed, four of us have worked in the same office.

In fact, three of us had the same job; while Aaron was work­ing as a devel­op­er, Pat was brought in to replace Jacques, and I was hired when Pat left. What a small world. That’s how Pat and I met Aaron, how Aaron met Jacques, and it was only on that day, four years lat­er, that Pat was intro­duced to Jacques.

Now we can sit around a break­fast table, fill­ing our­selves with greasy food and caf­feine in prepa­ra­tion for a week­end of gam­ing.

How long ago those days seem, work­ing in an unmo­ti­vat­ed gov­ern­ment office, dat­ing some­one I thought I want­ed to make my wife. I remarked to Pat how fun­ny it was to believe back then that I knew what I want­ed in life, and with a smirk, he asked me, “You think you know what you want now?”.

The ques­tion was rhetor­i­cal, of course. Sometimes Pat knows me bet­ter than I know myself. In his way, he was remind­ing me that even now, after all my con­tem­pla­tion and all my con­clu­sions, I still may not have fig­ured that out yet.

Do I real­ly know what I want?

Not real­ly. In my career, my rela­tion­ships, my short-term life I can say that there’s a path I’m mov­ing towards, but I also know that this will most like­ly change. As I learn and grow, as new goals are met and made, what I want changes too.

And per­haps being sure of this is what I real­ly want.