sometimes, it is just damn hard to do the right thing

sometimes, or many times, what the "right" thing is really subject to a ton of debate. and it doesn't help when the possibly not "right" thing or thing in that grey area can lead to a bit of personal gain, and not at anyone's expense. i just have to come to terms with the fact that i still should try to do what appears to be right. despite sometimes it's obvious stupidity to everyone, including myself.

the perfect life

the strangest thing about us is what we strive and work and work, for what we think would be our perfect life. if we don't get there, we always have that unsatisfied yearning, about what if i actually got there. and if and when we do get there, more often than not, it turns out not to be so perfect.

the idea of perfection of course in some ways is ludicrous. our minds are so jumpy, so easily bored, dissatisfaction is a much more normal state than satisfaction.

the one and only true trick is to train the mind to be still. to find the existing perfection in our daily lives, rather than in the abstract future.

inner peace is fragile

and poof! all that practice is gone.

the real trick is to blend real life and practice. then, we slowly remember the truth more often than not.

120,000

the hard part to remember, of course, is truth doesn't come from authorities, nor ancient texts, nor does it come from 120,000 people. all references certainly, truth only comes from deep reflection.

to quote Krishamurti:

'Truth is a pathless land'. Man cannot come to it through any organization, through any creed, through any dogma, priest or ritual, not through any philosophic knowledge or psychological technique. He has to find it through the mirror of relationship, through the understanding of the contents of his own mind, through observation and not through intellectual analysis or introspective dissection. Man has built in himself images as a fence of security - religious, political, personal. These manifest as symbols, ideas, beliefs. The burden of these images dominates man's thinking, his relationships and his daily life. These images are the causes of our problems for they divide man from man. His perception of life is shaped by the concepts already established in his mind. The content of his consciousness is his entire existence. This content is common to all humanity. The individuality is the name, the form and superficial culture he acquires from tradition and environment. The uniqueness of man does not lie in the superficial but in complete freedom from the content of his consciousness, which is common to all mankind. So he is not an individual.

Freedom is not a reaction; freedom is not a choice. It is man's pretence that because he has choice he is free. Freedom is pure observation without direction, without fear of punishment and reward. Freedom is without motive; freedom is not at the end of the evolution of man but lies in the first step of his existence. In observation one begins to discover the lack of freedom. Freedom is found in the choiceless awareness of our daily existence and activity. Thought is time. Thought is born of experience and knowledge which are inseparable from time and the past. Time is the psychological enemy of man. Our action is based on knowledge and therefore time, so man is always a slave to the past. Thought is ever-limited and so we live in constant conflict and struggle. There is no psychological evolution.

When man becomes aware of the movement of his own thoughts he will see the division between the thinker and thought, the observer and the observed, the experiencer and the experience. He will discover that this division is an illusion. Then only is there pure observation which is insight without any shadow of the past or of time. This timeless insight brings about a deep radical mutation in the mind.

Total negation is the essence of the positive. When there is negation of all those things that thought has brought about psychologically, only then is there love, which is compassion and intelligence."

remember to inspire

inspiration is the only way out of mundane existence. 

trust the training

i didn't think i could let alone walk to the track. i was so damn tired i had trouble putting on my running shorts without falling down. i was feeling this awful mix of bloated and hungry. have no idea how it's possible to have those two sensations at the same time.

anyway, i hammered it out the 10km. i don't know why it was easier than i imagined too. and right, i have been getting myself back in shape, albeit really slowly.

most of training sucks. but if i somehow keep at it, somehow, it starts to suck a little less.

what the hell happened to my willpower?

all these years, willpower has been the one thing that i've relied on. i am not the smartest, the brightest, the strongest, the whatever-est, but somehow through brute force i have managed to just get through. the gym was always something i looked back with some (probably misguided) pride. i was the scrawniest kid ever when i first stepped in. three years later, by senior year, i was putting up over 200lbs on the bench press. i could do pull-ups with a fifty pound weight added on. i seemed to have proved to myself that if i just worked damn hard, i could become reasonably good at something.

anyway, forward twenty odd years. i make promises to myself, important promises, that i could again do through sheer brute force. like practice hanuman, meditate every day. finish my damn book. teach yoga. somehow, i have been just talking all these years, and things remain where they are. i somehow end up reading the thousands of articles on my rss, sitting on the couch, or just doing nothing.

even the most "useful" of these activities, devouring info, am i now more informed? sure. am i more knowledgeable? maybe. am i wiser? if i were to believe myself, only knowledge applied, personalized, internalized, and finally realized, becomes wisdom. essentially, knowledge can be forgotten. wisdom, has been learned the very hard way, and simply cannot be forgotten.

so anyway, back to willpower, which has somehow deserted me. because i'm older? (and not wiser?) because i got married? because i'm stuck in a job that is neither good nor bad, just, well, a job? all of the above?

so these books tell me, to make it a habit, so i don't have to exert willpower. or, it's just a muscle, that we need to train, and keep training, then we can use it whenever we want in whichever situations. i haven't figured it out.

maybe it's simple - the rewards, at this stage of my life, are just no longer evident. not that i should have cared so much about them. in fact, it may just be a good illustration of that. the rewards (get big muscles, get girls, though that never worked out; do well on exams, get good gpa, good job, well, my thoughts can't think that far ahead), once someone pulls it away, or those rewards lose their meaning/relevance somehow, suddenly, i'm left with... nothing.

so, do i create some arbitrary rewards for myself? or even better, realize i really should not give a damn about rewards, and enjoy whatever it is i have at the moment? i think one of the difficulties of our generation is we have been totally conditioned under the work and reward system, from our earliest memories and experiences. do A, get B. why do A if not very useful and does not get you anywhere?

so i have to work around this. kickstart myself with imaginary rewards. put a big "X" on my calendar every time i fail myself. haul myself back up from the slippery slope of laziness and excuses. and think about how my own 14-year old-self used to motivate the hell out of my friends. let him loose again.

excuses

i am finding out i am incredibly good at excusing myself.

rather than staying focused despite changes, i somehow use changes as an excuse to not practice, as i need time to "get back on track".

i need to remember staying with my practice is the fastest way to get back on track.

and then, i can remember what the real things are.

the gradual death of personal time

i now realize, when i don't have enough personal time, i mean time really to myself, doing nothing, without fear of anyone bothering me, i get really cranky.

the issue is that could never have lasted that long, and things do pile on. and soon enough, we're not talking "enough" time. any time is a luxury.

the challenge is to maintain calmness, focus, despite all these things that distract, bother, annoy, and they all happen naturally in fact.

or, to change my concept of personal time. it was never mine in fact, and perhaps, every minute is already personal if i'm still alive.

man it is tough.

差少少,就可能真係差少少

today, i randomly saved someone. perhaps not from death, but from a body shutdown due to heat stroke at least. the interesting thing was i had a very mild experience of it myself later - and sometimes if you don't have that sip of water to save you, hard as one tries the strength just isn't there. and it just goes downhill very quickly from there.

i don't know if there's anything to be learned here, but perhaps if there's a little extra that can be done, do it, since you don't know if it will matter a lot later.

and the other lesson is make sure someone stays with the weakest link.

how to choose

when in doubt, in trying to decide between two things that are similarly good (or bad), choose the one that requires more willpower.

think, wait, fast

since i really don't have ideas these days (really, somehow i have stared at the screen for a good while and nothing comes to mind. nothing. ok, it's more like, i want to think about the deeper things in life. but didn't i already figure it out? and it's just too taxing to go beyond ah, life goes on. i need to figure out how to really jump start my brain again.)

i can think, i can wait, i can fast, and that is all, the young siddhartha said, in herman hesse's book.

sometimes, it really is like that. i kind of have to wait for the thoughts to emerge, from nowhere it seems. and sometimes they just remain unformed. and how do i coax them into forming themselves again?

i imagine it's like trying to regain my running stamina that has all but disappeared again.

time and patience. eventually, have faith, they return.

ultimate liberty

it always confuses me a little that compassion leads to dispassion leads to ultimate liberty.

challenges that make me look bad

i have a new theory about myself. the challenges that i like are the ones that even if i fail, i will look ok. the challenges i don't like are the ones that i will look like an ass if i fail, because i) everyone else can do it really easily and ii) there is no coolness factor associated with it.

for ii), while i still wonder when i will eventually grow out of it, i think it's not so much that i want to be cool now (truly, no one cares. even if they really care, all anyone will get is a "like" these days. i have another theory that "liking" is making people more indifferent, as you can "like" anything without saying anything. but that's for another day), it's more like i don't want to be uncool.

so anyhow. this came up as i am still thinking about teaching yoga. part of it is i don't want to do a half-assed job and i'd like to maintain some continuity if i ever start. the other part of it is i don't quite feel like it. maybe it's because i look really stupid teaching people to stick their bums in the air. or maybe i feel i'm doing my teacher no justice if i don't do it well. or maybe i'm just scared to stand in front of a bunch of people and have them stare at me and assume i know what i'm doing. which is weird, because i can do that for things i know even less about. and that never stopped me from blabbering on.

as life goes on

the new challenge is how to maintain some form of practice and consistency - whether it's writing this, running, yoga, meditation, given the dozens of new priorities that come up and will come up.

if i only have ten minutes, how do i possibly calm my mind knowing there are a long list of things to be done right afterwards? or alternatively, how do i actually focus for these ten minutes despite the things to come?

hasn't this always been the case, or does it just seem things are much more uncertain and unpredictable than before?

i really don't quite know yet.

but first, i need to get back in it.

only then, i figure out how to better to do it.

uncanny valley

singapore is my city-version of the uncanny valley.

there are a lot of things similar to hong kong - the G2000 shop, the andy lau advertisement, the mango billboard.

but there are small differences. the people on the streets look like the people i'd see in hong kong from afar, but one longer look reveals i'm definitely not in hong kong. the hairstyle. the walking gait. even the oil shine on the skin, probably just from the warm weather.

and it somehow makes it all the more alien to me. so familiar, yet different that it's weirdly discomforting.

i sometimes realize i'm such a creature of habit. so i guess, all the more important it is to somehow train myself to have better habits.

6 weeks vs 1 week

one would think that having not written for so long, i would be brimming with things that i'd like to expound on.

somehow, that doesn't quite happen.

as i must have reminded myself a million times, 6 weeks to get in shape, 1 week to get out of shape.

maybe that applies to the mind as well.

like the 5k run i did this morning, getting back in shape sucks.

but it has to be done.

who's first?

given the choice, do you help the people who has everything taken away, or you help those who never had anything in the first place?

it's time

it's time to get going again.

one of the laws of the universe state that:

determination is always elusive;

excuses are everywhere to be found.

different goals at different times

sometimes i mistake other people's goals for my own.

sometimes i even mistake my previous goals for my current ones.

of course, my current problems stem from the fact that i'm not quite sure what my current goal exactly is. and there's always a spectrum and overlap among what i think i should do, what i desire to do, what i think fits me to do. people always say, be yourself, find your passion. with all this exploration of my "self" over the past couple of years, i seem to be no closer to figuring out what "being myself" entails. my passion? media is an easy passion. what's not to like? but might it also be a superficial kind of passion, which is the reason i'm at times uncomfortable with it? or i'm just uncomfortable with the pay, the inherent instability of the business?

maybe, these kinds of self-imposed shocks are a good way for me to figure things out.

so i guess, i just have to keep reminding myself, there are no right or wrong choices, but there are kind and less-kind decisions, and there surely are happy and less-happy perspectives.