Bali

My trip to Bali was like stepping into a portal to a different universe, one inhabited by people whom I reckoned were so different from me--almost constitutionally different--both on the inside and out, that I wondered whether any discerning charts would have classified us into different species. They were simpletons, and I do not mean this in anyway pejoratively: they lived day in and day out as if their lives were composed of todays and tomorrows--and nothing beyond that--the past either forgotten or forgiven, either way they lived each day unencumbered by any part thereof.

The Balinese had the complexion of the sunset, that moment where the horizon had swallowed the sun just past its halfway mark, right before the skies dimmed to blue and dark blue. They were the people who had soaked in the sun for generations, darkened and browned, but nonetheless incandescent in their personality like smoldering charcoal. They were warm when I got near them: each word they said was followed with occasional nodding and a smile--almost apologetically, as if their need to verbally explain themselves was a mark of an offense having been committed on their part, and they were trying to mitigate the harm with each placating gesture.

Foreigners walked left right centre in Bali (or at least in Kuta, Seminyak and Legian) and their towering presence was so palpable, it felt almost intrusive. Most tried to soaked in the sun like the Balinese had--they flaunted their skin like they wanted to devour the sun, giving little thought or regard of how conservative or otherwise the places they were at (perhaps Bali was to them this monolithic wash of beach and babes, and all vices in between)--however, alas they were merely charred to pink: their skin blushing on the face of its defeat, accentuating its unnaturalness and the admonition by the Balinese sun. The color of the people of the sun was the Balinese's birthright, their birthmark.

The ubiquity of foreigners had over time woven its foreignness into the local fabric once upon a time displaying complete picture of traditions. By now parts of the old had been taken out--labelled as outdated, backward, or obsolete, while those which had been judged as still in line with the new norms (in other words, those that appeared 'exotic' to the foreign eyes) were kept for their redeeming commercial viability. This was the front advertised to the world. It was uncanny--to me at least--to find many Balinese who spoke English (or even Chinese, for that matter) sculpted by punctuating Balinese accent, the product of which while not altogether grammatical and complete was spoken with confidence and fluency that would put more than few of the English-speaking population to shame. I couldn't understand about one third of what was said (notwithstanding my familiarity with the English and Indonesian language), but I could tell that the Balinese knew perfectly well what they were saying, and apparently, so did the foreigners. It was like a secret club with a secret handshake. I just didn't get the memo.

The word "dodgy" would be modest to describe some of the parts in Kuta and Legian that I passed by. And while at first I wondered why they didn't better the infrastructure of these busy spots (for example, the lanes along these areas were one-way lanes, which forced you to make a long--well, longer than was necessary---detour whenever you missed a place and wanted to go back), but I now begin to think that perhaps this was so 'poorly' maintained on purpose. This had nothing to do with paying heed to traditions (I don't think prostitution and magic mushrooms were ever considered to be a part thereof); it was more about creating the ambience of disorder: hedonistic, rowdy, alive, yet a safe haven for tourists to indulge in the local vices. An order of disorder. Maybe this was why my driver could easily say that in spite of the loud music, the semi-nakedness, the overcrowding of the pubs and clubs, these places were safe and that I had nothing to worry about walking about at night. I had to take his word with a pinch of salt because he did ask me whether I would be interested to drive around the red light district to cuci mata (transliteration: wash eyes), which of course I politely declined. (My parents were sitting in the backseats.)

I dubbed the Balinese the people of the sun because the sun seemed to play a part in their collective pride as a people (I wanted to say tribal pride, but that doesn't sound just quite right). It was a part of their natural beauty, one that they unabashedly wished to share with the world: they wanted to show you what a sunset looked like, and how one should look like. And indeed they knew how to serve the sunset to their guests: with a pool by the cliff from which one could enjoy an unobstructed view of the beach stretching all the way to infinity where the roundness of the globe swallowed the vast sea, and with a healthy supply of alcoholic concoctions whose names reminded me that I was fairly close to the equator. As the sun made its lyrical descent into the horizon, pushing against blankets of clouds--resulting in a healthy mix of moments of light and shade--its reflection diffused on the surface of the waters turned the latter into silvery splendor. It was blinding, transient, unreachable; to borrow E. Gilbert's phrase: an indefensible amount of beauty. I just sat there, using every bit of my senses to drink it all in. This was the world that the Balinese lived in: an unjustifiable spectacle with which perhaps by now they were already drunk to a point of ignorance. However, I was not so lucky as they, but lucky enough to find the time albeit for a fragment of a moment to simply stop and squint. 

The Look We Wish To Live Under

We all need someone to look at us. We can be divided into four categories according to the kind of look we wish to live under. 

The first category longs for the look of an infinite number of anonymous eyes, in other words, for the look of the public. That is the case with the German singer, the American actress, and even the tall, stooped editor with the big chin. He was accustomed to his readers, and when one day the Russians banned his newspaper, he had the feeling that the atmosphere was suddenly a hundred times thinner. Nothing could replace the look of unknown eyes. He thought he would suffocate. Then one day he realized that he was constantly being followed, bugged, and surreptitiously photographed in the street. Suddenly he had anonymous eyes on him and he could breathe again! He began making theatrical speeches to the microphones in his wall. In the police, he had found his lost public. 

The second category is made up of people who have a vital need to be looked at by many known eyes. They are the tireless hosts of cocktail parties and dinners. They are happier than the people in the first category, who, when they lose their public, have the feeling that the lights have gone out in the room of their lives. This happens to nearly all of them sooner or later. People in the second category, on the other hand, can always come up with the eyes they need. Marie-Claude and her daughter belong in the second category. 

Then there is the third category, the category of people who need to be constantly before the eyes of the person they love. Their situation is as dangerous as the situation of people in the first category. One day the eyes of their beloved will close, and the room will go dark. Tereza and Tomas belong in the third category. 

And finally there is the fourth category, the rarest, the category of people who live in the imaginary eyes of those who are not present. They are the dreamers. Franz, for example. He travelled to the borders of Cambodia only for Sabina. As the bus bumped along the Thai road, he could feel her eyes fixed on him in a long stare. 

Tomas' son belongs in the same category. Let me call him Simon. (He will be glad to have a Biblical name, like his father's.) the eyes he longed for were Tomas'. As a result of his embroilment in the petition campaign, he was expelled from the university. The girl he had been going out with was the niece of a village priest. He married her, became a tractor driver on a collective farm, a practicing catholic, and a father. When he learned that Tomas, too, was living in the country, he was thrilled: fate had made their lives symmetrical. This encouraged him to write Tomas a letter. He did not ask him to write back. He only wanted him to focus his eyes on his life. 

-- Milan Kundera

Novel

And once more I see him the way he appeared to me at the very beginning of the novel: standing at the window and staring across the courtyard at the walls opposite. 

This was the image from which he was born. As I have printed out before, characters are not born like people, of woman; they are born of a situation, a sentence, a metaphor containing in a nutshell a basic human possibility that the author thinks no one else has discovered or said something essential about. 

But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself? 

Staring importantly across a courtyard, at a loss for what to do; hearing the pertinacious rumbling of one's own stomach during a moment of love; betraying, yet lacking the will to abandon the glamorous path of betrayal; raising one's fists with the crowds in the Grand March; displaying one's wit before hidden microphones--I have known all these situations, I have experienced them myself, yet none of them has given rise to the person my curriculum vitae and I represent. The characters in my novels are my own unrealized possibilities. That is why I am equally fond of them all and equally horrified by them. Each one has crossed a border that I myself have circumvented. It is that crossed border (the border beyond which my own 'I' ends) which attracts me the most. For beyond that border begins the secret the novel asks about. The novel is not the author's confession; it is an investigation of human life in the trap the world has become. But enough. Let us return to Tomas.

-- Milan Kundera

Sanity

'We all do it,' Adam was continuing. 'All journalists. We crate stories out of fragments. We travel all over the world, propelled onward by something, we sit in people's horses, our notepads in our hands, and we wait for the gems. And the gems invariably turn out to be the madness--the extreme, outermost aspects of that person's personality--the irrational anger, the anxiety, the paranoia, the narcissism, the things that would be defined within DSM as mental disorders. We've dedicated our lives to it. We know what we do is odd but nobody talks about it. Forget psychopathic CEOs. My question is, what does that say about our sanity?'

-- J Ronson

Efficient Breach

In contract law, there is a concept called "efficient breach." Most people assume that it is always "bad" to break a contract, because it essentially constitutes breaking a promise. However, there are some ways in which doing so can be good, or in the language of law and economics, efficient. This occurs when complying with the terms of the contract would result in greater economic loss than simply paying the other party's damages that have resulted from your nonperformance. For example, I commit to date someone exclusively. Maybe I even marry him.  If one of us later finds someone we prefer, it may actually be better for both parties if one or both of us break the agreement. If you believe in the value of efficient breaches like I do, then you would never get upset if your partner cheated on you. 

In efficient breaches, it is often the immoral choice that leaves everyone better off. I've lived my entire life this way, since long before I ever learned the term in law school. My child self understood the world in terms of choices and consequences, causes and effects. If I wanted to break a rule and was willing to suffer the consequences, I should be allowed to make that choice unhindered.  

I engage in this kind of self-promoting calculus in almost everything I do, often then the stakes are much higher. When my good friend's father was diagnosed with cancer, I cut off all contact with her. It sounds like a ruthless thing to do, and it was. It wasn't that I didn't love her; in fact, I loved her very much--perhaps too much. But I found I could no longer enjoy any of the benefits she had provided to me--superior advice, interesting conversation--because she was horrible to be around most of the time. I had over invested and was running many months into the red with no improvement. I found that I could not wear the mask of compassion or selflessness indefinitely without acting out in ways that were hurtful to us both. 

And so I cut off all ties and walked away. There were damages on all sides, but I had not other means of mitigating them, so it was an efficient breach. I think she would agree with me, even when I include her hurt and suffering into the equation. That alone would typically make the end of a friendship in this way a net negative. In this situation, though, my abandonment of her was to her benefit, particularly considering that my behavior was only going to get worse--that I was already tapped out in terms of being able to be supportive. I didn't leave her because I stopped caring for her. I left her because I did care for her very much. It was efficient. Still, the first couple of months apart I was just so relieved. If I was reminded of my friend, it was with gratitude that I was no longer in that unsustainable situation. As months went by, however, I began to feel the empty space in my life that she used to occupy. It was unfortunate. But this too is part of the cost-benefit analysis, when I realize that situations can often turn regrettable even though I did not regret any particular decision.  

Of course, there are negative real-world effects of making efficient breaches. In the marketplace, breaking promises decreases confidence and thereby discourages actors from engaging in future contracts. For instance, if you have been divorced too many times, people don't trust you, and so they don't want to play the game with you anymore. It's a problem. No matter how rational I may be in choosing when to follow the rules and when to break obligations, it is often insufficient for the people I am dealing with. They want more: more feeling, more attachment, more commitment, more of what they're used to. At some point, I have to wonder if all of my rational decision-making can make up for my inability to emphasize, and I conclude that it doesn't. People take for granted the empathy with which they were born, and the morality that they somehow internalize. Crying when someone you love cries--I was not born with this shortcut into the hearts of other people. Feeling guilt when you hurt someone you love is an internal safeguard to prevent you from losing them, but I have never been able to learn it. The work-grounds that I have devised for these things often fail me. 

--  M. E. Thomas  

Songversation

24

Turning a year older is decidedly one of the most difficult things that I have to endure this year. And it is not because I treat birthdays like a dirty laundry, like what most people do when they have renounce their youth. No, it is because it marks a point where I have to make significant decisions--and by God, these decisions are mighty hard. Countless sleepless nights have been spent on pondering, calibrating and weighing the factors for these decisions, and unfortunately the exercise has largely given birth to episodes of cognitive paralysis. Every decision is wrong. Every decision is right. Hard cases make bad laws, they say--I cannot agree more.

On balance, the decisions made (at the time of this writing) will whisk me away toward the altar of the pragmatic, the punishing and the industrious. Perhaps this is what people dub as "selling out". I mean, a sale is oft understood as an exchange of goods and services for monetary consideration. So, perhaps these decisions do constitute a sale, and by that logic, I sold out.

Nonetheless, I would argue that selling out ought not be associated with the derogatory, if not shaming, connotation that people tend to so draw when factoring the two. While it is perhaps wanting to seal working in a steel mill of an office as capable of feeding the soul of its nourishment, I would argue it is not altogether impossible or implausible. We are capable of synthesizing our own happiness--our own meaning--in spite of the fact these proclivities do not occur naturally to us. In fact, it is the very reason why we synthesize happiness and meaning to begin with. We are autotrophic beings, capable of nourishing ourselves and satisfying our needs--mental, spiritual, physical, emotional, intellectual. This act of synthesis is, I believe, a skill and a practice. We have to dare to do it, and we have to do it frequently enough to make it an integral part of our selves. Aren't repetition and synthesis the ways we teach our selves of our acquired tastes? How else do we teach our selves to relish the rubbery taste of vegetables, the bitterness of coffee, the inebriant consequences of alcohol,  the pain of stretching, the love for reading, and many others? These are, I would argue, teachable skills.

It is futile, however, to defend against the argument that all this is merely self-talk, an exercise of intellectualizing the circumstances to a point where they became cognitively acceptable to us. It certainly is. Nevertheless, isn't the exercise of reason the only way that we deny ourselves of our baser instincts. Isn't reason the main driver of self-restriant, which by and large a desirable virtue? We employ reason to weigh the consequences of our decisions against our internalized set of moral values, and we seek to find comfort in the overlap between the two.

Even though I may bow down to the altar of the pragmatic, the merciless and the mundane, it does not necessarily mean that I will cease to be a seeker of meaning and purpose. Indeed, every second of me failing to squeeze an iota of meaning and purpose in living is a second squandered, a second spent in the face of pointlessness. I will never relinquish that as a mantra. However, I believe that there will be exactly that--meaning and purpose--somewhere along the road behind the seemingly suspect altar. There must be such. Otherwise, how else would the multitudes of sell-outs live their lives for ten, twenty, thirty or even forty years devoting their time, efforts and sacrifices before the said altar if all the gods and goddesses are completely false? There is something there--however obscure, however shrouded by soul-deadening appearances--that will quench the thirst of the soul. What one needs to have is the attitude to seek beyond the web of dreadfulness and social disapproval.

This is why I have to base the decisions on a well-thought-out reconciliation of where the line is to be drawn, in a manner that will make sense to me. It will inevitably a very fine line, which meanders left and right and around, and unless one takes my epistemic recognition of the circumstances, it will simply come across as either selfish, or conflicting, or unreasonable, or all the above. And it will be a great challenge to champion such paper-thin delineation of what is acceptable and what is not, and quite naturally, there will be slews of criticisms rushing in to poke holes on the carefully crafted contrivances. Perhaps, objectively speaking, such arbitrary ring-fencing is invariably indefensible.

What I have to tell myself when that happens--should it happen, when it happens--is to embrace myself with a great deal of self-friendship and to tell myself that they were the best decisions that I could make given the data that I could reasonably gather in the circumstances. Perhaps, just perhaps, the best consolation is this: "Most people are really doing the best they can. And that's just the reality. You have to give people credit for their humanity." And I pray that I will be blessed with sufficient self-friendliness to allow myself to stubbornly sing in the rain--and even more so, hopefully, in the storm.

Whittaker Advice

Those who are ill-prepared to endure the battle for survival should perhaps have never attempted living in the first place. The only unforgivable crime is to cut short the experiment of one's own life before its natural end. To do so is a weakness and a pity--for the experiment of life will cut itself off soon enough, in all our cases, and one may just as well have the courage and the curiosity to stay in the battle until one's eventual and inevitable demise. Anything less than a fight for endurance is cowardly. Anything less than a fight for endurance is a refusal of the great covenant of life.  

--- 

Praise be the labors that lie before me. Let us begin. 

Grand

Understood

Her Look Of "Hopeless Beauty"

"It's clear that she's poor," he says. "Her face is dirty, her garment is ripped, yet she has a sort of dignity and confidence and fortitude. In her eyes, I suppose you could sense that there was something troubling her, something not quite right. She's seen more than she should at such a young age. Her village had been bombed and her relatives killed and she'd had to make this two-week trek through the mountains to the refugee camp."

Get Back To Work

I have a friend who’s an Italian filmmaker of great artistic sensibility. After years of struggling to get his films made, he sent an anguished letter to his hero, the brilliant (and perhaps half-insane) German filmmaker Werner Herzog. My friend complained about how difficult it is these days to be an independent filmmaker, how hard it is to find government arts grants, how the audiences have all been ruined by Hollywood and how the world has lost its taste…etc, etc. Herzog wrote back a personal letter to my friend that essentially ran along these lines: “Quit your complaining. It’s not the world’s fault that you wanted to be an artist. It’s not the world’s job to enjoy the films you make, and it’s certainly not the world’s obligation to pay for your dreams. Nobody wants to hear it. Steal a camera if you have to, but stop whining and get back to work.” I repeat those words back to myself whenever I start to feel resentful, entitled, competitive or unappreciated with regard to my writing: “It’s not the world’s fault that you want to be an artist…now get back to work.”  Always, at the end of the day, the important thing is only and always that: Get back to work. This is a path for the courageous and the faithful. You must find another reason to work, other than the desire for success or recognition. It must come from another place.

Positive Intention

Every behavior has a positive intention, I was told. I've been trying to practice this as much as possible since the day I read it. And I totally get it. At the end of the day we are just imperfect human beings chained (perhaps biologically) to our own lofty and rosy ideals, whose dimensions stretch so widely that the corners are almost always beyond reach--no matter how hard we stretch our fingers. The resulting discomfort then brews uncontrollably underneath, beneath the skin-deep chivalry that is too fragile and too permeable to hold anything in. We helplessly discharge the discomfort on the world, hoping that at the very least we have the swordsmanship to perform the task elegantly. We know that words cut--and they cut deeply--and that there is no armor donned by the most chivalrous among us that can fend off the cavalier performance. That is why we strive to strike with elegance. Alas, even at that there is little saving grace, notwithstanding how adroitly we engage in verbal gymnastics, we cannot reach those corners of ourselves that our minds and confidence have falsely constructed. The elegance is simply inelegant. However, few of us see that. Ultimately, in spite of our blindness we shake our discomfort so reflexively because, unfortunately, we shake our discomfort helplessly. If this is so, then what is to be done by our unfortunate listener, clad in an armor too frail and too permeable to shield him from the incisive words of his helpless counterpart--knowing that the latter is just painfully trying to stretch the fingers to reach the frontiers of the widely stretched ideals. There is positive intention behind the behavior, and it is hard to practice it.

Mastery

But in the end, mastery often involves working and working and showing little improvement, perhaps with a few moments of flow pulling you along, then making a little progress, and then working and working on that new, slightly higher plateau again. It's grueling, to be sure. But that's not the problem; that's the solution. 

---

Effort is one of the things that gives meaning to life. Effort means you care about something, that something is important to you and you are willing to work for it. It would be an impoverished existence if you were not willing to value things and commit yourself to working toward them.

--- 

Being a professional is doing the things you love to do, on the days you don't feel like doing them.

The Peter Principle

Dr. Lawrence Peter is famous for proposing that "in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence." In other words, Jen you do a great job, you get promoted. And that process repeats itself until finally you end up in a job you can't handle. 

I'd like to paraphrase the Peter Principle. I think what actually happens is that "in every organization everyone rises to the level at which they become paralyzed with fear."

Showmanship

In our most arrogant moments, the sin of pride--or superbia, in Augustine's Latin formulation--takes over our personalities and shuts us off from those around us. We become dull to others when all we seek to do is assert how well things are going for us, just as friendship has a chance to grow only when we dare to share what we are afraid of and regret. The rest is merely showmanship. The Mass encourages this sloughing off of pride. The flaws whose exposure we so dread, the indiscretions we know we would be mocked for, the secrets that keep our conversations with our so-called friends superficial and inert--all of these emerge as simply part of human condition. We have no reason left to dissemble or lie in a building dedicated to honouring the terror and weakness of a man who was nothing like the usual heroes of antiquity, nothing like the fierce soldiers of Rome's army or the plutocrats of its Senate, and yet who was nevertheless worthy of being crowned the highest of men, the king of kings.

Sunk Cost

Economists explain this behavior using a concept known as the "sunk cost fallacy": when estimating the value of a future investment, we have trouble ignoring what we've already invested in the last. Sunk costs are part of the story, but new research shows that other factors matter more. To figure out why and when escalation of commitment happens, researchers at Michigan State University analyzed 166 different studies. Sunk costs do have a small effect--decision makers are biased in favor of their previous investments--but three other factors are more powerful. One is anticipated regret: will I be sorry that I didn't give this another chance? The second is project completion: if I keep investing, I can finish the project. But the single most powerful factor is ego threat: if I don't keep investing, I'll look and feel like a fool. In response to ego threat, people invest more, hoping to turn the project into a success so that they can prove to others--and themselves--that they were right all along.

How To Be Lucky

Be generous. 

I don't use that word lightly. Generosity is luck going in the opposite direction, away from you. If you're generous to someone, if you do something to help him out, you are in effect making him lucky. This is important. It's like inviting yourself into a community of good fortune. 

Whenever I feel I'm working in a groove it's invariably because I feel I am being the benefactor in the situation rather than the beneficiary. I am sharing my art with others, lending my craft to theirs, interest-free without no IOU. I want the dancers to look great, so I try to give them great steps. In return, they live up to the potential I see in them. Then I am the one who feels lucky. In the luck equation, who is the winner here? 

Someone once asked me why the superstar dancers of the ballet world don't make very good choreographers. The quick answer is that few of them have the facility to teach effectively since a lot of what they do has come so easily to them. But I think the bigger issue is generosity. Stars become stars because they have a gift for pulling the world into them; they draw people's attention through their beauty, talent, charisma and wiles. As a result I don't think they're generally willing to project their own artistic hopes and desires onto other people. They are used to having their own assets supported. This isn't evil selfishness or egotism it's simply a part of their creative DNA, the way they are. 

To be a great choreographer (or teacher), you have to invest everything you have in your dancers. You have to be so devoted to them and to the finished creation that your dancers become your heroes. It takes courage to be generous like that, to believe that the better the dancers look (or the actors in your film, or the singer of your song), the better the scene will play and the more satisfying the work itself will be. Without that generosity, you'll always hold something back. The finished work shows it, and your audience knows it.  

It took me years to appreciate this. When I was younger (read: more limber, athletic, and strong) I used to do this awful thing to myself: Whatever dance I was working on, I would literally put myself in the center of the piece, even though I knew full well that I wasn't going to get to perform it. For a few years there, when I was in my forties and could still move well, I would get really pissy when the inevitable moment arrived and I would have to recuse myself from the piece and hand it over to one of my dancers. Of course, injecting myself into the piece was one of the ways I identified what the piece was about. (Every director does this-- tries each role on herself.) But each advancing year taught me a little more about generosity. Nearing my sixth decade, I could no longer rationally harbor illusions that I was the only one who could perform my work. In fact, I couldn't. If I could, it would not have been challenging enough for my extraordinary (read: younger) dancers. Age forced me to learn how to give everything to my dancers. That's not an easy lesson to learn, but I'm grateful for it. (Still pissed off, but grateful.) 

I cannot overstate how much a generous spirit contributes to good luck. Look at the luckiest people around you, the ones you envy, the ones who seem to have destiny falling habitually into their laps. What are they doing that singles them out? It isn't dumb luck if it happens repeatedly. If they're anything like the fortunate people I know, they're prepared, they're always working at their craft, they're alert, they involve their friends in their work, and they tend to make others feel lucky to be round them. 

Stupid

5. What is the dumbest idea? Thinking I could have it all. 

6. What made it stupid? Its built-in futility, given how I work. To lead a creative life, you have to sacrifice. "Sacrifice" and "Having it all" do not go together. I set out to have a family, have a career, be a dancer, and support myself all at once, and it was overwhelming. I had to learn the hard way that you can't have it all, you have to make some sacrifices, and there's no way you're going to fulfill all the roles you imagine. We thought, as women in the sixties and seventies, that we could change everything and remake all the rules. Some things changed, and some things pushed back. What makes it stupid is that I set up a way of working that was in direct conflict with my personal ambition. Something had to give.  

...

31. Which of your answers would you most like to change? Number six. Down deep, I still want to have it all.

- Twyla Tharp

Bridges

If we are to find our way across troubled waters, we are better served by the company who gave built bridges, who have moved beyond despair and inertia. 

Huffington Posts

My first taste if leadership came in a situation in which I was blissfully ignorant outsider. It was in college, when I became president of the Cambridge Union debating society. Since I had grown up in Greece, I had never heard of the Cambridge Union or the Oxford Union, and didn't know about their place in English culture, so I wasn't weighed gown with the kinds of overwhelming notions that may have stopped British girls from even thinking about trying for such a position. ... In this way, it was a blessing that I started my career outside my home environment. It had its own problems in that I was ridiculed for my accent and was demeaned as someone who spoke in a funny way. But it also taught me that it is easier to overcome people's judgment than to overcome our own self-judgment, the fear we internalize.

The Element

Sometimes, of course, your loved ones genuinely think you would be wasting your time and talents doing something of which they disapprove. This is what happened to Paulo Coelho. Mind you, his parents went further than most to put him off. They had him committed repeatedly to a psychiatric institution and subjected to electroshock therapy because they loved him. The next time you feel guilty about scolding your children, you can probably take some comfort in not resorting to the Coelho parenting system. ...

Few of us are encouraged to conform our family's expectations as firmly as Paulo Coelho was. But many people face barriers from family and friends: "Don't take a dance program, you can't make a living as a dancer," "You're good at math, you should become an accountant," "I'm not paying for you to be a philosophy major," and the rest.

When people close to you discourage you from taking a particular path, they usually believe they are doing it for your own good. There are some with less noble reasons, but most believe they know what's best. And the fact is that the average office worker probably does have more financial security than the average jazz trumpeter. But it is difficult to feel accomplished when you're not accomplishing something that matters to you. Doing something "for your own good" is rarely for your own good if it causes you to be less than who you are. 

The decision to play it safe, to take the path of least resistance, can seem irresistible, particularly if you have your own doubts and fears about the alternatives. And for some people it seems easier to avoid ruffling feathers and have the approval of parents, siblings, and spouses. But not for everyone. ...

The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.

Fallen Idols

One of my favorite novels is Tobias Wolff's "Old School", which captures the yearning of a young man to meet his literary idols - particularly Ernest Hemingway, the author's own boyhood hero. Wolff told me that his appreciation of Hemingway has grown over the years. "As you get older you understand how complicated were the lives of people you looked up to, and imagined were living untroubled and confident lives. So my feelings for Hemingway increased over the years because I no longer see him as just a legend or an icon, but as deeply flawed, struggling human being. And I'm all the more in awe of what he managed to do with his talent, considering what he needed to get through every day to give it full rein."

Colour Pencils

When I was three years old, my mum bought me a box of colour pencils. They came in all shades of loudness; their wonders a dazzle to my three-year-old imagination. When I opened the lid and slid the entire row out, I saw a rainbow-- a beautiful rainbow-- one that did not only come after the rain. With it I was going to make beautiful pictures, I said. I thought I was going to be an artist. So I took out my colouring book, flipped to the first page and there I saw a constellation of little dots, each with a number right beside it. And I took the black colour pencil because boundaries were supposed to be drawn in black-- only then would the picture come out right, just like the other colouring books I had. Then I started from dot number one, to number two, three, four, five, six, all the way to dot number forty nine, each stroke drawn with a determination, excitement and curiosity: what beautiful picture this one turn out like? The constellation of forty nine dots morphed into a jagged outline of a small boy walking his dog. He had a smile framing his face, and so had I. I started to take out the other colour pencils: red for the shirt, blue for the pants, yellow for shoes (but green for the shoelaces), and purple for the watch. I wanted to use all the colours I had in the box that my mum gave me to bring life into the happy boy who was walking his dog, teeth revealed through a wide smile-- oh, white for the teeth! And of course, black for the hair-- it should be black, only then that it would be just right, just like those pictures in the other colouring books I had.

When I was thirteen, I found the box of colour pencils my mum had bought for me. What was once a clean row of rainbow, neon in its splendour, was then a rolling set of muted colours, a rainbow out of order. What was once a neat line of soldiers-- impressive arrows!-- sharp, long, ready for a mission, was then a refuge of war veterans, greying and browning has-beens: some marred with teeth marks from my habit of biting the blunt end of the colour pencils, some dwarves of their statuesque past, and some hollow, missing their tips here and there like the smile of an old man. Some though were still standing tall and mighty. However, even with all the wealth of imagination of a thirteen-year-old, I still couldn't decide whether they were actually green or yellow, whether they were pink or purple, whether they were black or blue. They were not the right shade of green for the leaves, not the right shade of brown for the earth, not the right shade of black for the hair, not the right shade of white for the teeth. That was why even though I wanted to use all the colours I had in the box that my mum gave me to make beautiful pictures-- even though I thought I was going to be an artist-- I couldn't use them. And I didn't use them. I wanted to be the right artist. 

When I was twenty three, I forgot about my six-year-old imagination to make beautiful pictures. The box of colour pencils that my mum bought for me was stashed somewhere-- I couldn't really remember exactly-- probably among the piles of junk and bygone memories, a purgatory where childhood wonderment was choked by pragmatism and not-good-enoughs and that's-too-late-for-thats, a place where my twenty-three-year-old imagination dared not venture. 

When I was twenty three, I picked up a black pen to substitute the beautiful pictures I wanted to make with words milked clumsily from the wealth (and dearth) of my twenty-three-year-old imagination. There were no more constellations of little dots to connect, just rows of blank spaces, each neatly stacked on top of the other. It was like a wall, white-washed, pristine in its vacuum. So I began to write about the rainbow that slid out of the box of colour pencils my mum gave me, about the constellation of numbered dots that stirred my determination, excitement and curiosity, about the small boy walking his dog with a smile framing his face-- his red shirt, his blue pants, his white teeth, his black hair-- about the overcast ten years later that tarnished the rainbow and messed it all up; all these, one word at a time, neatly stacked in each row, just how they should be. However, by the end of this story-- when I appended my last full stop-- the smile that once mirrored the one framing the face of the boy walking his dog was not there. The constellations of little dots that marked the end of each sentence did not make a beautiful picture, no matter however way I tried to connect them. The words were broken wires, jagged in their strokes. It was an outline of confused, discombobulated picture of thingamajiggy. I turned my head left and right; there was no colour pencil to make it beautiful. 

Just In Case

Captured

Authenticity

"Most people are really doing the best they can. And that's just reality. You have to give other people the credit for their humanity."

Grey Area

And you know what, I think it's right that Tony is out because you should not define people by their maddest edges. And what Tony is, is that he is a semi-psychopath. He's a grey area. And the world doesn't like grey areas.

But the grey areas are where you find the complexity, where you find the humanity-- it's where you find the truth.

And Tony said to me,"Jon, can I buy you a drink in a bar? I just want to thank you for everything you have done for me."

And I didn't go. What would you have done?

- Jon Ronson

Brilliant

I am really grateful that my cousin came for my graduation. She is, other than my own mother, the one person who has pushed me, inspired me and believed in me to be the person that I am today.

Knowing her has opened a lot of doors for me: from teaching me that the tiny rolls that she lits up every now and then are called 'ciggies' and not 'smoke' (my English was adorably bad), to putting up with my ranting on my new-found, non-air-conditioned existence when I first came to Singapore, to furiously correcting my grammar, to training me into being able to spar in harmless, venomous banters a.k.a every dining experience I had with her (the gorging on the food is always as important as the verbal mortal combat), to giving me a place to stay in when I had no place to go and was too young to sign my own contracts, to introducing me to 'character building', to treating me like a grown-up when I couldn't still distinguish my knee from my elbow, to saving my life once when I mindlessly jumped into the adult pool even though I didn't know how to swim (I was six or seven at the time), to taking me to Disneyland for the first time, and to believing that I could be anything and everything that I set my mind to-- and actually meaning it. 

I do believe that once in a while, very rarely, we do meet people by whom we feel helplessly inspired. In her case, her extrovertedness always finds its way to make me come out of my shell a bit more-- actually, a lot more. Without saying a word she can make me speak up a lot more, make me articulate myself better and be mindful about what I think and say. Pacing her in a conversation is always a work-out; one after which I find myself mentally spent but a lesson I wouldn't trade for the world. 

However, this breed of people do not come in abundance. They never do. They come in only for a snippet portion of our lives, and once they have done what the divine has set them out to do, they move on-- perhaps to share their gift with some other people some place else. 

She is going back to Holland next month (after living here for over a decade), and perhaps we may only see each other once in a blue moon thereafter. Nonetheless, I am grateful that she has been a great influence on me growing up, and it felt amazing that she could be there to see me graduating from law school. She herself is a lawyer, and finally, she joked, we are in the same club. It feels really good that I can make her proud. 

Mantra

If the divine, cocked-eyed genius assigned to your case decides to let some sort of wonderment be glimpsed for just one moment through your efforts, then Olè! 

But if not, do your dance anyhow. And Olè! to you nonetheless for just having the sheer human love and stubbornness to keep showing up. 

- E Gilbert 

Price Tag

But writing well isn’t merely a utilitarian skill. It is about developing a rational grace and energy in your conversation with the world around you.

No one has found a way to put a dollar sign on this kind of literacy, and I doubt anyone ever will. But everyone who possesses it — no matter how or when it was acquired — knows that it is a rare and precious inheritance.

- Verlyn Klinkenborg

Wash

Sometimes we know our worries don't matter because these guys are singing somewhere in the world, and making it a better place for us to live in.

Leighton Davis Is My New Superhero

Monster

Beware that when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster; for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

- F Nietzsche 

Gratitude

A lot has changed in the past few weeks. My life which used to feel like an interminable wait for schooling to end, has passed that threshold finally. Suddenly things feel different, and the changes happen so quickly that I can hardly drink the whole thing in properlyl. Before I know it I have replaced some of the old with the new, obtained purchases I have never made before, and now am carrying a title that neither makes a student nor a working adult. It is simply a transition period, yes, and good God, it feels funny.

Perhaps the idealistic, wide-eyed part of me at times thinks that when major quakes happen in life, something like graduation or getting my own place, there will be some accompanying background music that primes you-- quite rightly-- for the things to come. But no, life has not its own soundtrack. Even when I was perspiring profusely writing in the first thirty minutes of my last few law school exams, there were no trumpets, no horns and no violin to prime me for the immense stress to which I was subjecting myself. The major quakes just happened and poof, when I finally manage to catch myself, everything was over. 

These changes, for the most part, they are good ones. And one thing that I realize is that I do not express gratitude often enough. The feeling dawned on me the first time when I was miles away in Milan, at the Duomo Cathedral, when I looked up at the altar of the church, and then the words came to me, 'Thank you God. This is amazing.' And it was. It had been for quite a while already.

So I took one of the candels, lit it up and put it amongs the many candelabrums at the Cathedral, and I gave thanks to Him. At that moment, in the stillness around me, I caught myself. I thought, 'Well done, Calvin Magnus. You are in a good place.' And at that point I decided to practice living the joy, to be mindful of it, and to express gratitude for it. Apparently, as evidenced by the cumulated receipts within the following 14 days, this made me burn a massive hole in my pocket. 

Things are to change again in the next twelve months. I hope that the next time I catch myself and note of the stillness around me won't be-- like the last time-- only after a long interval has lapsed since Milan. Take time off, and take notice of the (little) wins-- they are there somewhere-- and practice gratitude. Note to self.

I Don't Think About Work All The Time Anymore And I'm Seriously Way Happier by Charlie Hoehn

For a long time, I thought I was going crazy. I’d convinced myself that something horribly wrong was about to happen. I thought I would be stabbed, shot, or arrested every time I left my apartment. I was sure that there was an impending disaster that would melt the social contract and pit my neighbors against me. I saw criminals and undercover cops everywhere I went. All that “world is coming to an end” talk — I bought into it.

Every moment was exhausting. I dreaded being around more than one person at a time. I eyed everyone like they were judging me, pitying me, or attempting to manipulate me. My attention was divided in every interaction: one half of me would pretend to be normal, while the other half would be trying to keep it together.

I could feel various parts of my face twitching, like I was about to crack. My hands shook constantly. It got so bad that when a friend came to visit me, I couldn’t drink a glass of water because it kept spilling just from me holding it.

I tried to behave like nothing was wrong, when all I wanted to do was lock myself in a room and curl up in a ball. If someone had tapped me in the chest, my body would have shattered. If someone had ordered me to cry, my face would have flooded. I felt fragile, weak, and hollow.

I was ashamed. I didn’t want to be around anyone – not because I stopped liking people, but because I didn’t want them to catch my weird energy. I wearily watched my girlfriend cry when I confided that I felt dead inside, all the time, and I didn’t know how to fix it.

I laid on the ground for 20 minutes one night, wondering whether I should call an ambulance. My heart was beating so hard and fast that I could actually hear it, and my left hand was going numb. My first panic attack.

…

My anxiety lasted for more than a year. It affected how I breathed, how I thought, how I ate, how I slept, and how I talked. I was serious and tired and afraid, all the time. I wanted so badly to return to my normal, lively, care-free, confident self. But I didn’t know how to shake it.

I tried everything to fix myself: meditation, yoga, high-intensity workouts, long runs, therapy, therapy books, keeping a journal, super clean diets, extended fasting, drugs, deep breathing exercises, prayer, etc. I even took a six-week course, made specifically for men who wanted to overcome anxiety. A few of these things helped, a lot of them didn’t. Some of them made things worse.

Then one day, I discovered the cure. When my mind processed it and recognized it was the solution, I started laughing. The answer had been so obvious all along.

In less than one month, I was back to my old self. The cure for my anxiety was free, fun, painless, and immediately effective. I have no fear that those feelings will ever return. If they do, I’ll be able to wipe them out right away.

I hope this post can help you eliminate your anxiety once and for all. It’s not nearly as hard as you think.

…

“Adults are just obsolete children.” – Dr. Seuss

Have you ever witnessed a little kid working out on a treadmill?

Or meeting up with a friend to chat over coffee?

Or wearing a suit and making cold-calls?

Or attending a networking conference to hand out their business cards?

HELL NO. That stuff is lame and boring. If you saw a kid doing any of those things, you would laugh and wonder what the hell was wrong with them.

Kids don’t run to get in shape; they run to feel the grass beneath their feet and the wind on their face.

Kids don’t have a chat over coffee; they pretend and make jokes and explore the outdoors.

Kids don’t go to work; they play their favorite games.

Kids don’t network; they bond with other fun kids while playing.

There is no ego. There is no guilt. There is no past to regret, and no future to worry about. They just play.

And that’s what I’d forgotten, what I’d been missing, all along.

…

Giving myself permission to PLAY was the cure for my anxiety. It was a subtle but powerful shift in how I viewed the world.

For two years, I had unknowingly prevented myself from playing. I am a workaholic, which can be pretty horrible when you work alone. No one tells you to stop or take a break, or that you’re burning yourself out. I’d find myself tethered to the internet all day, sitting in a chair for 10 hours and staring at a bright screen. Even when I was “finished,” I’d impulsively check email several times between midnight and 2 a.m. I know it’s dumb and unnecessary and “What could be so important?” and “You need your sleep,” but I did it anyways. I was oblivious to the fact that my nerves were being frayed for hours on end, and that I desperately needed fun face-to-face time with real human beings.

What made matters worse were the idiotic rituals I’d fallen into. Drinking coffee all day, then drinking alcohol with friends on the weekend. I didn’t get outside, I didn’t move enough, I didn’t sleep enough. My weeks were a cycle of over-stimulation and numbing.

I read Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul. The message of the book hit me like a brick wall – it explained what I’d been doing wrong this whole time. I had completely deprived myself of play for nearly two years! Even when I had been “playing” (doing fun activities with friends), I would still feel guilty or self-conscious. My mind was elsewhere: what I’d done wrong in the past, how I was compromising my future, and how I was wasting the present. I was so critical of how I was living my life that I couldn’t be in the moment.

Getting out of that mentality saved me. I remembered how happy I’d been growing up, even just years before, and I knew why I’d been that way: I’d always allowed myself to play.

…

“A lack of play should be treated like malnutrition: it’s a health risk to your body and mind.” – Stuart Brown

The real problem had been my state of mind. I’d become increasingly adept at rejecting any form of “non-productivity.” I couldn’t allow any form of play if it didn’t contribute to earning money or doing something “meaningful.” Even when I was with friends or doing something that was supposed to be fun, I couldn’t stop thinking about all the time I was wasting. I wasn’t being productive; I was losing valuable time. I had to get back to work!

What would the world do without me and my important work?!

Without realizing it, I became very serious, even though I’d never been serious in my entire life. I couldn’t play because that meant I wasn’t working, and I couldn’t really work because I always felt tired and jaded (because I never let myself play!) This resulted in me convincing myself that life was a miserable grind for adults, and that I needed to be very serious if I wanted to get through it. I approached everything this way, and treated my work as a form of self-imposed slavery.

Little did I know how limiting that mindset was, and how much it was hurting the work I was doing.

…

Play is what has driven and shaped every beautiful part of our culture. Music, concerts, books, cooking, sports, movies, television, fashion, art, video games… We pay for these things so we can experience the fruits of another person’s PLAY. And the most virtuous form of work, according to some of our most revered and accomplished minds, belongs in the realm of play:

“I never did a day’s work in my life. It was all fun.” – Thomas Edison

“Play is the highest form of research.” – Albert Einstein

“The only way to do great work is to love what you do.” – Steve Jobs

“Without work, all life goes rotten, but when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.” – Albert Camus

“A master in the art of living draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play; his labor and his leisure; his mind and his body; his education and his recreation. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine whether he is working or playing. To himself, he always appears to be doing both.” – François-René de Chateaubriand

I know a lot of really, really accomplished people. Some of them approach their work in this way — they play. Others are very methodical, rigid, and systematic. It doesn’t look like play – it is unquestionably work. And it took me a long time to finally realize… I do not function well in the latter group.

I HAVE to approach work as play, otherwise my work sucks. When I tackle a problem with a sense of play – voluntarily because I’m inherently attracted to it – my creativity and optimism and happiness soars. I become fascinated with the world. I fall in love with people. And whoever I’m working with helps me make the game more fun, and our positive energy becomes contagious.

I realized that nearly every important career decision I’d made had been rooted in play. All the cool jobs I got – and the very concept of FREE WORK – ultimately came from me viewing the work as a form of play. They were activities I didn’t need to be rewarded or paid for (even though I was), because they were fun. It didn’t feel like hard work because I got to “play” with cool people, I got to be challenged and learn a ton, and most of the time, it felt like it was just a game I’d made up. And that’s where my best work came from: the belief that I was creating and playing my own game.

Once I saw that I’d forgotten to treat my work as play, I knew what I had to do in order to fix it. It was simply a choice.

…

When I moved down to Austin, a friend introduced me to his buddy David via email, and suggested we should meet. David replied to me with the usual request: he asked if I wanted to grab coffee. I paused a moment, then wrote back:

“Hey David, good to meet you. This is an irregular request, but you want to meet up at a park and play catch? Haven’t done that in awhile and it’s a lot more stimulating than sitting around and drinking coffee.”

His response:

“SURE THING. Playing catch sounds like a f*ing blast! I’ll ping you in a bit and if we can’t do it today, let’s play ball tomorrow!”

And it was a blast. It removed the pressure of us having to talk and impress each other, so we could just focus on the game.

I used to feel a bit nervous on first dates. I had to be “on” for hours at a time. The last date I went on was great — the energy wasn’t uptight at all because we played around the whole time. We ordered whisky Shirley Temples, shot cherry stems through our straws at random people, and cracked jokes about the karaoke singers. There were no attempts to be cool or charming, or thoughts about where this date might take us — it was all about making the moment fun.

That’s how I’m approaching my meetings and dates from now on: what games can we play together?

Life is funny. Back in college, I used to read Tucker Max’s site and think, “What a fun guy.” I’d go out with my friends and drink, and we’d try to create our own crazy stories. Now, Tucker is a close friend. We play homerun derby together every weekend. We come up with fun pranks we can pull. We make inappropriate jokes until we’re doubled-over laughing.

I just finished six weeks of improv classes — three hours every Monday. Every session, I was thrust into situations where I was essentially guaranteed to fail and look foolish. At first, I was nervous and slightly mortified. My heart beat rapidly and I would sweat when I had to perform in front of 15 other people. But by the end of the six weeks, improv became a tremendous source of strength. All of us were there to play, to go with the flow and say “YES” to every possible situation we were thrown into, to cheer each other on and have fun together. We all looked foolish, but we all trusted each other. And that’s how it should be all the time — saying “YES” to every moment, knowing it’s another opportunity for you to embrace life and have fun (Improv, by the way, was the most effective remedy to curing social anxiety that I could have possibly conjured).

I’m signing up for more improv classes. I’m scheduling travel. I’m having fun because I’m making play a priority. And you know what? I feel 1000 times better than I ever thought I would. I’m back to my normal self. I love life again.

…

Play is what we all LOVE to do. Play is where our subconscious naturally guides us. Play is the state where we are truly ourselves, once we let go of our egos and fear of looking stupid. Play immerses us in the moment, where we effortlessly slip into flow. Play allows us to imagine, to create, to bond with and understand each other. Play is what creates our strongest social circles.

And most importantly, play utterly destroys anxiety. Play gets you around other humans, face-to-face, and allows you to form a real connection with them. Play allows you to stop taking your life so damn seriously, so you can start living again.

Life was never supposed to feel so serious or scary in the first place! The people who try to convince you that it has to be that way just aren’t very good at playing. They’ve forgotten what it’s like. So have a laugh, remind them, then go find better playmates. Everyone is looking for someone to have fun with. Go out, create your own games, then get others to join in. Just play.

…

If you’re struggling with anxiety… Take a moment to ask yourself the following questions:

1. Am I allowing myself to have regular guilt-free play with friends?
2. Am I sitting and staring at a screen for most of the day?
3. Am I consuming information that’s feeding my anxiety? (e.g. conspiracy websites, fear-mongering news)
4. Am I moving enough each day to exhaust myself? (i.e. lifting heavy weights, playing sports, sprinting)
5. Am I outside getting natural sunlight and fresh air each day? (I couldn’t get enough sun at the time, so I did 30-days of Vitamin-D + fish oil, along with Vitamin-B. Both helped me ease up and feel better)
6. Am I sleeping eight hours per night?
7. Am I consuming too many stimulants (caffeine, sugar, grain carbs) and depressants (alcohol, drugs) throughout the week?

Those are the areas that will help your anxiety tremendously, once you’ve taken steps to fix them.

And if — like me — you realize you haven’t been allowing yourself to play, then go through your “Play History.” Write down all the activities that repeatedly brought you joy from your childhood, then start incorporating them back into your life. For me, it was: baseball (catch and homerun derby), pranks and practical jokes, learning and developing skills, travel, performing for an audience, film, building/creating things, and improv comedy.

You don’t need money to play. You don’t need more free time. You can always do it. Play is a state of mind – it is a way to approach the world.

It’s only a choice: Anxiety or Play. Take your pick.

“Man is God’s plaything, and that is the best part of him. Therefore every man and woman should live life accordingly, and play the noblest games… What, then, is the right way of living? Life must be lived as play…” – Plato