A meaningful life.

What is a meaningful life? Would only nothing less than a life filled with countless adventures and exotic experiences be meaningful? This was my misconception.

A meaningful life, by my current reckoning, needs purposeful thought. Even the dullest circumstances, when lit by a thoughtful narrative, can produce a meaningful existence and a charming story. Consider instead a fascinating life devoid of description. The participant of this life is lured from moment to moment by a desire for higher emotion that is trained on the most captivating, brilliant, yet ever-changing circumstances, yet never once examines the moment. Is this meaningful? Fun, maybe, but hardly meaningful.

I've noticed that I had been living an un-meaningful life. Almost like chasing after a butterfly: exerting to finally nab the coveted prize but uncertain what to do with it afterwards and unable to remember the chase. Have I been pursuing these phantom butterflies for 30 years?

Things are different now. I am outwardly quieter but it can be rather intense on the inside. The implications surprise me daily. For one, watching television has become impossible for me: I cannot ascribe meaning to the content or I weary from trying when content is served too quickly.

Assignment

MK doll

How often do we assign meanings to our feelings?

I often find myself explaining how I felt after the emotion occurred. A correct explanation would justify the associated emotion. But I get lazy and do not always explain myself, even to myself. What happens then: Are these silent emotions "justified"?

I am curious because I've always had silent emotions all my life. Specifically, had I been living an unexplained and impoverished life?

Introspection did not come naturally to me, until I had to explain myself to others. This may be what is commonly referred to as "accountability". Becoming an adult may just be increased accountability, both to others and more important to oneself.

Critical events can change people's lives. How many of such instances start from increased introspection?

Explanations enrich our emotions. More broadly, we often assign meaning and project ourselves onto other people and things. Our first tinted opinion of the world would indicate more about us than the world. But ultimately, this projection and association enriches our lives even if we get it wrong.

Which makes me think: How often do we assign meanings correctly to our emotions? How does the interaction between thoughts and emotions complicate our ability to understand how we feel? Since our thoughts can influence our emotions, thinking/explaining can easily steer us away from the first reasons behind these emotions.

This is perhaps how we indulge in our little delusions, wrapping them with false assignments to our emotionally charged lives.

Perhaps this is how we distinguish ourselves from animals. Humans and animals both have emotional capacity, but only humans actively clothe it with meaning.

How do cats apologize?

Petting

We humans say "I'm sorry" when we are apologetic. We say it sometimes even when we are not apologetic perhaps in proper manners or to achieve some ulterior motive. Hence, the words "I'm sorry" cannot be the fundamental means of apologizing.

For instance, cats don't say "I'm sorry" when they feel apologetic. So how do they apologize?

Well, if they can even feel apologetic. I suspect so.
Cats get into fights with other cats or their human companions and promptly resume affectionate behavior soon after these fights. Surely between the fight and ensuing affection a cat must have felt apologetic about the incident and decided to forgive and patch up? Or have they just forgotten about the fight?

Until I figure the answer to this question, my method of apologizing to my cat will have to suffice. I just hope she understands. Or forgets that I got mad at her.

Piercing Eyes

Piercing Eyes

Writing relates me to the world.

Telling a story forces me to seek meaning within the facts and indulge in a romance with my imagination.

I will write again, not because I have more time now but less.

----------------------------

I walk by a red, squalid house every day. Its paint was peeling and reeked whenever the door creaked open.

Every week, different people would loiter about its front steps talking loudly, usually too agitated or too indifferent.

I didn't know who lived there. I didn't bother to find out. I usually averted my eyes as I scurried across this house, as if my feet had already decided a fear about this place.

Just this Friday, I walked by this red house again on my way home. The afternoon air was heavy. Too hot for a latte and too humid for a walk. Nonetheless I had them both.

I sipped my latte as I stepped into the shadow of the red house. Fool. You can't hurry when you are drinking. I reluctantly slowed my pace, while it cursed at me.

Someone started whistling from the house. The sudden music made me turn, bracing myself for an awkward greeting.

A black man, with graying hair, was standing on the lawn with a large green sofa. The sofa was gaudy but well kept. No visible stains,or tears. There were no ruffles on its skirt while it sat squarely in the lawn.

With a stiff brush, he gently and methodically combed off the dust on his sofa. He moved purposely across the sofa, moving the same brushing motion to a different patch, keenly inspecting the previous one.

It was as though he had already divided the task into hundreds of little steps which ensured a pleasing result which only he can appreciate. And pleased he was as he whistled to his flawless execution of each step.

I was confused.
This house looked in pain from the outside, yet in it lives a man who brushes his couch more carefully than I with my cat. Does the inside of this red house look better than the outside? If so, why? What is the story behind this house which haunts my commute?

My lips left my latte and my feet immediately hastened. Before my eyes could pause to collect more details, I had already left the house more curious but no less fearful than before.

-------------------------

A story is never over until you stop telling it.

The stars

NateNAngela@Halloween 12

At my high school graduation, my teacher gave each student in my class a simple congratulatory card. On it showed a child gazing curiously into the moon, sitting in a sprinkling of stars. The message: "shoot for the moon. Even if you, miss you'll be amongst the stars."

Ignoring the obvious impracticality, or even awkwardness, those words were marginally inspiring and mildly impressive. Back then, of course. Yet sufficient for it to persist in me to this day.

Thank you SKK. Your mark, though subtle, is indelible.

Novels

We light curves

Musings on types of novel-creation. It would appear, from my limited readings, that the novels are inspired by two means: conclusion-inspired or theme-inspired. Of course, there will be exceptions to these which may very well be the majority. Nonetheless, such a simplistic categorization may elucidate or enrich reading.

Conclusion-inspired writing begins with a conclusion; thereafter the author enriches the process to the conclusion. Example:
Step 1: My family bought a dog. My dog died.
Step 2: My family bought a dog, a german shepherd. My dog, died four years ago.
Step 3: My family bought a dog, a humanly-sentient german shepherd. His wonderfully mysterious sensitivity to our lives started my family's passion of pets. My dog, died four years ago.
Step 4: My family bought a dog, a humanly-sentient german shepherd. His wonderfully mysterious sensitivity to our lives started my family's passion of pets. (Insert more details) My dog, died four years ago.
Step n: "Novel completed".

Theme-inspired writing may originate from an author's desire to create a fictitious world or describe an imagined variation of a current situation. The author might then weave incidental stories, which describe the world or phenomena created by the author. Example:
Step 1: In the future, mankind struggles for individuality and integration into complex social networks.
Step 2: In the future, mankind struggles for individuality and integration into complex social networks. Jane finds herself subject to such personal conflict daily. She leads a typical life: complete with an awkwardly-functional family, image-conscious cadre of friends, hypersensitive allergies to basic food types and an incurable addiction to expose her thoughts to the multi-web. The multi-web is a reinvention of the world wide web after the "year of criticality", as termed by workers in networking theory. The web, as we know it, inevitably embedded human interactions into its transmission protocol. A user of the multi-web is no longer a user, but a key component of its functionalities, in a statistically averaged sense. ...
Step n: (story continues to a satisfying ending about Jane's story, with an extremely detailed description of the world I intended)

My point:
I lament the rarity of books with strong evidence of both inspirations.

窗口

Fallen View

宁静的清晨四点半。破晓前已经从满身汗的睡眠中醒来。睁开眼；四周似熟似生，紧紧对照了目前生活的状态。感觉上似乎成为失去权力的长期旅客，时间停留在船乘离开与进港的失落。言语，笔记，手足，都无法表达目前的感受。渐渐习惯了为前途而恐慌。渐渐为目下的方便而部下无数谎言。累了吧，不想再解释了，也不见得有愿耳恭听。只有五点钟，电风扇的杂声陪伴我。

Bottling it up

Bottling it up

Every once in a few months I ask myself the question I currently fear most: what have I been doing with my life?

............

Moments later I realized my breathing had stopped in pace with my frozen thoughts. The stillness condenses into a blush which blooms a sweat along my spine.

Damn. This occurred more frequently after entering an ivory tower where material rewards nearly disappear, and silence grips me whenever I find myself. Then alternately exposed, too quickly, to the fancies of the "real world", always encrusted with a thick layer of showiness.

How do you crack an rock? Alternately heat and cool its exterior with ruthless haste. Do it enough and you will find shards or crumbs. Useless knowledge about geography still mocks me after all these years.

Again! "What were the past 27 years spent achieving?" This time, much louder, followed by a decidedly painful silence. Water starts dripping down my face.

I, like most of my peers, am a multi-millionaire: I've already been given beyond 14 million minutes to decide the answer to this question. Too many gone, too few remaining. Five million were spent sleeping. Nearly two million were consumed away. With my memory probably holding less than tens of thousands of minutes worth, I wonder about the squandered remainder.

I forcefully bottle up this minute's worth of panic, suddenly resolved to act; wishing away this dread, knowing its shadow will seek me again.

Reaching for the towel, I step out of the shower and begin my promised new day.

Technorati Tags: graduate school

Friends

Range - View from Sulphur Mountain, Banff.

Who do we consider our friends: people who care about us or whom we can get along? One condition does not strictly guarantee the other. We sometimes find ourselves having to tolerate our friends when one of these two conditions are starkly absent. But tolerate we do, if only to sustain a lazy habit, or subjugate to peer pressure.

I've seldom sought new friendships, even though I like meeting new people. Meeting new faces erases the tiring recurrence of bad habits and social bullying. Perhaps this is why I like traveling. It affords a temporary escape from my habits. But, I digress. This, after all, is a blog.

I've only come to realize the influence friends exert on my life. I start to behave more like them, or less like them, but never unchanged. I tend to either strongly agree, sometimes without reason, or strongly disagree, usually with unthinking haste. The latter situation is nearly always a precursor to the end of an the friendship.

It is a compulsory struggle which bears upon me. I am strangely disturbed by my inability to stay constant, or to hazard a cliche: "stay true to myself", whatever "true" and "myself" may mean to the world. If my "true self" is merely a composite of past prejudices, should I accept influence of friendships as a personality gained from my history?

If we do become our friends, or take on some of their dominant qualities, should we not surround ourselves with positive people whom we can get along? Which brings us back to my first question: what about our friends whom we care about but exhibit very negative personalities? After all, friendships are about "being there" and "support" and other terms which go well with Saturday morning cartoons. Maybe we should also grow such a positivism in ourselves, so that our more negative friends can benefit from.

Unless, of course, they are the sort who dislike optimism or constructive opinions. After all, who likes to be told what to do, in this new liberal age?

If these don't work, we can always go with what is most convenient. But to think that we spend so much of our time worrying about our career, our future and finances, should we not devote attention to picking our friends who decide the our personality?

Tough choices with no single solution for every situation.

The mountain range we have to adventure continues into the horizon, with the setting sun blinding our eyes temporarily from the discouragement of the majestic view.

Offline

Microphone

....
In the meantime, I've thought about what I want from myself during this lifetime; a lifetime with an unannounced end.

I think my current answer is more specific than my first. Perhaps I am driven by my peers and mentors to seek meaningful creativity with my hands. Standing in the light of their enlightened minds, I wonder how far mine could shine.

And thus I continue to challenge myself.

Histories and Hysteresis

Crying.

A tree in a city's winter,
stripped of its cover...
...the foliage obscures the intents,
wrong turns and scars.

In winter, the leaves wither to reveal the emotional supports. Only then can we appreciate the structure of our sense of emptiness, pretense and insecurities.

Old proclivities and bad memories: histories and hysteresis.
Everyone deserves a private audience with their comfortable flaws.

Confused branchings align to a moving sun. We adjust to our daily contradictions and oxymorons, spreading our attention thinly over ill-defined expectations.

Each new branch walks in air, yet thinning all the time. Its tip turns back to find a shrinking trunk accompanied by a growing uncertainty. The branch adds what it can to augment the trunk, while the trunk teaches the branch its limits.

Exposed and weak, we stand against uncaring traffic, looking at the next naked tree, wondering if our apprehensions meet.

Toughen your bark; wait for the certain spring. Then again, you may hide your branches in secret hope that you will weary of the game if the final winter does not take you.

Come Spring

Fruition in Spring

My branches may shiver and my roots rock in the dirt. My dark colors too, add age beyond my expectancy. I hide in my layers, waiting for the scent of green. It will, I am sure, come for me.

Wait for my leaves to dance in sunlight, drawing circles in the breeze. Stand under them to twinkle starlight in the midday sun.

Take these fruits I saved in winter; harvest me.
Come spring I will feed you nectar of bees's envy.

An echo

The institution of marriage is founded on the same human tendencies as dating. Except the former legislates a much larger inertia against separation.

Yet in our longing for a type of perfection in another person, we neglect to look inward. For how can 2 hollow logs burn beyond the brevity of an forgotten flame?

Thin lines of truth

Centered

Everybody lies, with or without intention.

It starts with harmless exaggeration, perhaps to entertain the audience. After all, we all have soft spots for fireworks. Embellish the story, enrich the experience.

Next, our incomplete memory begs creative reconstruction. None of the details need to be correct or even make perfect sense. It just needs to fool the listener.

The vicious cycle repeats with the audience, but in a somewhat the reversed order (or maybe none at all): reconstruct the story when it needs to be retold, often so that the story "feels" accurate, then quickly embellish as is appropriate. Perhaps this is why old recipes are constantly "re-invented". Or so that the word "re-invented" may be meaningful.

If only all stories needed to make a minimum amount of "sense", for error-checking. It could be as easy as making logic annotations to the story or honest self-doubting remarks. How about making statements falsifiable? Leaving little "mental exercises" for the listener to complete could start the reconstruction process earlier.

But what I seek is utopian. The world finds on interest in verfiability; it merely wants to dangle morsels of fact on the thin lines of truth, against the backdrop of lies colored to dazzle.

Simple complication

Intertwined

It is an ironic struggle of man: to make life easy to understand but sophicated enough to enjoy. The brain feeds on novelty, while the heart sings only to simplictic ideals.

Perhaps this is why societies are formed from families: keep the fireworks close but the fire closer.

In the jungle of complicated human networks, our emotional capacity can only manage a small feature of the greenery. The patch of dirt that we never want changed. Yet we still secretly long for surprises, if only to be frustrated by it.

Then from our tiny patches in the jungle, we reach out to touch our neighbors with our roots holding our hands. If we are lucky, we'll find other plants to hold our hands.

The tiny connections often sleep in a larger nest of uncertain motives. The little movements cannot possibly fathom the larger influences which carry it along. Only much later can these motives be understood.

As time washes away the burdensome details, our mind slowly painting back the emotional content of what transpired. Gradually, we wrap ourselves in untruths that warm our starving souls. Stomachs are easy to fill but hearts growl forever. Armed with our imagination and brushes made from the most painful memories, we cover the world in shades of anger and joy, dipping into the palette of lies that were taught. Only the bravest ones mix their own colors.

We are all artists in a way. Painting the saddest, most complex, intricate and breathtaking mural known to this blue world.

腐朽的。坚定的。

Use, Abuse

放弃的理由往往是因为外表腐朽，不及往日。可是潜在的，是不是肉眼所难察觉的坚强？

那么灿烂的外貌可脆柔，只要毅力长存，放弃的理由也就荡然无存。

We want to believe

Crispy

Fools choose to believe, others just choose and believe. When is it too late to be a fool?

.......

It is a familiarity that transcends reason: you have experienced it before, although you can't possibly have. Something longing something fonder. Insert the appropriate obsession.

It has been told in movies, described within novels, ripened legends and myths, inspired songs for millennia, molded almost every adolescence with an idle luxury for imagination. Surely, you must recognize it.

Someone once told me that the first love is the only love. You'll spend the rest of your life attempting to recreate it.

An ignorant heart can paint even darkest skies with rainbows. Or perhaps novelty just sweetens the dullest gestures. A combination of both, I suppose, can create the best puppy love. But you'll only get to use it once. Time and reality are the two daggers that will murder every naiveness you have.

I still think that all this is wrong. I still want to be the fool. Even when life wrinkles my smile. For what else is worthy enough to move on to?

Finally Free

Web o Deceit

From the dark lonely I flee.

Hide away, poor startled soul,
a decrepit shell powerless and cold.
A secret pleasure takes it toll,
years of solitude I stole.

In quiet pillows screams of pain,
tears clawing the violin in my brain.

Ugly dreams roused my sleep,
I learnt that even sweat, shouts and shrieks.

Fall through winter, heart's asleep,
it finds comfort in the snow and sleet.
Pure white crestfallen from heaven,
friend of mine, Melancholy,
froze the deep winter asleep.

Why clench the cruel past?
Ruler I am, in a kingdom of none.

Why shy from other souls?
I carry a baggage from which people shun.

Why fear when others extol?
Too bright a sun can be hateful to behold.

Damn the propensities! Damn the cold!

From the dark lonely I flee.
One day I will finally be free.

A distant hope

?

5am and woken to a pulsating despair.
Yet another dream that he did not want. Not a nightmare, he's certain. Or so he tells himself. But enough anger and fear were mixed in that his emotions were stirred.

He wishes for a reality that only his mind can afford. But he always wakes up just when it starts to sweeten. He begins to think that life, like his dreams, take on this pattern. Like a carrot dangling before a famished mind.

5am. Birds always chirp at 5am. They must have a large carrot.

Silent Night

Labor of the tropics

Warm air slips into the room, kindling the sleeplessness that lies on the pillow. Another lonely night in the confines of his tiny room. He consoles himself with the cushy bed.

"Hey, at least I get to do whatever I want."

He finds warmth only in the balmy summer air. The heavy air suffocates his thoughts. An uncertain reverie pulls the consciousness away from his troubled life.