Wednesday, February 18, 2004
Walking
All you have to be is what you are—not the you that you were in that present moment which has just escaped and fallen into the past, nor the you that will be a long time from now. Very soon, you will have a chance to be the you that you can become just now. That is all you have to be.
The human being is a walking creature. We walk into times of joy and then walk out of them again, but if we keep our feet moving as straightly and we can, each small inch of time brings us a little bit closer to infinity.
Photos • Yunnan • Way of Life • Optimism • (41) Trackbacks • Permalink
Monday, February 16, 2004
Your Wings
During the vacation I just spent with my mother, so many of the veils over my understanding have disappeared, and the eyes of my soul feel as if they can see more clearly. Of course, every advance in one’s own understanding reveals more clearly that vast oceans of mysteries lie beyond one’s grasp, but there are moments of joy that come with it as well, which somehow make things seem as if all is right with the world. It lasts this way for a while, until the time comes for you to pass some major new test, and acquire powers and knowledge you didn’t know you wanted. Confusion is a necessary ingredient in the stew of spiritual growth, but you never know that until the spiritual meal of the day is finished and ready to enjoy.
Anyway, one day I was talking with my mother about a number of things, many related to my early childhood, and I realized that I had gone through a large part of my life always wishing to serve others on the quest that they had rather than to take up my own. I had a feeling that I was destined to be the father of someone important, remembered as something like a footnote, treated only in the introduction of that person, as a background to their lives.
Today I can put that notion at ease more easily than before. Whatever or whoever my children, or friends, or anyone else in my heart will choose to be is very much up to them. But my choice is the one which is up to me. Each of us has only our own life to live, and a major part of that life is to take up the challenge of making one’s own special contribution to the world. No one else would ever think to do the things you can do, in the way you can do them, simply because they are not you, and they have other tasks of their own to fulfill, other potential they must unfold.
As beautiful as others are, whether they fly high above you or below, there’s no one else with those wings at your side, and there’s no one else who can fly with them.
David's Life • Photos • Yunnan • Way of Life • Permalink
Wednesday, January 21, 2004
One Month, Two New Years
The fireworks burst all around, rising up between the apartment buildings and all around them, firecrackers booming into the earliest hours of the morning. The land where fireworks were invented has little fear of using them to full effect when the occasion calls for it, and for centuries, there has been no greater occasion than that of the Spring Festival.
For Chinese, the Spring Festival actually comes in the winter, but it signalizes that spring is coming. Moreover, according to the traditional Chinese Lunar calendar, the new year starts today. So Chinese first celebrate the international new year, wishing all their friends a happy new year, lots of good luck, all the best things in life, happiness everyday, and so on, and then about a month later, they wish everyone the same thing again for the more important Chinese version of the same holiday.
As I begin writing this, it’s already 1:30 in the morning, and the fireworks are still going. They’re much less than the cacophony of the midnight hour, but it’s not unlikely that if you were sitting here at this moment, looking out of any given window in a Chinese city, you might be able to see more fireworks too.
But maybe this is almost the last of it. Maybe Shanghai is ready to sleep now, and begin living the new year it has just celebrated. There are just a few drunken fireworks now, as if straggling home from a big party, totally unwilling to let it end for real, still singing on the road when everyone else has gone to sleep.
Monday, January 12, 2004
Pandora's Hope
In a previous entry, I wrote about how rare it is that someone really finds “true love” in this world. For a long time, I had cherished the idea that I might be able to create a truly happy and successful family, but after some disappointing experiences, I began to believe that I had failed. I seemed to be, like so many other people, condemned to live my life in solitude, or at best, in a pale shadow of my impossibly idealistic dream.
My dear mother took issue with that. In an email, she wrote to me:
Minor criticism: I wished that the article on marriage would have been more upbeat. There are some good things about being single.
At first, I wanted to respond to her that I didn’t feel upbeat about marriage at the time I wrote that article, and how could I have written something that I didn’t feel? But then I started to think that my negative attitude was the fruit of a belief that, for whatever reason, I was chosen to suffer in this life, to have my dreams dashed to the ground instead of fulfilled. It seemed impossible that things could have happened as they did if this were not true.
But then I happened upon a very special film in a local DVD store, and it started to make me think again, about the great stories that people have always told and remembered through the ages. How many of them ended with the hero realizing that he was simply chosen to fail and suffer in this life? How many of them allowed our hopes to die? Nearly each story which lasts in our hearts is a Pandora’s Box of turns and disasters, most of them far worse than anything I have known. And in so many of them, the main characters feel exactly the same things that I have felt, and for a moment, they too lose sight of what dreams they know are still worth holding on to.
In the end, that may be the purpose of stories—all of them must contain tension and conflict, or else our hearts will not acknowledge them as true or interesting. Our very lives are about resolving the tensions and conflicts we detest so much, and we require that a story bring out in us a new knowledge or a new faith in our power to be the heroes that our lives require us to be.
Because, while the characters of our favorite stories may be up against all the forces of evil combined, their journeys are just reflections of our own, blown up bigger for us to understand and relate to in a new way. Might it not be heroic to keep on believing in the possibility of love and happy family life—while at the same time appreciating the beauty of being single? In some ways, we are always alone—in our secret thoughts, and in the dreams that even we forget upon waking in the morning. Yet in so many ways, it is only through the others, whom we dare to allow into our lives and hearts, that we learn to make sense of who we are, and come to understand what being alone in a healthy way really means.
We began the journey of life at our mothers’ breasts, drinking on the milk of dependence. Slowly, we have learned to be individuals. And yet we must transcend even that independence in order to become interdependent on those whom we love. In that glorious adventure of relying on others as well as ourselves, hope is indeed a most valuable thing.
Tuesday, January 06, 2004
Imagine
Ever since the turn of the millennium, each New Year’s Day has felt like a leap into the future. Here it is: January 7, 2004— already seven days into the third year since 2001: A Space Odyssey became alternate history rather than a possible future. We still have no monoliths, aliens, or crazy space stuff. There’s plenty of crazy people stuff though—but we’ve been living with our own craziness for so many centuries that now it seems almost normal.
As you already know, I’ve enjoyed science fiction since I was a kid. It’s filled with imagination, creativity, and it has often been the spark that pushes real science in new and interesting directions. It discusses problematic issues of technology and philosophy before they even become real issues. For example, when the news first started talking about the cloning controversy, many people familiar with science fiction felt like they’ve been down that road already, and long ago formed an educated opinion about cloning, wether for or against it.
In many ways, it is just as important to look into our future as it is to look into our past. Making sense of history has always been a way to make sense of ourselves, and learning where we’ve been, it is said, can tell us the most about where we are going. Yet it is the art of imagination that actually dares to directly ask the question of what we are going to do with our future, and it’s myriad answers provide us with a myriad possibilities to dream of.
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