If I decide to live in the US in 2012, I’m thinking of getting an RV or preferably a van and live in it. Drive to the warm areas of the US, visit friends for a few weeks or months, and eventually learn to live in places where I don’t know a single person.
I’m pretty close to that right now; my current roommate I’ve only met once snowboarding, though I see Tommy at least once a week.
I worry about showers and laundry. Laundry can be done with laundromats. Showers I feel will be like living at Black Rock City, using baby wipes in between showers. For real showers, I can couchsurf and get a shower and bed. It’d be nice to figure out how to get real showers, though.
I think it’d be a great learning experience. I’d learn to not worry about rent, what I truly need to sustain myself, and the mobility would allow me to see more places without figuring out where to live next.
I do worry that my increasingly vagrant/hermit lifestyle will get me too isolated from the rest of humanity. Not feeling a connection with long-term friends could have a mental impact on me. I’m already pretty isolated, staying home all the time, reading books. My only interactions are when I go do yoga or go to a men’s circle. If I travel all the time, those scheduled human interactions will be gone.
Food is another concern. Refrigeration, specifically, since I’m sure I’ll have lots of fresh fruits and veggies. If I park in the shade all the time my food might survive, but there’s no guarantee of that. Maybe I’ll just have to make frequent trips to supermarkets and farmers’ markets.
My van will smell like kombucha and fresh fruits all the time.
Chinese people and its culture relies on luck a lot. A lot of celebratory greetings are “I hope you have lots of fortune (luck and wealth)”, if you escape death you say “good luck, good luck”, etc. Going to fortune tellers often means they tell you what to do to bring good luck to you (wear red, put a table here, etc.)
Gambling is another thing. Chinese people love gambling, and love to beat the odds. Only luck can allow you to beat the statistical odds, right? Lots of weird superstitions like, don’t pat someone’s shoulders while they’re gambling, or accusing dealers or other players of giving them bad luck. The God of Gamblers movie is a cultural phenomenon. (This guy can always win. He can change cards, he can read people’s minds. Sure, a lot of it is skill. But he’s beaten luck. Or maybe luck’s on his side.)
The other day I was telling Tommy how I like my uncle’s wife, she’s a pretty cool chick, and that he’s a lucky guy. But I just realized that by saying he’s a lucky guy, I implied that he doesn’t deserve her. If he deserved her, I’d have said, “Of course he got his wife, he deserves at least that good of a woman.”
So luck implies a lack of deservedness, the opposite of entitlement. You’re beating the odds. You’re not supposed to get this result, but you got it anyway.
In the Chinese culture of always relying on luck, on always wishing each other good luck, doesn’t this imply that Chinese people don’t think they deserve anything? That they don’t deserve riches, but hopefully they’ll get lucky and strike it rich anyway. That they don’t deserve a beautiful, smart, sexy wife, but they’ll get one anyway.
For the first time, I feel old. My body has been telling me that with every injury, with every wound that takes forever to heal. But my mind has always been sharp—until yesterday.
Yesterday I told Wendy I was using Evernote. Just trying it out, nothing serious. She immediately shared her screen with me and showed me all the cool stuff she was doing with it, how she was using every little helper function they included: tags, saved searches, automated toilet flushing. I was unimpressed: I have no need for all this, I can flush my own toilet, thank you very much.
Yet there was a moment of realization that I was refusing to learn these tips and tricks. Once I saw it as a choice, I wondered, Am I afraid of learning something new and complex? The whole time I’ve been telling everyone, including myself, that I like simplicity, that I live a simple life. But I never noticed the latent fear of learning yet-another-thing.
Maybe I’ve grown wiser, less easily impressed by complexity. Maybe I’ve learned that complexity is usually glitz and glam but when it comes down to it, it’s just distraction from getting shit done. That’s what I like about simplicity: it cuts away all the bullshit and lets me see whether the thing works or not, period. It is very obvious.
Lifestyle is created not by the actions of one day, but by many little steps over months and years. I’ve gradually worked on eating healthier, exercising, socializing, saving money, and experimenting endlessly to create my current lifestyle. How to Create Powerful Habits for Life by Leo Babauta (Zen Habits) made me realize I have been developing habits to mould and sustain my current lifestyle. Here’s my summary:
Achieving Goals with Habits
Success starts with doing the small steps that lead to goals
Habits are a way of doing those small steps
Oftentimes people jump headfirst toward goals but don’t establish habits needed to sustain them
Can’t achieve goals that take months or years without first instilling small habits
Creating a habit is more important than doing something big today; a tiny habit will accumulate in weeks & months to more than what can be done today
Focus on creating a habit instead of seeing immediate results
Simple Method for Creating Powerful Habits
Don’t do the habit the first week. Plan it out:
What were past obstacles?
Who will be the support system?
Talk to my support system about the new habit
The more consistent the habit, the stronger it is. Take a daily trigger (waking up, eating, brushing teeth) & do habit immediately after trigger every day for 4–6 weeks
Positive feedback. Every time I go running, reward myself. Make the habit enjoyable (e.g., with music), focus on positive aspects, get positive encouragement from others: as soon as I do the habit, report the habit (blog, twitter, email, forum, “gone 24 hours without smoking”). Focus on creating the habit rather than on instant results.
Report my progress to a social group. There will be times when I fall off the habit; have people to call before that happens
Adjust habit as needed. Is the habit too difficult? Unforeseen obstacles?
Overcoming Habit Failure
One habit at a time; doing too much leads to failure
Make habit extremely small (5–10 minutes) and expand later
When interruptions happen, either:
prioritize habit, or
accept interruption and resume afterward
Viewers’ Questions
Identify negative habits’ triggers and replace the habit with a positive one (e.g., typing notes after meeting instead of smoking)
Negative self-talk:
listen to it (as if it were someone trying to quit smoking and saying “I need it”, for example)
look at it like a bug
and mentally squash it (“look at how many people have quit smoking”, “look at how many people have ran marathons”)
Overcoming laziness: positive feedback is easiness; negative feedback is hard work. Reverse it: negative feedback from social motivators (gotta tell everyone I’m lazy), positive feedback is feeling great doing it and bragging rights
Restarting habits: make it as easy as possible (just get on the bike for ten minutes; just lace up and run), even if it seems ridiculously easy compared to past
Become conscious of urges: tally up each time an urge comes up before doing it. See how often it happens and what the triggers are
Blogging creates accountability and positive reinforcement
Avoid feeling guilty. Habits are a skill: mess up and try again
Having a routine makes habits easier. Even if every day is different, tie habit to something daily (waking up, breakfast, brushing teeth)
Average habits take 68 days, but easier habits take 12 days. The easier the habit the easier it is to form
Has the habit formed yet? Does it feel automatic now? Does it feel like an urge to do after the trigger? Look at my record: have I consistently been doing it, or spotty? If the answer is yes to the above, then a new habit can be formed
In the weeks leading up to my parents’ visit, I noticed an increase in fantasies where I would have smart quips to put down any insults my dad would throw at me. I would recognize these as they appeared, cut off the fantasies, and become present. Sometimes they would persist, but either way, my mind was occupied.
Lately I’ve been trying to replace these fantasies with realities. So I grew some balls and faced my dad. I talked to him, honestly, telling him my beliefs, my feelings, and challenging him in his inconsistent words and actions. I replaced my fantasies with real conversations with my dad.
Surprisingly, I began to recognize more and more of myself in him. Like him, I am very philosophical. Like him, I have dreams. Like him, when I get challenged, I get in my head, shut off the world, and become cold and distant.
I recognize these similarities, and can relate to him better. Additionally, I try to change the fact that I shut down and become cold and distant, and instead make myself vulnerable, showing warmth and love. I started hugging my dad every night before going to sleep, even if I had fantasies in my head of one-upping him in logical arguments. I started to actually enjoy conversations with him. I started to be honest with my beliefs.
It’s nice to improve my relationship with my dad. Now I’d like to work on getting to know my brother better.
I used to hate my dad’s lectures. I hated how he would go on and on, I feared the heavy air whenever he sat down next to me and asked me if I had a few minutes. It invariably ended up with him telling me about what it means to be a man, how I’m not holding up my end, how I’m irresponsible, him yelling at me, and me shutting down into my little man-cave in my head.
I used to hate the way my dad nodded along, just said, “Yeah, uh-huh” to everything people said. As though he understood. He just does that because he wants to build rapport with people when they talk to him, to seem smart, to not be looked down upon. To save face, rather than to actually learn and understand. I despised that cowardly act to save face.
Then I realized he never nodded along when he lectured me. He actually listens to me.
My dad triggers me. He says stuff like, “Both my sons are failures” and “I wish you would quit dreaming”, which sends me in a haze of confusion. I imagine having arguments with him, how I would tell him off.
Then I catch myself, and I breathe. I take in the moment. I focus on the wonderment of the present, my breath, this planet I’m living on. My brain is struggling to continue its confusion, but I fight to be present.
At the end of the night, I expect a talk of some sort, so I want to sleep early to avoid it. Since I want to avoid confronting my dad, I do the opposite: I walk right into his room, tell him I’m going to meditate and go to sleep. Surprisingly, last night, he asked me about meditation. I described it to him, then invited him to meditate with me. My mom also joined in. The three of us had a peaceful meditation before everyone went to bed. It was nice.
This was because, instead of harboring my ill-will toward my father, instead of avoiding him, I opened my heart to him and was vulnerable. It definitely could have gone the other way: he could have told me to sit down, as usual, and lectured me about life for an hour. But avoiding him for just one more night would have created another night’s distance between us. I already know how that story goes.
I never thought I would be teaching both my parents how to meditate. Maybe I will lead them toward Buddhism next.
I’ve been wondering this for a while. Today I meditated about it for half an hour, and came to the conclusion that consciousness is nothing more than a combination of imagination and memories. I hear my voice internally as a creative jumble of memories of me talking, as my self-expression, and I take that to mean that I have an internal voice, evidence that I have a soul. But that voice is no different from an imaginary argument I have with my dad.
Why take it so personally? Why take this jumbled memory of my external voice as “me”? Ego is the answer. But what is ego?
Ego is the self-preservation mechanism of making the body important. Without ego, I might not care if I get hurt. But when I get wounded, I personally feel it, letting me know that this body is important, that I should protect it. Thus I extended it to the mind.
“For true friends seek not to coerce us, even gently and reasonably, into believing what we are unsure of. These friends are like midwives, who draw forth what is waiting to be born. Their task is not to make themselves indispensable but redundant.”