Happy 3rd birthday Enzyme! 😃
Hello everyone,
Welcome to November. It's crazy that 2017 is ending so soon, and that this Enzyme is exactly 3 year old! I'm overjoyed, and I don't know a better way to celebrate but to share a picture.
Guess what is is?
A leg. A beautiful leg. Probably not the leg of the person that I said that line to (although it would have been epic if it were the case 🤡)
Why this message?
You can read this quote as a message for resilience, that you should try again despite hardships etc.. Or, like me, you can also read it as a testament to the unspeakable beauty of being a person, beyond what you look, say, think or feel and heck, even and especially know.
To develop that attitude towards oneself also means to treat the other with the same re-spect (which literally means "to look again") To acknowledge the person even when you have to say No, even when you vehemently disagree, even when the other person or group of people have done terrible things to you. It is a stance that we are capable of taking, and that I want to take, every moment. To keep asking "Who are you?" and get all different but equally true answers each time.
Why does it matter? Short & cheesy answer: Love. To quote Alan Watts in one of his most profound quips:
"Everyone has love, but it can only come out when (people are) convinced of the impossibility and the frustration of trying to love (themselves). This conviction will not come through condemnations, through hating oneself... It comes only in the awareness that one has no self to love."
Phew. That's the deepest I'll go today. Let's resurface and hear about the story of the picture. My dear friend Judy has made this with so much love as a gift at my graduation where she asked people to dig up the Enzyme archive and find quotes that resonated with them. The result is a beautiful handwritten quote book (with the pdf copy too). I am in awe and love. Thank you everyone, particularly Judy. Cheers to more years ahead of us, even though if I were to die tomorrow, I'd be content. 😇
But before that, let's celebrate the Enzyme together...
When I ___, I read Enzyme so that I ___
(A sample of what people have replied to my previous email it to me. Thank you for the beautiful articulation. For those who want to send something back, please do!)
When the food of my lived experience is generating discomfiting flatulence, I read EFT to borrow Khuyen's digestive tract. His flora and my flora are having a good time multiplying in there, creating an optimum environment for fabulous movements.
When I feel like the environment I'm in and most people I'm surrounded by are rather geared towards the superficial, I read E4T so that I can think about what actually matters to me in life; so that I think critically and deeply, besides doing my job, the laundry and the rest of the mandatory activities of adult life. I find there is little time in our day-to-day to explore these matters and society/work propel us to think less and less! I always read E4T!!
When my inbox is a web of parallel and perpendicular threads, and I need the orthogonal lifeline to pull me out.
When I give myself the time, I read E4T so that I can connect with Khuyen's trajectory.
Also, please share the Enzyme with one or two people whom may find this helpful or interesting. It's time to try some artificial fertilizer on this soil!
The Greatest Greed of All: Time
This week, I'm sharing a short story about the Greatest Greed of All: Time where I went totally ballistic with my productivity-obsession. I know, I was crazy... but I wouldn't have been who I am today without such craziness. Here is an excerpt, read on if you too ever felt the overwhelming need for productivity in the US culture.
One day in my sophomore fall, I found a really cool app that could allow me to log in my time with only 3 steps: press the icon on the screen, press a button, log the duration. Done. Better yet, at the end of every day and every week, it will automatically produce a graph of my time usage. I was so pumped. The first few weeks I obsessively analyzed those graphs to optimize my behaviors.
Example of my obsession with time, Week 4 of April 2013. No judgment plz..
At first, I tracked in 30' chunks, and soon I got greedy. What if I could get more granular to the minute? Little did I know that doing exactly so was recipe for insanity. My time log would look like this. 4:15p snacking. 4:20p doing push-up routine, 4:23 open door for housemates and socializing. 4:30: back to homework 4:40: got distracted, snacking some more, 4:50 no more snack, finally got back to work. 5:10 leaving the room, too fed up, cannot work anymore.
It was really exciting at first. I was more aware of my time and therefore felt as if I was making more progress. At the end of every night I’ll look at the graph, think about how to shave a few minutes here and add more there. Less time socializing. Less time eating. More time reading. Sometimes I wonder if I got a lot of satisfaction from actually saving time or from feeling smart…
I was like that for more than a year, with about 4100 minutes of pushups. Slowly it became frustrating though. The more data I had, the less I change. It wasn’t as big of a Big Data, and I was already drowning… Time spent on tracking might have been more than saving. It was like self-imposed ADHD. I could barely concentrate on anything because I was so obsessed with my time performance, the equivalent of cooking rice while opening the pot every minute. Good intention, terrible terrible execution. I knew it wouldn’t be sustainable, but I couldn’t quit. While most people got addicted to food, drug, TV or social media, I got addicted to tracking time. Every time I track an activity, it felt like eating a sugar candy.
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If you want to read the rest, see the link on Medium here (and if you like it, please clap). If you can't read due to the paywall, see the Word version here.
Sharing is sprouting.