Crisis of self-improvement

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Last week, a friend cut some ginger for his tea for breakfast and put it in a plate of apples. The bursting forth of the apple flavor blends in with the aftertaste of the ginger. We were surprised. Wow. The pleasure of alchemical aftertastes.

It reminds me of one of the best pleasure in life: a good conversation, one that that "continued to sing in your mind for weeks afterwards" (John O'Donohue). How do we cultivate that quality of porous resonance that allows for conversation, verbal or non-verbal then? The answer, surprisingly, is to become porous, to keep things messy and bring in the resonances of the past. To quote a dance teacher of mine.
"When I dance with someone with the lucid quality of waiting, I notice that while in motion they tend to broadcast where they have just been. They are still tasting and hearing the echo of what was" - Martin Keown.

What is so beautiful about this idea of a person being a reservoir of echos of the past is that it shifts the way we perceive the world not as things and objects but as relationships and patterns. You are not just an object; you are a interweaved webs of relationships, you are patterns of behaviors, of energetic dances. When we meet someone, we want to create a generous listening space so that the echos of their their relationships with other people, with their interests, with home, with memorable objects, could sing through you.

I'm writing this as I am preparing for my own celebfarewell gathering in Tufts before I'm gone for along time, and thinking about the many conversations I will be having during this holiday season. May you too continue to have many of those singing voices in your head :-)

Crisis of self-improvement

This week, I wrote a story of a transformative experience that I had two years ago. I thought it would give you some insights in this amazing and quirky process, one that I'd never consciously expect but perhaps deep down have been longing for.

Living with shattered beliefs

If you imagine my life thus far had been like an essay written neatly on a piece of paper, then after it was as if the paper had been flipped upside down with all the words jumbled up and smeared around. I still appreciate the ideal of becoming a better person, but I’m no longer sure about what that “better person” entails.

In the larger scheme of thing, who or what determines the direction of “improvement” and “progress”? What if everything we thought we knew suddenly wasn’t true anymore? What if, as my friend and teacher Bayo once wrote, “falling may as well be flying without the tyranny of coordinates”?

All those beliefs about what “good person” entail, from kindness, compassion, wisdom, generosity etc.. They too can and should be examined.

For example, what does kindness look like? I’m still wrestling with the question of how am I supposed to “help” people. Sometimes what needs to be done may just be to let whatever needs to happen happen, even if it may seem painful and difficult. When someone is clearly not doing well or even self-destructing, could I imagine myself not doing anything to help?

What if in these moments of crises I can just simply be there with them instead of trying to stop it? What if the way to deal with a fever is to let it happen fully so that it can eventually stop? The itch to do something is so great especially in times of crises. Yet, without the ability to just sit and bewith the mess, whatever we do may just end up re-enacting the results that we don’t desire.

What else has changed?

To continue the life-as-an-essay-on-paper metaphor, it is not just the words get jumbled up but that the whole piece of paper became translucent as if the material itself has changed. Something shifted in my being-in-the-world. I wasn’t sure of who I was anymore, and that was okay.

I experienced what Richard Rohr calls a deeper “okayness” to life, particularly to not know exactly who I was becoming. Perhaps not knowing can be just as good as knowing, especially when it comes to self-knowledge. Without embracing the unknown, there can be no imagination nor possibility.

As the Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman said, “overconfidence really is associated with a failure of imagination. When you cannot imagine an alternative to your belief, you are convinced that your belief is true.”

The need and drive to improve is replaced by an attraction to something vastly more unknown and perhaps beautiful. It was a shift from being driven to being drawn. Maybe evolution is the purpose of life and has a direction. Yet even if it is, I’ll have to let it happen more than controlling it. I learned the difference between belief and faith. The former is about holding onto things, which seems more certain but also rigid. The latter is about opening up to doubt and letting it permeate through my being. Life gets scarier yet also more real.

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See the full post here on Medium.

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