2017: through the tainted glass
View this email in your browser.
Merry Xmas everyone! Sending good wishes from a very snowy place.
In the spirit of gift giving this holiday season, I've compiled a resource page chockful with goodies, including stuff that has been most influential for my ongoing development. It may just be what you need for 2018. Check out the gift, send me some notes and maybe we can do a not-so-secret Santa exchange thing
Also, I’ve long been fantasizing an (un)official LinkedIn profile, and finally I gave it to myself as an Christmas gift. I haven't let myself be so self-aggrandizing for so long, so I thought you might like it too.
Khuyen has absolutely no quantifiable skill. A typical half-ass hybrid product of a liberal art college, he managed to graduate with the seemingly valuable Computer Science degree yet successfully refused to do any technical work for his whole life. To make life even worse, he is certifiably incompetent in writing proper academic paper and has no particular tangible skills like playing music, taking nice photos or making yummy food. Even writing, the activity that he spent the most time on, mostly results in an idiosyncratic self-aggrandizing blog about random topics from erotic gravity to what if humans grow like plant. Worst of all, he is as picky as a princess when it comes to work, often choosing the path of least resistance by picking what he will do anyway for fun. "I've been wanting to beg for work, but I have been so pampered and lazy that I'll wait till I get near total bankrupcy", he confesses.
While many of his peers are pursuing their passions to make a positive impact in the world, he is looking for such passion in his lover's body. In rare lucid moments, he asks himself about profound questions like "Life Purpose" or "Meaning" and ends up with terrible existential rants.
The only skill he is somewhat confident about is to enjoy the awkward, messy situations of his life, which occasionally make for some interesting stories that he doesn't get to tell due to his introverted, party-avoiding personality. Make no mistake here please: this guy is incurably doomed.
Phew, it was fun to write! Maybe you can try one for yourself too!
On a last personal note, the last week has been such a beautiful and poignant time for me to say goodbye to people. I teared up when friends sang a beautiful song at my celebfarewell. Life is full of love and care :-)
May we all be the source of love for each other these last few days of 2017 and even more so in 2018,
Khuyen
Crisis of self-improvement
This week, I tried to write a 2017 reflection as something that can be useful for people. It took me a ridiculous amount of time to write this note, which I ended up throwing away 80% :-( Writing doesn't get much easier over the years..
Life as an improvisational art
On a slightly more serious note, 2017 is a year where I explore and embrace improvisation as a philosophy of living with spontaneous exploratory writing, improv workshops and contact improvisation dance practices. While improvisation itself resists a definition, roughly it means for me preferring aesthetics over outcomes, multiplicity over single focus and vibe over goals.
The anthropologist Mary Kate Bateson has a beautiful metaphor for this: composing a life. She writes
“An artist takes ingredients that may seem incompatible, and organizes them into a whole that is not only workable, but finally pleasing and true, even beautiful. As you get up in the morning, as you make decisions, as you spend money, make friends, make commitments, you are creating a piece of art called your life.”
Improvisation is a high order skill that requires upholding multiple viewpoints simultaneously. For instance, composing in a spatial sense, as in visual arts, requires putting together disparate elements that need to be in some kind of overall balance. Composing in a temporal sense, as in music, requires looking at the change that occurs within a lifetime — discontinuities, transitions, and growth of various sorts — as well as the artistic unity that can characterize a life.
Composing a life as a metaphor highlights the more relational aspects of life and opens up a new set of vitalizing questions. How might we relate to our own life as an emerging whole while becoming more attentive to the relationships among the parts? How might we continuously look the potential for synergy among different aspects of life while sustaining our attention to its diversity and interdependence?
Doing so, as Mary Bateson writes, “may offer a different clarity of vision, one that is sensitive to ecological complexity, to the multiple rather than the singular.”
As you can imagine, goal setting strategy doesn’t fare too well with this “composing a life” metaphor. I don’t hope to achieve three goals for life, work and love just as I cannot aim for three epiphanies at the beginning of composing a good song. If I can imagine what I want to achieve, then it is no longer interesting.
While vibe making may suit more than goal setting, embracing this philosophy of improvisation is far from the easy-peasy “go with the flow” vibe. Rather, it requires a sustained attention to multiple focus and willingness to dive into messy explorations.
The bad news for this approach is that it takes a lot of practice. If you know any improvisational jazz musicians, you’ll notice that they practice all the time, trying out different grooves, listening to various tunes etc… The good news is that there is little distinction between practice and performance; everything from work to love to play blends in together as one whole, wondrous and messy life. With time, life gets richer, in both strangeness and delight, awkwardness and flow, ecstasy and heartbreaks. It’s not for everyone.
-------------------
See the full post here on Medium.
Sharing is sprouting.