On Ithaca & unflinching
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Hello everyone,
I just got back to Ho Chi Minh City after a month in Singapore. Last weekend, I spent some times with my mentor Leng, who reminded me of a poem he shared with me as I was applying to US universities 7 years ago.
I want to share it with you, first with some context.
The tension between future benefit and present gratification, goal and process, destination and journey has been something that I have struggled with over the years. You probably do too, especially if you are the kind who think and plan about your future.
I remember lamenting to him about how some of my ambitious peers seem to be so focused on that One Big Goal to the point of treating everything as a stepping stone. To me, it was not even about being morally noble (i.e "treat people as people not as things that you can extract value"). It just seemed that they don't get a lot of joy out of the experience, which I definitely don't want.
Yet I recognize my own desire to achieve the goal of studying overseas too: who wouldn't want a better, more promising future?
How does one reconcile the ambition of success and achievement with the intrinsic joy and reward of the journey itself?
The answer is both. Do both. Remember both.
I so want to hate this answer, but it's just darn right.
This poem comes at the right time for me as I'm contemplating my next move and choosing to embrace my own ambition and power. There you go.
Ithaka C.F.Cadafy
Keep Ithaka always in your mind. Arriving there is what you’re destined for. But don’t hurry the journey at all. Better if it lasts for years, so you’re old by the time you reach the island, wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way, not expecting Ithaka to make you rich. Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey. Without her you wouldn't have set out. She has nothing left to give you now. And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you. Wise as you will have become, so full of experience, you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
I can imagine you feel the same way sometimes, and I hope it helps.
Khuyen
Not Flinching
This week is a story issue. Here is another reflection on making eye contact and not flinching at suffering, which came from a story my boss often tells and a stroll in the park with a dear friend. It sounds so ordinary, and yet so unexpectedly profound. Such is life.
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A real conversation doesn’t have to solve any problem, but it always brings us to the frontiers of our experience.
Let me share with you a frontier from such a conversation.
A few days ago, I went for a long walk in Singapore Botanic Garden with my dear friend Shao Wei, a 2-year overdue stroll between two kindred spirits. We used to live in the same city for 4 years of college, but we met only once a year or so and exchanged some emails over the years.
Her name brings me a spark of joy, not so much in a cheerful bubbly way but rather a deep singing resonance. Imagine sinking your teeth in a well-cooked, flavorful drumstick. That’s how satisfying our conversation would feel like sometimes.
After a two hours walk, we went to eat at Mr Prata, a small restaurant selling this Indian puffy bread. My hands were taking great delight in tearing the bread and dipping into curry as we talked about our joys and challenges.
I shared with her a story that Dr Home, my boss and mentor, often tells about Joanna Macy, a teacher and respected elder in her nineties whose work has influenced many people and whom we just cannot help but fanboy so hard.
Dr Home got to meet her in audience of a class a few years ago when she was a student, raising her hand and asking questions like she was nine, not ninety. He then had a chance to be with her in a dinner with a big group of people where everyone was engaged in a table-wide conversation.
At the end of that, when everyone was leaving and he was walking her to the car, she asked him: “Home, tell me about that thing you said earlier at dinner. I’d like to hear more.”
He was so surprised that she paid attention to something small he said that he himself didn’t even remember!
Awe-struck, he ventured to ask: “Joanna, you are just so amazing. How do you grow old yet becoming even more alive like that?”
Joanna smiled and said to him:
“When I see suffering, I do not flinch. I move right through it.”
The story still stirs up something whenever I retell it, even when I
wasn’t directly there. The most common example of that flinching is seeing homeless and panhandlers on the street. I often think of a lady sleeping on the street near my apartment in Saigon, especially when it’s raining. It breaks my heart, and I’m so painfully aware of my incapacity to look at it.
I felt a bit of that stirring too when I was sharing to Shao Wei, and what happened after completely shifted my understanding of that line.
“When I see suffering, I do not flinch. I move right through it.”
As I was repeating that line, I noticed through the periphery of my eyes that she looking straight and intently at me.
I noticed that I was not looking at her like that.
I couldn’t make eye contact.
I was flinching.
I turned to look at her, and I struggled to stay there.
I was humbled by how hard it was.
I’ve done the staring straight into someone’s eyes thing many times as an exercise at many kinds of workshop. I could do it just fine, mostly because it is in the context of a workshop where everyone was practicing this usually uncomfortable act.
I do have the capacity to maintain eye contact, but I didn’t have such an in-depth understanding of what is going on when I buckle.
The usual NLP-style explanation is that prolonged eye contact feels too naked, unsafe and vulnerable. It’s partly genetics, partly family upbringing and partly culture. It’s one of those small non-verbal act that anyone wants to cultivate trusting relationships should practice, as some people and cultures use eye contact as a measure of trust. As such, I need to practice unlearning and rewiring such habitual flinching.
Circling folks would probably say that we are afraid of intimacy, to see and to be seen. While both are sensible explanations, that looking I had with my friend felt so strong that it begs for a richer and more fundamental meaning.
It’s about the vastness of a total experience, which exposes me to the deep pain of cutting myself off from experiencing life that way.
Totality here is not so much about ticking off bucket list full of wild adventures, but rather of giving my whole self to the moment.
Indeed, to every moment.
That moment hit me hard with a realization. “This is suffering. I too am suffering.”
If I were to bring more of myself — in this case the visual and emotional in addition to the intellectual — the totality of the experience is just too overwhelming.
The habit of defending myself from being consumed by the moment goes so deep that the flinching seems inevitable. As such, I habitually and unconsciously cut myself off from my deep feeling and sensitive knowing.
In doing so, I am isolating myself. That isolation too is my suffering.
As I turned my attention inwards, I sensed both a grounded heaviness and a tingle of tenderness present within my body. I was in awe at both the vastness of a simple experience and my sheer incapacity to receive it.
In an unexpected yet profound way, that moment shifted my understanding of suffering.
It used to be the physical pain, including birth, age, illness and death as taught by the Buddha. Mostly, it means our mental fixations of insisting things and especially ourselves have to be certain way rather than what is.
Now suffering also means “the unbearable lightness of being”. It’s beyond good or bad. It just is, and what I want is to hold its frightening preciousness more rather than running away from it.
I know that intellectually because I do geek out about philosophy, but boy, experiencing it is a whole new world.
What an unexpected gift.
After a very full silence of us looking and me not flinching, I began to speak slowly, attending to each word as if I were bowing to a precious pearl coming out of the moment.
Silence is powerful. So are fresh words.
I find her face pretty. Yet that moment was neither the butterfly-in-stomach infatuation with a crush nor a desirous urge with a carnal body nor an oozing loving warmth from the chest with a long time lover.
It was more like a raw, intense attraction between two heavy celestial bodies while being irresistbly pulled down into the core of the Earth by an immense gravitational force.
It was physical attraction in its truest sense.
12.45a
We forgot about time until we were so full of each other.
As we said goodbye, it felt as if we got drunk from imbibing the experience.
Yet this was no cheap headache-inducing let’s-have-some-fun liquor. This was the finest wine from the Source.
I’m reminded of what John O’Donohue said in this beautiful conversation with Krista Tippet on On Being.
“When have you last had a great conversation in which you overheard yourself saying things that you never knew you knew, that you heard yourself receiving from somebody words that absolutely found places within you that you thought you had lost and a sense of an event of a conversation that brought the two of you onto a different plane, and then, fourthly, a conversation that continued to sing in your mind for weeks afterwards?
I’ve had some of them recently, and it’s just absolutely amazing. They’re like, as we would say at home, they are food and drink for the soul.”
After two days, I still felt a bit drunken by this intoxicating reality. I walked around the city enraptured by the togetherness with my surrounding. I looked at my friends in their eyes while noticing the deep breathing currents running inside. People would think that I’m high, because I am.
Like any experience, this too comes and goes. On the third day, it’s almost gone. It was so good, and it is over.
Yet now I don’t crave for that high as much, for I know what such experience means.
It is an invitation to trust even more in the utmost terrifying beauty, abundance and vastness of life.
It is always there when I look and not flinch.
Read the original post here on Medium.
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Quotes I'm contemplating this week
Just one this week:
"I choose to risk my significance;
to live so that which came to me as seed
goes to the next as blossom
and that which came to me as blossom,
goes on as fruit. "
From I Will Not Die an Unlived Life - Dawna Markova
I have been set on fire by this poem. It reminds me that a passionate life doesn't have to be about adventures and achievements in the external world but also be inner vibrancy too. It's what it does - bringing seeds into blossoms and bringing blossoms into fruits that matter.
Lastly..
Do reach out for the Inner Critic Assessment or general conversations about life. I'd love to be helpful.