Craft By Zen by Jeremy Wong

The Solano Stroll in Berkeley is an annual event where the entire stretch of Solano Street is closed. Local businesses and residents would participate in turning the street into a street festival. The firefighter departments of Berkeley and Albany would come with a fire truck where kids could sit in the driver seat and understand what it could feel like to be the firefighter driver. Restaurants would bring out their grills and serve some street food. Clothing stores would try to give discounts for their end of season sales.

It was there, over fifteen years ago, where I started a collection of business cards. At the stroll, the street is littered with booths from local businesses, artists, specialists, and because it’s Berkeley, radicals. Each one of these booths had business cards there for the taking, so I ran up and down the two and half mile stretch to collect them all. Besides the booths, there were people on the streets handing out their own personal business cards next to their signs. One guy in particular was an artist trying to sell his ceramic pieces and made custom jewelry.

A normal response when someone receives a business card would be to commit to an action to it or, more likely, throw it away in the trash. I decided to keep the cards in a box, serving as a container for the Solano Stroll experience. But it expanded beyond the event. I found myself taking business cards from restaurants, gift shops, travel agencies, community boards, and other businesses. I collected the punch cards you would receive at sandwich shops. I collected the strange, square shaped ones. I collected the last one on the business card tray. One time, I entered a photo store, and as I was taking a card next to the register, the store clerk looked at me sternly and asked, “Why are you taking a business card?” Flustered, I scurried off, clenching the business card in hand.

On family vacations, I would fill the pocket of my suitcases with business cards from the various places we went. The cards transformed from words with contact information to personal stored memories. I have this particularly strange one from Taiwan that introduced me to their calendar system. 93? Whoa! Sometimes other paraphernalia would find its way into my collection, like tickets from the movies, plane rides, and the theater. One in particular comes in recent memory. I have this ticket stub from the Alcazar, a theater in Pattaya, Thailand that ran shows every night of their most beautiful lady boys.

Over the years, I’ve asked the central question to this collection. Why keep this up? As I said, most sane people would throw them away. A day before the planes hit 9/11, my grandmother visited the World Trade Center. She bought a bouncy ball from the gift shop that glowed after impact. When she came home, she gave this to me as a gift. I couldn’t see the ball more than just a reminder of the tragedy that hit this nation. A month or two after she gave me the gift, I lost it as I threw it on the school grounds. It rolled underneath the bungalow of my classroom and I felt devastated. The ball had this history I only knew about. That’s what these cards mean to me now, memories that remind me of specific moments of my life.

At a recent meet-up I attended, I was introduced to the concept of perceived distance. Perceived distance is the mind’s perception of how far you have traveled while absolute distance is the distance actually traveled. Obstacles could increase the perceived distance, like road blocks, traffic, rough terrain, and changes in elevation. At the meet-up, the speaker used the example of bicycling on the same lane as fast driving cars. Here in Silicon Valley, we have expressways connecting different cities where cars could drive easily 50 to 60 mph (that’s roughly 80 to 96 km/h for you non-Americans). When a bike has to share that same road, the biker will perceived the distance to be longer because of the stress of getting hit by a car.

This made me think about how similar the concept of perceived distance is to perceived difficulty. Sometimes I can be quite stubborn and refuse to do something because the initial action is cumbersome. I held off on writing an email for a whole month because I thought the writing would take an hour. In my mind, I place a 1 to 1 ratio between time and difficulty, meaning the more time it takes, the more difficult it becomes. In reality, the email took me 5 minutes to write and one click to send.

David Allen, author of “Getting Things Done”, talks about how to get incoming work done. If the activity takes two minutes or less, do it now. If it doesn’t, figure out the next action that must be taken, whether that is blocking off a part of your schedule to do it, defer it to someone else, or figure out an action at a later date. However, in my implementation of his system, that last part about taking the action at a later date never comes. I’ll have my inbox stack up and be left with an overwhelming number of 10, 20, or 30 minute activities.

When I read Kelly McGonigal’s book, “The Willpower Instinct”, I learned about willpower depletion and how easily we can be susceptible to wasting our time when in that state. To diverge from this path, I’ve been reduced to doing things while I have the self-control and drive to do them. But with a large stack of todo items that take longer than 2 minutes, there’s no possible way I can do that in the allotted time when I have the willpower to do them. This leads me to an unfortunate conclusion; I don’t know how to lower the perceived difficulty and stop overloading my schedule. I would actually like to hear how others deal with perceived difficulty and getting things done. What are some techniques you use to get things done?

Before I went to Iowa, fireflies were meaningless to me. Early last spring, my roommate bought a string of solar green LED lights and hung them on a tree. At night, they would glow in and out, simulating the fireflies lights. Living in Northern California for most of my life, it was easy for me to overlook this as a cheap gimmick. When my roommate installed them, I had a hard time finding the emotional pull they had for my roommate.

On my cross-country road trip last summer, I stopped for the night in Omaha. One of the locals invited me to a weekly Taco Tuesday event. The major difference in this event than others I’ve been to is the locals really make you work for the tacos. Locals ride their bikes on an old railroad tracks path paved into a bike path for ten miles ending in a outdoor seating restaurant that served cheap tacos. Luckily, at the half way point, there’s an oasis of booze called Margaritaville where you can stop, talk, and drink. I drove across the Mississippi River to Iowa stateside in awe of the flat landscape. By the time I got to the trail head, the sun was just starting to set and I was a bit worried I was going to have to ride in the dark. Much to my chagrin, the path was illuminated by fireflies. I gazed at the bugs, awed by their bright glow of hope. They seem to say, “winter has past, you can come out now”. Their presence allowed me to finally understand what many writers were talking about in those children books — a glow of summer.

I thought back to my roommate’s fake firefly lights hanging in our backyard tree. It was a representation of this kind of emotion where he would be taken back to his summers in Boston trying to catch them. I stopped my bike and tried to catch one. Although I didn’t have much success, I felt like a kid. I realized adults can have the empathy and nostalgia for a past childhood they never had.

And yet, I don’t understand how something as simple as a glowing green light could make me feel so happy. It set the setting, and for the rest of that night; they were the entertainment. It was more entertainment than any manufactured, designed, or advertised piece of media humans had developed. It felt pure, and in a way, the path I was taking was this magical journey down the rabbit hole. And appreciating these tiny things are why we live life, right?

Here come real stars to fill the upper skies,
And here on earth come emulating flies,
That though they never equal stars in size,
(And they were never really stars at heart)
Achieve at times a very star-like start.
Only, of course, they can’t sustain the part.”
― Robert Frost

With over half a year of writing these letters, I am taking the time to review the differences in my writing between the past and present. I haven’t noticed a difference in writing quality, to my dismay, but I’ve learned something much more valuable. I’ve learned the value of editing. Before, I thought editing was a cumbersome and not necessary. “Shouldn’t everyone understand my stream of consciousness?” It turns out, no, the reader cannot. When I went back to re-read my writing, I realized I couldn’t read it. I had to think of the context in which I wrote it in to determine what I was trying to say.

Programming helped build part of this muscle. For over a year, I’ve been reading and reviewing my code, and I’ve noticed holes everywhere. As I learn how to become a pragmatic developer, I notice the code I wrote in the past just isn’t up to my standards today. And the code I write today won’t be at the standards that I hope for tomorrow. With writing, I strive for the same things. I want it to be legible for the intended audience with hopes that they will understand my point of view.

It felt embarrassing having my audience read such verbose verbiage. For the past month, I’ve tried to cut back on using adverbs and other modifiers. I’ve scrutinized words such as “only”, “very”, and “just” and tried to cut them out. Now when I read through my writing, I immediately cut those things out as soon as I can.

I pass my essays through the Hemingway App to detect awkward sentences. For example, the app can detect passive voice and difficult to read sentences. In grade school, most of us learned to avoid these techniques. I didn’t comprehend these things until I started recognizing them as mistakes. When I had a friend edit my writing, I learned that it’s hard to recognize these things on your own. Speaking of editors, if you would like to help edit these in the future, reach out to me.

When I read writing from some of my favorite authors, I’m awed by their clarity and narration. I aim myself for that target, but I’m not quite there yet. I will need to deliberately practice more, but I recognize that I’m making progress. Also, I still loads to say, so I’m not going to quit writing anytime soon.

I’ve been experiencing heavy burnout over the past few weeks. I didn’t spare myself much time besides work, scheduled play, travel, and sleep. I’ve even deferred to eating out rather than cooking. The lifestyle, quite an unsustainable one, started to take a toll on my health. I took a run through Big Basin last weekend and was almost wiped out. I looked in the mirror at my pecks two days ago and saw sagging breasts and a round, bulging stomach. It was a pitiful sight since I use one visual metric as an indicator if I’m healthy, that of looking good naked. Some of those armpit wrinkles had their own wrinkles.

I took this time and started to reflect what was stressing me out. I stayed up later on nights where I should have gone to sleep earlier. I stopped exercising as much since late-April after coming back from Chicago, using travel as an excuse that threw off my exercise regime. I’ve been eating out when I have been used to home cooked meals. All of this sums up to looking at myself in the fitting room mirror at the mall staring at my own man boobs.

While a funny recollection, it scared the crap out of my. I have insecurities with my body shape, wearing loose clothing to hide some of those imperfections, and not doing anything about it. I know I could make the time, but with burnout, it is hard to feel elated to go for a run after work. I’m going back to basics, some may call it common sense, and work on the fundamentals again.

Don’t overload yourself

I switched over to the Todoist app, that worked quite well for a few months, but slowly piled up into ten daily tasks. I’m scrapping that out and re-doing my schedule to only handle one important task per day. Anything more that I accomplish will be a fun for the future.

The other thing is I’ve been overloaded with going back and forth between San Francisco and Palo Alto to go to events. I have to have a better, clear mission to do those things and know what events I can skip and which ones I should actually go to. It got bad over the past few weeks when I was going to an event every work day, which means more travel time.

Health Comes Primarily From Diet

In college, my big revelation was diet, not exercise, makes up most of the work needed to stay healthy. To stay fit, that’s where you introduce exercise. When I cut most sugar out of my diet, meaning no soda or juice, I saw results in my body. There were some side-effects, like getting these strange headaches along with sugar cravings, but after pushing through that hump, I have no regrets about that decision.

However, in most recent years, I’ve replaced those things with wine, which is a lot worse, especially when not in moderation. I will enact a limit of one glass if I do drink.

Listen To Your Body

Your body is quite acute to stress if you listen to it. I’ve had an issue with going to lunch, making terrible decisions listening to my body’s hunger pains. Instead, I’ll try to continue working, but my productivity has tanked. When I get lunch, I’ll buy too much food, get stuffed, and collapse with a food coma, ruining more work productivity. If I actually listened to my body initially, I would have had some willpower to tell myself to get a small salad and to stop eating when I feel full.

Caffeine, Or Your Drug of Choice, Is Not A Panacea

Last week, without much sleep the night before, I thought it would be a good idea to buy cup of coffee to get me through the day. If you don’t know me well, you’ll find out I rarely have caffeine. A cup of coffee for me it’s like crack, used sparingly for those rare, tired occasions. One this particular day, I was a bit hungover. I finished my coffee, and within minutes, felt that body ache.

I’m not giving caffeine a bad name, but I understand people hold on to it as a crutch, because it’s become their addiction. They can’t function without it, as witnessed through my roommates. When I use it as a quick solution, it’s never full proof and there’s always side-effects.

All of these things are measures and habits that I used to use as a basis for a clean, healthy way of living. It’s been hard to maintain balance, but there needs to be recognition that I’m going through this along with some reflection about how to take counter measures. And by relaxing this weekend and taking the time to write this out, I feel one step closer to that goal.

Last night, I celebrated Father’s Day by taking my father out to the restaurant of his choice. He decided to go to Tomei’s, a Japanese/Chinese open buffet serving a wide spread of options. I don’t typically eat at places like this because I know they will be packed, the quality of food will be subpar, and I come out stuffed because I don’t have a gauge of how much food I actually ate. But being a good son, I obliged to take him out there.

When we were seated, I looked around at the crowd. There were tables and seats packed in a large, dimly lit room full of families. The buffet line was barely tolerable with long waits and impatient people who cut in line in order to satisfy their cravings rather than abide to the unspoken rule of lines. It’s as if respect were thrown out the door and indecency was invited in.

I finished my third half-plate of food and stopped myself from eating more. There was no point in over-stuffing myself with previously frozen crab legs, under appreciated sea urchin, or under ripe watermelon. What’s the use of trying to stuff myself to the brim? I try to stick with the 60% rule of eating to 60% satiety, or at least the perception of it. I look at those around me, and I see they’ve lost control, allowing their cravings to dictate their actions. Thoughtless actions lead to lower empathy with the people around us. I remember a buffet I was at in Thailand, most of the customers went over to the buffet serving station with no care about shoving other people out of the way to fill their plate. It was rude and disheartening because I felt like I was being treated as an obstacle in their way.

Service workers are also have less empathy to those around them. Since the customers don’t serve as good examples of how to behave, it affects how the service workers behaves, and vice versa. This can be reflected in the care and attention given to the food. At Tomei’s, I thought the quality could have been better. And that’s not saying I want something top-class; I want the people preparing and cooking my food to have the care and attention they would give feeding their own children. I tip a barista something large when they take the time and actually brew a nice cup of tea or coffee. One of my favorite restaurants from the past year is a Guatemalan restaurant that serves hand-made tortillas, and you can buy them at an affordable price, i.e one dollar sign on Yelp. They knew quality, and their customers respected that. Couldn’t Tomei’s have that?

Let’s be clear. I’m not chastising buffets. I think there are some great buffets out there. I live by an extraordinary Indian lunch buffet that serves some of the best tandoori I’ve ever had. The cooks stick with the few dishes they know how to make best and make a lot of it. You can tell the cashier genuinely cares about your experience at the restaurant. At Tomei’s, I found myself rejecting most of the food because I knew it wasn’t going to be worth it. How could you mix dim sum with sushi? They just don’t go together and they’re two different disciplines.

Maybe I’m tooting my own horn because I have these cuisines on separate occasions and maybe I’m the wrong audience for this place. And if that’s the case, that’s fine. This buffet doesn’t need my business in order to survive. Last month, on Mother’s day, they had a three hour wait for those arriving ten minutes after opening time. I’d like to think that buffets like this are a gateway drug, and eventually the customers find something they really like and go out to find a restaurant that specializes in that thing. To those people, I am delighted to open up my own culture’s food to them. But I draw the line in the inexcusable behavior of thoughtless actions that negatively effect the experience of other customers. What’s the point when you’re trying to eat your food while being angry at the person seated next to you?

Fireflies are the signs of summer. They are this bright glow of hope. They seem to say, “winter has past, you can come out now”. Their green ominous glow like magic as you walk down the road. At least, this is what I would tell you if I hadn’t grown up in California. As a Californian, I can tell you there were no fireflies, no glimmer signaling the start of summer. When I read about fireflies in grade school, I would wonder what was so special about them. They were the mythical unicorns of my childhood.

It wasn’t until an adult when I first encountered a firefly. It was in the midwest, Iowa, biking through the woods. The sun was hanging low and there they were. Glowing in short spurts luminance, shining the path for my bike to head towards. They made me smile, and I wondered if I should be a kid at that moment, drop my bike, and try to catch them. Their presence allowed me to finally understand what many writers were talking about in those children books - a glow to the summer.

I don’t understand how something as simple as a glowing green light could make me feel so happy. It set the setting, and for the rest of that night, they were the entertainment. It was more entertainment than any manufactured, designed, or advertised piece of media humans had developed, at least for my tastes. It felt pure, and in a way, the path I was taking was this magical journey down the rabbit hole. And appreciating these tiny things are why we live life, right?

I’ve found the answer I’ve been looking for. I already found the answer years ago, but I’ve got to dig it up every now and again. The question: What’s the meaning of life? The answer: It’s different for everyone, so you’ve got to figure it out. This time, I’m revisiting it in a different context. I’m reading “Not Fade Away: A Short Life Well Lived” by Peter Barton & Laurence Shames and I’ve been tying it with conversations I’ve had with my roommates about a recent death of a former co-worker. In “Not Fade Away”, Peter, who had terminal cancer, writes about coming to terms with his impending death and trying to help everyone’s struggle with their eventual end. In this short excerpt, Peter is suffering through the side-effects of chemotherapy, and he’s complaining to his wife.

One day, when my body was wracked and my head ached and my spirits were at their lowest, I said to my wife: “I just don’t see the point.”

Now, my wife Laura is as supportive and kind as a person could possibly be. I’m in awe of her gentleness. But in that moment she was something other than tender; she was absolutely fierce.

Fierce on my behalf — and, I think, on her own. She still had the determination that I was having such a hard time mustering. She still saw value in the struggle. She wasn’t about to let me wallow. She already had enough burdens; she didn’t want to cater to someone who had given up.

“So find one!” she declared.

I was so surprised by her vehemence that I lost my train of thought. I said, “Huh?”

“You don’t see the point?” she said. “Find a point!”

Looking back, I realize just how important that brief but intense conversation was.

— Peter Barton, Not Fade Away, pages 83 - 84

Peter’s revelation after this incident was there is a separation of the body and mind, something he eventually considers the soul. The body is the physical attachment, one bound by nature to decay and fall apart. The mind can take the role of the body and do the same. However, if we have control over our mind, we don’t have to allow it to decay and rot. We have the ability to not allow it to taint everyone else.

My roommate Mark keeps asking the question, “What’s the point?” while we were all sitting around the backyard fire pit. He follows up with his explanation for why the elderly tend to be mean and grumpy. “They’re in pain all of the time.” While true, the bodies of many elderly people are in pain, many of them allow the pain to get the better of them. When we don’t make this separation of mind and body, we can get terribly depressed.

The best counter example I know of for someone who didn’t let their body’s pain get to their mind was Stuart Scott, ESPN anchor. In the following video, Scott talks about his struggle with cancer and shows us what’s possible when faced with death.

Reading this book, I couldn’t help but well up and cry, get depressed, get overwhelmed by the emotions Peter was going through. And then, it’s followed by hope, knowing that I can make the most out of life. My biggest take-away is not to let this moment slip again and really determine what my own purpose is for my life.

I wrote two separate pieces that I thought would become this week’s letter, but I scrapped them before I was finished. Each of these pieces devolved into a rant about what was going wrong with a painful decision point I had at the beginning of the week. This frustration became my creative rut. It’s a series of second guesses given by a very harsh, inner voice.

I started writing the first paragraph of the first draft, and really hated it. I deleted the paragraph and started over, but the writing sounded worse. The thing I’ve come to compromise about longer format writing in the past few months is that deleting a whole paragraph, paragraphs, or almost the entire piece is okay. In fact, I encourage it because it allows you to go back, read the piece with the deleted text and recognize what’s missing from it. Also, since you’re not looking at that bad paragraph, you’re not going to use that as a reference. As the saying goes, out of sight, out of mind.

I learned from this first draft that I shouldn’t try and shape writing around a quote. I included a stanza from a song and tried to tie it together. But I re-read the quote and I re-read the subsequent paragraph; they were not saying the same things. That made me feel like the core idea was jumbled and I really don’t know what I’m supposed to say.

The placeholder title didn’t help either. In school, they teach you how to write a generic thesis before your write your essay. However, in practice, my thesis usually emerges after writing for a bit and trying to recognize what my piece is about. For example, in this piece, the thesis is trying to dissect what is so difficult about writing. In my first draft, it started as how to tear down barriers, and slowly turned into a piece about how to come to grips that one day, you’re going to die, so you should use that to stop fearing things you have no control over. Eventually, the piece started ranting about the issues in my personal life, and I know how no one wants to hear someone bitch in a longford essay. That’s when I decided to scrap it and start over.

I know I’ve written about this before, but I love revisiting this concept of shitty first drafts. Anne Lamott introduced it in her book, “Bird by Bird”, an excellent guide to writing that I’ve read at least twice. The problem that I encountered with this first draft was sheer frustration that I wanted to write something meaningful and beautiful, but turds kept coming out no matter how I tried to edit the piece. The second draft was getting better. Initially, it sounded great. I trudged along, knowing my writing was a work in progress and would need severe editing, but it didn’t matter because I was churning paragraph after paragraph. When I would finish the piece, I would go back and edit those sections. And then, nearly finished with the piece, I start ranting about the discomfort of this week’s events again. It was supposed to be about networking, which quickly turned into how to build meaningful relationships, which quickly turned into why a personal relationship of mine went south.

In hindsight, prep work may have helped with these pieces. However, I recognize if I put too much time in prepping a piece, like making outlines or brainstorming ideas, the less I would actually want to write about that topic. I start drafts because I know they would at least give me a prototype of what the piece could be. In Robin Sloan’s last newsletter, “Primes”, in late March, he showed a screenshot of all the drafts that he had for that piece. His Gmail inbox, shown below, has at least 20 ideas for the drafts or things he wanted to share, but didn’t make the cut. When I saw that, I was amazed that I’m not the only one who has a troubled time sticking to one topic. The drafts aren’t all bad news or failed starts. They also have some idea that I cannot yet figure out, and when I do, it will be addressed in a later letter.

I write all of my letters in Evernote which has this feature to look at past revisions of a note. If I ever wanted to, I can re-read a draft and see all of my deleted sentences and paragraphs. All of this data is saved upon future investigation on the topic.

Looking at my the sidebar where all the notes live in my “Drafts” folder, and there are at least half of the notes that will never see the light of day. They’re a constant reminder to tell me writing drafts and crafting ideas don’t get much easier. In a way, I want it to be like that because if it was easy, I wouldn’t really enjoy the activity. It calms my mind knowing frustration is part of the process because I know there’s always something I need to improve.

“How come it’s easier to make friends as a kid than it is as an adult?” asked several acquaintances of mine.

I think the more relevant question is, how does one go about making friends? How about going on friend-dates?

No, no, no. It’s not like going on online dating services like Okcupid and trying to message women in an attempt at being impressive enough to go on a date. And it’s not like Tinder where you determine a friendship by the way they look (swipe right to ignore).

During the activities you do outside of work, take the time to get to know the people around you. Perhaps ask one of them to coffee, lunch or dinner. If you feel too vulnerable about asking someone to go on a friend-date, take the advice from Kelly Williams Brown, author of “Adulting”.

“Anytime you say to someone, even in a very veiled way, I care about you. Do you care about me? it’s scary.

But almost everyone will be pleased that you took the initiative. And if they’re not delighted by your straightforward friendliness, there you go! That is a bad friend candidate, and it’s good you won’t be wasting any more time.”

— Kelly Williams Brown, “Adulting: How to Become a Grown-up in 468 Easy(ish) Steps”

Be personable and presentable to your new fellow friend. Just like dates, the best way I’ve found to get the ball rolling is to talk about something you’re passionate about. For me, it’s traveling. I go to weekly meet-ups with other like-minded world travelers. We talk about the adventure, the excitement, and the places we’re going to go next.

To finish off the friend date, remember to follow-up. When I get a follow-up email, phone call, or a physical card from someone else, it really shows that they care. Congratulations on your first successful friend-date!

I had a profound thought to myself this past weekend while watching the new Avengers movie. There were a series of scenes in which the superheroes were shown what they were most afraid of. In the middle of watching this, I had an nasty thought that came back, one that should’ve been settled years ago. It was the thought of living to the fullest and being able to express myself fully, something I struggle with on a consistent basis and it came back to haunt me sitting there in the theater.

After the movie ended, walking down the long corridor of the movie theater, I was lost in thought. I tried to brush it off. I hate confronting this issue in me. My usual reaction is to let it subside and move on with my life. But it followed me over the next few days.

I was listening to the Design Matters podcast where Debbie Millman interviewed Elle Luna. Elle wrote this piece on Medium called “The Crossroads of Should and Must”, which summarizes a portion of the interview when she’s describing the dream she had. In her recurring dream, Elle is standing in front of a white room with a concrete floor and high windows. She decided to go out and look for it in real life. After searching for days or weeks on Craigslist, she found it.

Dusk was falling as I arrived at the white room from my dreams. It was stark, absolute, white, and a symbol of something new, of beginnings. As I looked around, I thought, “What on earth have I done? Why am I here?” And as clear as day, I heard a voice say, “It’s time to paint.”
— Elle Luna, “The Crossroads of Should and Must”

Elle calls this her calling, and a decision she must do. She quit her job and started painting for the first time in ten years. She was able to express herself, or be true to herself, in a way she wasn’t able to do before as a designer.

The story shook me. I know there are some fears I pretend to not be ready to face. Thinking about the fear in the theater, I asked myself the question, “Am I lying to myself? Am I living the way I want to, being true to myself?”

In my career, I haven’t made the best decisions, and I’m not totally committed in the job I’m currently in. The crossroads of should and must are blurred, and I can’t think if I’m working in the industry I’m in because I should do it or I must do it.

In the process of thinking about this, I broke down my worries to some actionable steps. The first is to recognize myself. In the middle of Elle’s article, she asks the reader to make a list of top ten things I’m most afraid of. This is what I came up with in an allotted ten minutes:

I’m afraid…

1. Of being able to dance in front of strangers in public transportation. One stupid question that I ask myself is, is it illegal to do street performance on a moving train?
2. Of eavesdropping and joining in on the conversation.
3. Of starting a conversation with a complete stranger on the train. Especially of the opposite gender. My brain goes into overdrive and analyzes angles of how I would end up being a creeper or realize I may not have good social skills. I don’t think I have bad social skills in other settings.
4. I don’t have what it takes to take a leap of faith without sliding back into old routines right after. Elle Luna talks about choosing “Must” isn’t a one time decision. It’s a continual decision you have to keep on making daily to yourself.
5. Of the guy in the head. The one that tells you how much of a piece of shit you are. I used to have severe imposter syndrome, and still beat myself up for making bad choices and decisions.
6. Of being penniless and broke. That I have no solid financial plan. Of talking financials with others.
7. Of having no one to talk to and that I’m cooped up in my room or brain too long. I’m doing better at this, now that I rotate between different friends during different times of the week or month.
8. I will be alone. Like the last one, but in terms of a personal relationship. I felt bad when I abandoned all hope while working late nights because it felt impossible to put myself out there.
9. I will make the people around me feel bad. I don’t like being the bearer of bad news, and I hate shaking up the pot. I’ve been relatively non-confrontational my whole life, but I’m working on this.
10. Of dying and having an obituary I wouldn’t want to read.

What are you afraid of? Are there things in your life that are blocking you from doing what you want to do? Take 10 minutes and write your own list.

On top of reading Elle’s article this week, I finished listening to a recent episode of Triangulation with Luria Petrucci, AKA Cali Lewis, who opened up about her past failures and being able to be true to yourself and to the rest of the world. It hit more emotional strings to the same tune of taking the reins of your life and live it to the full extent.

I’ve made my list, and now I can slowly tackle them, one day at a time. And I’m more aware that I have the choice to work on it or not, of asking “should I do it” to taking action and saying “I must do it”.

And that the battle is never won; the crossroads of should and must are always there, continuously testing us. Figuring out how to stay strong and fighting for what you believe in is the harder part. Updates later once I’ve figured that out. There’s work to be done.

Side Note:
Elle Luna wrote a book after her Medium article went viral. I bought her book and am in the middle of devouring its contents. I’ll give a short update later of what I think about it.

Kids and Boredom

The other day, during dinner with my friend Jon, we were discussing what is the most negative thing brought about by technology today. Hands down, I said the use of technology in conditioning our children to form bad habits. Coincidentally, after dinner, we were walking to the car and saw a mother and a child. The child, maybe 5 years old, was whining and crying in public. The mother reached into her bag, pulled out an iPad, and gave it to her child. Immediately, he shut up and was mesmerized by the screen in front of him. I said, “Darn it, I wish that didn’t just happen.”

I’m not going to decree that technology is the problem here. You can see through history about the negativity we assign to technology, like John Philip Sousa talking about “a marked deterioration in American music and musical taste, an interruption in the musical development of the country, and a host of other injuries to music in its artistic manifestations, by virtue – or rather by vice – of the multiplication of the various music-reproducing machines.” He was referring to the gramophone. Every recent generation has something new to distract their attention, from radio to televisions to computers to tablet and phone devices. It’s more important to remember technology is just a tool, and we determine how we use this tool.

In my dinner discussion with Jon, he remarked how kids don’t know how to feel bored anymore. The wonders of using Lego’s or playing with physical objects, or just having absolutely nothing to play with makes the mind wander. Perhaps we are stripping children of this ability by being wired 24/7. Being wired has this loss of sense of self. Taking television as an example, we’re being sponges absorbing what comes at us in a one-way communication channel. And when we think we’re learning, we only grasp the moments most memorable by design. By writers and advertisers who are seeking your attention in this attention economy. Our brains are looking for something to stimulate our brains. We forget being bored forces our brain to find an external stimuli in other places, perhaps in the depths of our creativity or a sense of mindfulness.

Present Mind

Mundane tasks like cooking, showering, or driving can stimulate day dreaming. And the state of day dreaming may be more beneficial than conventional wisdom. From an article from WIRED, the author describes one study in which mind wandering has shown to exhibit executive and default regions working in conjunction with one another. This means the mind wandering state may not be as mindless as we all think it is.

Imagine a scenario where we are waiting for our triple shot expresso to be made at Starbucks. The barista is having complications with the espresso machine and you’re waiting there for ten minutes. And in this ten minutes, you do something profound; you do nothing. With that nothing, the brain wanders, wondering about the tiles on the floor, how many chores you have when you go home. The void of empty is filled by a stream of consciousness. But the moment you grab your phone turn it on, you’re sucked into a different world, one that has intended designs and patterns of habit.

And that’s what we do; we condition ourselves to lose the present mind. We have the decision whether to wait there staring at the barista or reach into your pocket or purse for your phone and divert your attention from the situation to something more productive, like Candy Crush. Hanging out with a friend the other day, we went out for some tapioca drinks, and while waiting for my order, she sat down at a table and whipped out her phone and started to play a game. This annoyed me, because I thought we were two very present people, but at the moment of pure boredom, she resorted to a quick, cheap attention grabber. I’m not against phone games, but there’s a disconnect when you’re hanging out with someone and one or both of your escape to the virtual world instead of sharing what you have in the present. I try my best not to use my phone as I’m hanging out with someone else. I’ll admit I whip out my phone from time to time, but I recognize how that affects the other party.

Boredom in Cooking

In an interview with Jon Favreau, he talks about mundane tasks while training with a chef for researching his movie, “Chef”. He mentions that during the mundane chore of chopping mis en place, he had a disconnect in chefs doing this laborious work when it could be done by the line cooks. But after all of the prep, using the prepped ingredients for cooking made him much more self aware of the process. He had a deeper appreciation for the food that comes out and about the story of the meal rather than be the passive participant.

When I’m cooking, I find myself in an elated state of mind, functioning almost seamlessly, handling multiple tasks with relative ease. Typically, this is in the form of going from chopping vegetables, heating the pan, and cleaning my dishes. I know exactly where I left off from one activity to another, and the brain feels very mindless. But this sparks immense creativity. If I’m missing or don’t have enough of an ingredient, I’ll improvise, figuring out alternatives. I take a holistic view of what I’m cooking and try to find a substitute ingredient to accomplish the same thing, like using lime juice instead of fresh lemon, or paprika instead of cayenne pepper. I get fairly bored following recipes because I was to push myself outside of the box and add or remove ingredients, or try some other form of heating instead of the method provided. It’s cooking sessions like this where I wonder why more people aren’t cooking.

Mindfulness in Jazz

In the 9th grade, I joined the school’s jazz band. It was my first jazz class, and I was failing to grasp the concept of improvisation. My area of expertise was conservatory classical music, and I simply looked at the sheet music as scripture. When I looked at the dashed out measures with a scale key on the top, I was afraid. I didn’t know all of these scales by heart, let alone follow it with no notes. I was dumbfounded and kept to myself, pretending to know what the lines of music meant. The jazz instructor came in, and we played Take Five right off the bat. I was introduced to strange sounds all around me, listening to students improvise sound during the solo section, and I thought it was pure magic. I tried to mimic their sounds after class, but it sounded like rubbish. My band teacher instructed us to listen to the greats. Other students informed me to follow the scales as reference points, use existing bits of the rhythm, and combine a bunch of riffs together. Climbing up and down octaves gives more variety, and don’t worry too much about playing fast.

For some of my off time, I was attempting to learn about music theory and why a combination of notes or in sequence could have a consonance or dissonance sound, i.e. sound pleasing or destructive. I obsessed with figuring out how to improvise with an analytical mind. But reading through snippets of autobiographies of Miles Davis and John Coltrain, it painted a different picture. The analytical mind shuts down and brings about this sense of mindlessness. It become music played through feeling or emotion rather than thinking of what note to press next. The musician will think of things in sounds rather than the notes in letters, i.e. play “A” next.

In the band’s end-of-year performance, I was informed that I would get to improvise. I was nervous as hell during the practices leading up to the performance. It was about a one and a half minutes, attempting to solo during Miles Davis’ “Freddy Freeloader”. I spent time memorizing the F scale, thinking less about the notes and more about the sound. During the performance, you could hear my solo had elements of the main melody with traversals on the blues scale. I failed at utilizing more than one octave, but it didn’t matter. The nervousness subsided midway during the solo and I entered a mindful state. I stopped thinking about psyching myself out and corrected any dissonance I heard. After the solo, a second sense of relief overcame me and I looked at the crowd. I received applause and I probably could’ve cried at that point.

Today, I’ll occasionally listen to “Kind of Blue” for the 50th time, and just become so entranced by Davis’ solos. I often think of what must be going through Davis’ mind as he’s playing the music. And then I’ll listen to one of his acid jazz works, and become overwhelmed by the insanity of the sound. The pick-up in speed, the downbeats, the intricacies of melody that seem to come from randomness, Davis’ improvisation skills sound like no one else in the world. And he does one-take, live in front of an audience. One has to wonder if this was his nirvana.

Take-aways

I feel the toll constant attention takes. I have lower desires to reach out to others, feel awkward trying to talk with people when I do, and create dark places for myself if I’m alone. When I come up for air, letting nothing happen around me, meditate, or find a space to be mindful of my breathing, all of the prior described situations are flipped. I’m eager to talk with others, I feel less awkward in talking, and I create a happy place when I’m alone. Next time you find yourself impulsively rushing for your phone, don’t satisfy the impulse and give boredom a chance. You may find rewarding outcomes.