What I am doing right now is called writing, but I know that is not what I truly want to do.
Writing is tough. It takes time and energy. The grammar police always hides behind the bush, both inside my mind and out in the world. And of course, it does not make money—at least enough to justify explaining my work as a “writer” to others. I never got paid from my writing, and probably I will not.

I don’t write in order to argue with other people or prove my point of view. If someone comes along and challenges me about the legitimacy in my writing, I just shrug my shoulders and back off slowly, fade into a wallflower in that cocktail party scene, wait until that person finds another toy to play with. Wimpy? Yep. But seriously, I don’t have the desire to prove that I am right—to others. I only need to prove to one person, and that’s me. That sounds so lonely when laid out in texts, but that’s true. Yet being a human being, I am filled with an over-the-top joy when someone tells me that she thinks what I wrote is right, or even better, interesting.

Interesting. That’s the keyword. All I want to do is to find something “interesting.” What is the state of being interested, after all? It occurs when I find something (A) true but (B) previously not obvious. To find something interesting is to find a truth. It doesn’t have to be The truth or Your truth. It only has to be My truth, whether it has a significant impact on my sense of identity or just gives me a small chuckle to lift my spirit up for 5 minutes. But it has to be true, at least to me. Of course it might be more fun to find a universal truth than a personal truth, but sadly I have only one “truth filter” and that’s my own body. I write because I want to touch the truth. You may say I am looking for God, or personal Jesus. So be it—I don’t give a damn.

Indeed, all these sound very personal and private. If I am just digging into a mental sandbox to find the missing coins or cards, why do I need to show the result to others in the name of writing, after all? A truth is a truth. It does not have to be cleansed to make it less “authentic,” doesn’t it? But here is the problem. I do not know what I have dug up, until I brush off the dust and polish the outer skin. Just like precious stones are always wrapped by pressurized rocks, my truth is just a chunk of tangled web of consciousness in its raw form. In order to see what is really inside, I need to reach out for my knife, sandpaper, or toothbrush: my writing.

Writing is polishing. I know my tools are far from perfect. English is my second language, and after all, language itself has never been perfect, which is a reason why we haven’t gotten tired of churning series of text lines even after seeing damn near perfections done by Shakespeare, Mark Twain, or Dylan Thomas. (Also we have a great mechanism called memory loss, but let’s ignore that for a moment—show some mercy, please.) But after all, writing is the only set of tools I have acquired over the years. Some people use musical instruments. Or paint brush. Or their own body. I use words.

That’s right, what we do under the name of art is always about seeing, touching, or revealing a truth, any truth. The reason we are moved by watching a great movie, listening to a song, reading a prose, or dancing in unison with a partner is because we touch the truth, or the universe, for a brief moment. How good it would be, we imagine, if we can stay in this moment forever. But that moment almost always quickly fades away, leaving us with even more desire. For me, I am eternally that 7-year-old version of mine who had the chance to glance into the skirt of the cute girl next door, only for once. She might have even smiled at me. I don’t know, and I will never know.

What if I found a way to connect to the truth all the time? Maybe that’s what they call enlightenment. But I need to think about this: Do I still want to make love when there is always someone with me, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year? I am not exactly sure. Again, I don’t know, and I will never know. Well, as any soccer fan in an overcrowded bar can show me, the greatest moment comes right before the climax. That expectation, the craving for the 0.5 second leading to the ecstasy, is what makes it worth the game, and what makes us…us. Why stay inside the supreme state, even though it is “supreme?”

I guess I want to stay in this world and wait a bit more to catch the next glimpse of her smile. Or her underwear. Therefore I write, for now. But now is the only moment I have.

I believe god exists, but in the form of natural laws, such as gravity. Galileo, Newton, Einstein weren’t enthusiastic because they observed physical laws. They touched the truth—god. God is gravity. Thus we are part of god and god is part of us, because gravity is the power that attracts everything in this universe. And yet gravity is part of god, and god is part of gravity, and so are us… We are eternally peeling the layer of gods, a huge onion encompassing everything, and we will die smiling at the glimpse of another god—another layer. Maybe it is quantum physics. Maybe it is the blue of the sky. Maybe it is the tide of the ocean. That’s god. It is unfair, it has no emotion, it does not provide salvation. But it is always there.

The moral of this story for me? Forget god, grab some beer, watch the star, and go to bed. With someone you love. That’s god.

P.S. The subject line was originally written by Ken Wilber.

I have been dealing with the big questions for years: Who am I? What is important? How should I live? I never found one right answer, so decided to rid of the wrong ones first. (Don’t we all do this when picking our significant others?) Who am I not? What is not important? How should I not live? There, they have become much easier to handle.

I started to let go of (1) relations and (2) things that weren’t working any more. The former is another story; I just say that I made the right decisions, and that it wasn’t about cutting everything off but rather about recognizing that our priorities have drifted apart. For now, let’s focus on the latter: tangible items. A stuff met either of the two criteria below, or it got kicked out.

• It works for me
• I used it at least once in the past year

I almost created a third category for “unusable but meaningful objects”: old photo albums, gifts, handmade items… Ultimately, they were included in the “It works for me” category. No matter how big and important memories those items carried, if they tied me only to the past, I parted with them. If they connected me to the present or to the future, I kept them (hence, they “work”).

Here is the result, borrowing the format from the Minimalists website.  I now (still) own around 200 items.

• Furniture (20): 4 chairs, 1 table, 1 desk, 1 sofabed, 2 bookshelves, 4 racks, 1 refrigerator, 1 washing machine, 1 vacuum cleaner, 1 heater
• Bedroom (60): 5 pairs of shoes, 10 shirts, 10 pairs of socks, 5 coats, 10 pieces of underwear, 10 towels, 1 mattress, 3 blankets, 1 sleeping bag, 5 bags
• Kitchen (30): 5 cups, 10 saucers, 5 bowels, 1 mixer, 1 toaster, 1 coffee maker, 1 water filter, 1 set of cooking utensils, 1 set of seasoning, 3 sets of eating utensils
• Books (50) : 49 + 1 Kindle (which contains many more ebooks)
• Electronics (10): 1 laptop, 1 DVD player, 1 router, 2 hard drives, 1 mobile phone, 1 speaker set, 1 headset
• Hobby (20): 1 wet suit, 1 set of scuba diving gears, 4 paintings, 1 painting set, 2 sketchbooks, 5 small figures, 1 set of Buddhist items, 1 collection of funny flyers
• Bathroom and Others (20): 1 cat house, 2 blooms, 3 sets of cleaning substance, 3 sets of tools and supplies, 3 rolls of papers, 1 set of bathroom items, 1 weight scale

I did feel somewhat empty after throwing stuff away. Even though they weren’t functioning, they did fill places in my apartment as well as my heart. But very soon, I naturally started to look for something that could fill the void. I started to re-invite new items into my life, such as cooking, which turned out to be a surprisingly rewarding habit even though eating out in Taipei is cheap (and sometimes cheaper).

The real catch here is that reintroducing cooking into my life and recognizing its importance happened only after the downsizing. My body had been sending a message requesting a better dietary habit for years, but previously that weak signal was buried under the enormous amount of noise emitted from the junks I had accumulated. And as a lazy slob, I was still skeptic of taking up cooking until the last moment. All I knew was that my then eating habit wasn’t working for me any more; I wasn’t sure cooking was the right answer. Why give up all the conveniences? Why not just go to vegetarian restaurants or pick more salads?

But because I had emptied out so many items in my life, my desire to introduce something new was stronger than my hesitation. I reluctantly took a bet, and only after I started cooking I realized that I wasn’t just getting sick of eating out all the time; I also wanted to explore learning new skills, eat simple yet tasty food, rediscover Japanese home cooking, so on. My body wasn’t just saying no to my outdated habits; it was also saying yes to new experiences. I could figure out the former, which was still a major challenge, just by thinking. But I could have never figured out the latter if I did not roll my sleeve and take up the knife.

Leading a simple life isn’t about reducing stuff; it is about getting my life back into arm’s reach, because sometimes—well, most of the times—I could understand what’s important only after doing that very stuff myself. Getting down to the bare bones is just the beginning. The real work, introducing new (and forgotten) habits that I did not know I needed, starts from there.

Everything points toward getting real. Simplifying is just the first step, to clear out the noises (clutters) on the surface so that we can listen to something more profound. After all, if reducing is the only task, our lives resemble the tactics of a defensive soccer team. Yes, they sometimes get results (Greece did win Euro 2004). But were they ever exciting to watch, or play?

The 21st century looked so bright when I was a kid, busy devouring into retro-futuristic juvenile science fiction books. Young couples enjoyed honey–literally–moon trips, everybody was healthy and young, and nobody worked. Robots and computers took care of all our lives, and a typical citizen just relaxed in a sofa in his apartment complex overlooking the skyline, indulging in philosophical discussions over the TV phone.

30 years later and we are in the post-2001: A Space Odyssey era. We will probably never travel to space on a PanAm vessel served by androgynous flight attendants. The ever-increasing health care costs and underfunded social security system are crushing hopes for a happy retirement. But one prediction is coming close to realization: No work, not anymore. Either robots or robotic hard-workers in developing countries are taking care of our job with 50% less cost. We, the good citizens, sit down in a sofa in our apartment complex, gaze into the TV screen, and indulge in philosophical discussions–inside our heads, wondering what our lives are about.

Welcome to the real world, where young and smart lads, who have received the highest levels of education human beings ever conceived, are flipping burgers in a drive-through while living in the basement of their parents’ house. What went wrong?

Probably nothing. Nobody deliberately tried to force people into the current economic situation. Most likely, most people just worked hard to feed their families, send their kids to college, and save for their retirement. And I think therein lies the key.

What is work, especially the joy of it, after all? Largely, it is about improving our lives, step by step. In other words, it is to make things more efficient: faster, easier, simpler. All we have done is to continue our optimization crusade–until now, where we have reached the holy grail: humans, the ever unpredictable, lazy slobs. We have stepped into the final (or previously forbidden) phase of optimization, that is to reduce ourselves.

The sci-fi novels overlooked two things: we need money to buy food to nourish our body, and we need something to do to nourish our soul. Rob us of them, and we can easily turn violent. In Andalusia, impoverished villagers marched across the country for protest, led by a leader who endorced vandalism and has been hailed as the modern-day Robin Hood by the media. Angry mobs in China unleashing their frustrations hardly counts as news anymore. Expect more to come.

Is there a way out? I think there is. If the current jobless situation continues to get worse (yes, it will) to a point where everybody, even the 1%, starts thinking “I’ve had enough,” then we have a new task in our hands–the time has arrived for us to optimize the jobless economy, which was caused by the previous stage of optimization. Work sharing, job hopping, slashers–all these minor tactics will soon blossom into mainstream lifestyles.

And yet, after everybody gets a job, then of course we will start “optimizing” them. Chicken and egg, ying and yang, men and women. The karma will continue.

This is a summary of an email message I exchanged with a dear friend when I was struggling with depression a while ago.

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The latest D incident has finally woken me up to the fact that Mr. D will never leave at my request. He just sits there until he gets bored (= I give up fighting and just lay down).
Mr. D is still there, right now, at my side. I decided to do what I do with or without his presence or consent. Just like he can control his naughty behavior, I have full control over mine.

Life is not an American Idol performance where you get up on the stage only on the best condition (and still get criticized). It is more like swimming in the middle of the ocean. There is actually no one measuring your performance and giving you grades. And no one can take your place and swim instead. It is just endless and eventless. You have to constantly fight the urge to look down into the bottomless darkness that sucks you in. Sometimes you just want to be as cynical as you can and give up everything, because regardless of what you do, the current always seem to take you to another place.

But if you look up you can see the beautiful sky or the stars. If you look ahead you see the horizon, where the sun comes up every day. If you look around you can see people you care about, all swimming his or her own life. Most of them have their own directions. But you may exchange a brief encounter with them with joy, because it is already a miracle that you two have crossed each other’s path in this vast ocean. And occasionally, you have someone who happens to be swimming in the same direction. Better yet, you may have someone who can swim with you side by side.

So I woke up, spent one hour writing until I got tired of shouldering Mr. D, slept again, got to my workplace. Mr. D is always sitting on my shoulder, slowing me down dramatically. But I am swimming, and looks like Mr. D is decent enough to at least stop whispering into my ears. We may never be able to build a great relationship, but I think we are at least on okay terms.

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After writing the above, I started walking on the road back to reality, where everything works but nothing works (according to my term). Perhaps my depression was an attempt to escape into a fantasy world where I could control the result. I am so glad I couldn’t.

When my predecessor, John Gittings, left China after 25 years, he presciently foresaw how the the old cold war stereotypes would be shattered by the countrys speed of development. But that is just the start of realignment. In the future, I believe the most important political division will not be between left and right, but between conservers and consumers. The old battle of “equality versus competition” in the allocation of the resource pie will become secondary to maintaining the pie itself.

via China: witnessing the birth of a superpower | World news | The Guardian.