Archive for June 2007


A child’s defense mechanism

June 28th, 2007 — 7:50am

As I learn about defending using Tai Ji, a child taught me about her defense mechanism. We were eating ice-cream, and suddenly, she waved a spoon of ice-cream in the air and said:

“This is where my dad is…” and moving her spoon to the left,

“This is where my mum is…” and imagined feeding each of them ice-cream.

The background to this child’s family is this – her dad is working in UK, and her mum is doing the same in US. And we’re in Singapore. It’s obvious that their daughter misses them dearly. In a bid to externalise this feeling, she used ice-cream.

I believe this is the power of imagination, the power of the sub-conscious mind. Even though you’re not thinking about it consciously, you’re allowing your sub-conscious mind free reign to do what it has to do, to keep your conscious mind free to do what it has to do. In this child’s case, her sub-conscious mind allows her to miss her parents, and her conscious mind allows her to eat the ice-cream.

Her plight may appear to be a sad one, but she is coping with it so well that I feel weak compared to this child. So here is a thank you note to her, and hope her family situation will improve. In the mean time, we can always do our part to make her feel less lonely, like bringing her out to eat ice-cream. :)

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Comment » | Life around Us

The lure of anticipation

June 24th, 2007 — 11:43am

My work requires me to anticipate on a daily basis – more commonly known as “risk management” in the industry. It’s a nice sounding term but it cracks the brain, literally. We need to come up with scenarios, however unlikely, so that we have a system in place which is robust enough to deal with these “what ifs”.

All these future expectations is conflicting with what I am trying to do away with, anticipating. You see, one of the big “no no” in push hands is to anticipate the next move, because once you anticipate, you’ll lose the moment and if the next action is not as anticipated, then you’ll be in a disadvantageous position. That’s why we are trained to “listen” to the opponent’s movement rather than anticipate.

With all the thinking going on in my head, no wonder my teacher says that those who think too much, can’t progress much in Tai Ji. We cannot be in that moment. We cannot be present to the moment. Always thinking about the next move, possibly thinking about what’s for dinner as well.

All these is assuming that anticipation is bad for us. Why? Let’s see… If we create too high an expectation, and we didn’t reach it, we’ll feel that we haven’t accomplished what we have set out to achieve. If we create too low an expectation, and we achieved it, although fulfilling our expectation, we have artificially created an “achievement ceiling”, a goal post which if it didn’t exist, we may well shoot beyond it, way beyond it.

So why are we so tempted to anticipate even though we know it’s bad for us?

If push hands have got anything to teach, it’s this. It’s easier to anticipate than not to anticipate. The conscious mind thrives in this kind of environment. It seeks for your attention and gives you a high if you win, just like winning the lottery – you’ve anticipated the right number.

While anticipating is easy, the “happiness” it gives is only temporary. If you don’t anticipate, you just do it and accept the consequences. Any situation can be turned into an opportunity for you to express yourself, if you are brave enough to know yourself, the real you. The truth shall set you free. Anticipating will not.

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2 comments » | Life in Motion

Learning less everyday

June 23rd, 2007 — 8:58am

This website has been undergoing some identity crisis lately. Well, the website can’t actually undergo identity crisis, but somehow, it’s easier to write when referring myself as a third party. :)

Anyway, as much as I want to “think and grow”, I’ve been reminded that “thinking” itself might be counter-productive to growing. As The Power of Now suggests, we are drawn to think, sometimes so much so that making “thinking” as an end itself. Doing puzzles, sudoku (which by the way if you haven’t checked this out, is highly addictive) etc are ways in which we engage our mind, apart from thinking about work, relationships, and life itself.

My Tai Ji teacher recently highlighted that (in general), people who needs to think a lot at work are normally those who progressed slowly in Tai Chi. I casually mentioned that I also fall into that category…. and then there was silence…. and then we laughed! :D

I think (yikes!) the “thinking” which is restricting growth is normally the conscious thinking that we do. Conscious learning cannot be applied at will. You can only hold so much thought at any one time. To react to an ever changing situation, conscious thinking is a poor processor. You need a processor which is much more intuitive and with potentially limitless capacity to adapt to our ever changing environment. I think we need to “push” conscious learning to the other-than-conscious mind. To learn less consciously and learn more intuitively.

I hope to use this as the theme for this blog from now on – learning less everyday. Let’s see where this will take us.

p/s: this reminds me very much of Yoda – unlearn what you have learnt. :)

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7 comments » | Guides to life

A student becomes a teacher

June 17th, 2007 — 9:01am

After becoming a student for years, a few friends asked me to teach Tai Ji. I rejected profusely, citing some lame excuses e.g. not ready, not good enough, do not want to mislead etc. Of course, being friends, they have the normal comeback for each of my excuses. I think the fact that I’m not charging for the class gives a strong incentive for them to try out Tai Chi for the first time!

I did think about why I didn’t want to teach in the first place. Those reasons cited were actually true. And yet, something is nagging at the back of my mind about each of these reasons.

1. I don’t feel I’m ready to teach.

Then it hit me that I will never be ready. Or to phrase it differently, I can never be ready as I am ready now. There will always be excuses down the line that will make me feel that I’m not ready – the timing is not right, I don’t have time, I’m tired etc. It sounds very much like the top 10 excuses for not training!

2. I don’t feel I’m good enough.

Also, I will never be good enough. There will always be someone better than me, but the question is, am I good enough for them?

3. I didn’t want to mislead them

I didn’t want to mislead them, the way I saw some of the teachers misled me! But without those misleading twists in my Tai Ji path, I wouldn’t have been able to distinguish the good from the bad. So in a way, meeting these teachers did help. Somehow, the dots are joining.

So…

The student hence became a teacher, to all 3 students in the first lesson. :D They did try to rope in some other friends, but no one were as keen as them, yet. Maybe after the first class, more will turn up, and better still, none will turn up! Will see how this goes. Watch this space!

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7 comments » | The diverse Life

Buying a ticket home

June 10th, 2007 — 9:50am

Buying a ticket home. It’s suppose to be easy, it’s suppose to be painless. But when you combine school holidays, Sundays and rainy days, you’ve got yourself a perfect storm. Continue reading »

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1 comment » | Accessories to Life

Paid to perform

June 6th, 2007 — 8:30am

I am an employee. I have a fixed salary every month, for as long as I work with the company. I get some holidays which I can take anytime of the year. Of course, “anytime” is normally controlled by someone else, commonly known as “the boss”. I can “request” anytime, but it’s never “anytime”… Anyway, when I started my very first “paid monthly” job, I never view it as a job I was paid to do. I view it as a learning ground, a chance for me to show both myself and the world out there what I can do. So I feel sad when one day, not long after I started my first job, that “the boss” told me to just do it without questioning, because I am “paid to do so”.

Questioning is part of the learning process. Over time, you learn when to question and when not to question. But not to question AT ALL breaks the very meaning of learning. For me, understanding the purpose of what I’m doing determines the level of energy and intensity into that work. The stronger the purpose, the stronger the will power to make sure it gets done.

In a hierarchical company, the purpose is often lost through the chain of command. Sure, companies have mission statements, but how often are those statements translated to anything remotely close to the work being done on the ground? The only consistent mission statement is “to make money”. This measure on its own is not a good long term purpose for any company. Actually, what they fail to tell you is that this mission statement is incomplete. The full mission statement is not actually to make money, but to make money “in the short term” – to make money as long as the person on top is in charge of the company. Because the person on top knows that his time is short – either make a big bang out of it to prove his worth, or make big bucks out of his time before his time is up.

As a result of the “chain of command”, this mentality is translated to each section of the chain. So, as long as you’re head of some section, you will more or less succumb to the direction the “ultimate head” is telling you, whether you like it or not.

Can we turn this around? Should the fate of the company be controlled by a chain of command?

I believe this military style structure has its use in the past. Business schools have probably dissected this business model umpteen times to fill up a whole course. If so, there must be some solution to this, but why does the problem persist?

I guess the human civilization that we have come to be proud of its growth and technological prowess has failed to grow in the wisdom dimension. We can split the atoms but we can’t split the ego from ourselves. The only thing we have managed to split is our personalities. At work, there seem to be a different creature inhabiting the body. If you were to meet your co-workers outside of work, they would seem perfectly normal. But when you place them in a work environment, somehow, an invisible hand is guiding their actions. Hostile, defensive, insecure, yearn for power etc are some of the common traits of this new creature.

I didn’t mean to write so negatively about the corporate world. So here’s the challenge for myself and for you hopefully as well. We can’t change what’s out there, we can only influence. But the one thing that we can certainly change is ourselves. It’s difficult to go against the grain, but we can still choose to be true to ourselves without appearing that we are going against the flow. Keep a cool core, and as you build up your core strength, it will overspill. Just like the contagious laughter. Smile a little, and your co-workers will smile back at you, eventually!

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2 comments » | Life around Us

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