Full Circles

Inner and Outer Life

Author: Daryl Chow, MA, Ph.D. (Page 2 of 7)

Ordinary Magic

June 28, 2023 / / 0 Comments

Magic is a strange art form.

If you stop to think about it, the magician is the only one in the room who does not experience the magic.

Uncle Frankie was a magician. As kids, my cousins and I were in awe by the stuff he has up his sleeves.

I was constantly trying to outsmart him and burst his bubble. But here’s what I discovered later in my life: Even if I figured out his “trick,” I could not perform the magic the way he did it.

Information is not transformation. Knowing is not enough.

And when we bring magic to others, we get to experience a different kind of magic: The magic of witnessing someone experience a sudden moment of transformation.

Conversational Magic

Conversations are like magic

It’s bizarre. The air pressures leaving your mouth, converting into sounds and meaning enters the heart and mind of the other, and for better or worse, creates an impact.

All of us are magicians, really. We have the power to do what my Uncle Frankie does.

But first, we must be intentional. Then we can find a way.

The relational craft is to learn the praxis of languaging our intent. Wanna see where our intention gets lost in our blunt art of conversation? Just listen to parents talk to their kids. The effect is often not what we intended.

To Be Altered

And, perhaps more importantly, we have to let the words of the other alter us.

“Instead of telling actors that they must be good listeners (which is confusing),” says renowned improv teacher, Keith Johnstone, “We should say, ‘Be altered by what’s said.’”

We have to learn to ask and hear the needs of others, and let that reconfigure our point of reference.

Theologian John S. Dunne describes empathy as “passing over,” where we enter into the thoughts, feelings and imaginations of the other.

Passing over is never total but is always partial and incomplete. And there is an equal and opposite process of coming back to oneself.

In short, something beautiful is created when we are willing to be altered as we gracefully leave ourselves, to “pass over” and put our attention to the experience of the other.

That’s magic.

Warning: It’s Not Just Your Attention

June 22, 2023 / / 0 Comments

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.

~ Herbert Simon.

There is a prescient quality to the words above made in 1971, made by a pioneering figure in cognitive sciences and artificial intelligence.

It is not new news that our attention is up for grabs.

Listen to Joe Rogan’s calling out the potential “massive distraction” of AR glasses, while Mark Zuckerberg actually thinks it’s a good idea.

What is an Algorithm?

Cathy O’ Neil, author of Weapons of Math Destruction describes algorithms as using historical information to make predictions.

If our future is asymmetrically left to people who owns the code, we are going to get a world that is designed for people who shaped Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and the like.

Joe Rogan’s response should also be our responses: Why should we let our attention be stolen, every day, every other minute?

But there is a greater worry. The warning we must take heed is not only that our attention and time is lost. More insidiously, our intentions are getting thwarted and pushed to the wayside.

Liquid Modernity: Your Coffee Needs a Cup

June 15, 2023 / / 0 Comments

Something’s missing. 

Your coffee needs a cup.

The cup needs to withstand the heat. It has to hold what I am after. A handle, that’s a plus. 

If I have coffee, but no cup, I have nothing. 

Liquid Age

In this liquid age, where nothing seems to hold, and everything is a state of flux, we need to have “cups.”

Cups can be conceived as rituals. 

Rituals require of 3 things:

  1. Intention
  2. Attention
  3. Repetition.

Rituals play out in our every day lives. How we say hello, and how we say goodbye. How we welcome a newborn baby, and how we grief the loss of the ones we love. 

How we make transitions in our lives, moving from an old world to a new one.

Without the solid presence of rituals in the face of what sociologist calls “liquid modernity”, we are left hungry and thirsty. Not that there aren’t things to nourish us—too much in fact—but rather, we have no place to hold our intentions. 

When there isn’t a place to hold our intentions, our attention goes astray. And that gets repeated.

Rituals clearly exists in religious practices. We must also find our way to bring rituals into our everyday lives. 

Even if the word “ritual” doesn’t sit well with you, an obvious sign that we yearn for this the experiences of our children. They want you to read that baookbefore they go to bed. Yes, it’s the 15th time they have read that, but they want you to read it with them. Their intention seeks for your attention, and they desires the rhythm of repetition. 

Again, and again.

In this liquid times, we must protect our intentions. 

Stop, and ask yourself, do you want to drink this coffee?

If so, you’d need a cup.

Fall in Front of Others

January 20, 2023 / / 2 Comments

I grew up skateboarding. It was my escape plan. It took me places. I learned mastery from skateboarding. I learned to hide injuries from my father, cos’ the pain of the falls are less than the wrath of my father.

I recently watched a video of a girl learning to do tricks on a skateboard over a 12-month period.

It’s incredible. It’s like watching a time-lapse video of a plant grow. She made incremental gains, some bad falls, and also some giant leaps.

But what was striking was the recurrent comments made by others about the video:

I worry that we have been hyper-conscious. In literal ways, the mirror is overy-reflected back on ourselves (Read this: Point Your Camera to the World). We can’t help but obsess about how our hair looks on a Zoom call.

An aside: This is also why if you are learning to practice a speech, despite conventional wisdom, the worse thing to do is to practice in front of a mirror. The focus isn’t about you. It’s your audience.

We all need to find a way to lose ourselves, and get deeply engaged into things that make us come alive.

Here’s one my best mates, psychologist and ex-Navy officer, Eng Chuan,  learning to skateboard at age 57.

Good Things Grow From…

October 21, 2022 / / 0 Comments

Most of us know this song.

Sing along:

“We all live in a yellow submarine.”

Now, hear the demo version for this landmark song:

Doesn’t sound like the final version that we know, isn’t it?

That’s why I love hearing musician’s demos. It the genesis. It’s the raw “toddling” beginnings.

 

Scrambled Eggs

Play along with me for the next one. Can you guess what song this is (hint: It’s a famous hit):

“Scrambles eggs, oh baby how I love your legs.”

Any luck?

That is the first lyrics for Paul McCartney’s hit, Yesterday.

The lyrics erm, improved.

“Yesterday, all my troubles seem so far away.”

 

Take the First Step (Not the Second)

All things start from somewhere.

And that somewhere may seem unpromising. Heck, you might even feel like an impostor, or not good enough. And that does not matter.

What you think about you and your abilities, doesn’t really matter.

Say you go for a job interview. Who gets to decide whether you are “the one” for the job?

Not you.

When you go on a date, who gets to decide if you are “the one”?

Not you.

When you release a song to the streaming platforms, who gets to decide if your song is going to be a hit?

Not you.

So what are we to do?

Take, the first step.

That first step, is everything.

Here’s the poet David Whyte:

Start Close In

Start close in, 

don’t take the second step, 

or the third, 

start with the first 

thing

close in,

the step, 

you don’t want to take. 

 

Because, as we observe this in nature and biology—just notice your gardens and potted plants—good things grow from sh*t.

Befriending Grief

February 25, 2022 / / 2 Comments

The experience of grief is not something we would ask for. Grief does not ask for our permission to exist.

Grief is not only losing something or someone outside of our selves. When we lose someone we love, we lose a part of ourselves. It is heartrending.

Steeped in our everyday exchanges , we are sublimated not to think about death. In my Chinese tradition, some might say it’s bad luck to speak about dying. In response, we say “Choi,” in Cantonese, to ward off the words – or even just having those thoughts – articulated.

You could say that reckoning with grief is like trying to stare at the sun. If you look at it directly, it blinds you. But, it illuminates everything. Our world revolves around it.

That’s because Grief has a twin called Love.

Someone who has worked in palliative care and author of Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul Stephen Jenkinson says this,

“Grief is a way of loving that which has slipped from view…
and love is a way of grieving that which it has not yet done so.”


And if we can stand in the sun and take this in for a minute, I believe this will lead us to a place of love again.

Put another way, befriending grief on a daily basis passes us through a threshold from floating along in live to a certain sense of wakefulness.

Like the emphasis we give to our dental hygiene, what we need now is a society of individuals who values and engages in the process of waking up on daily – twice a day.

Wakefulness is the hidden prerequisite to presence.

And what constitutes this contemplation of daily waking up? To be a practitioner of grief.

This is not a grim and austere exercise. Instead, it rends our hearts open to reality… a reality that doesn’t need our consent, that life is finite. Because of its finality, evermore the poignancy of our living.

Buy a flower and put it on your dining table. Its presence differs to a plastic creation. The living flower will wither, the fake models what’s real, but never so. Yet, the flower’s existence penetrates into our consciousness (and if we learn to take it in) of both its temporalness and its gravity of beauty.

A way to grief is to slow down time to love, and a way to love is to befriend grief.

See related: Love’s Near Other–Loss

Drive like a Grandma

November 22, 2021 / / 0 Comments

Here’s a suggestion: When you are on the road, drive like a Grandma.

Let the other people overtake you. Let them drive faster than you. Let them get to the traffic light first.

Go even further, wave to let them get ahead of you–simply because you can be graceful.

No need to rush, because rushing gets you to your destination maybe 2 mins earlier, but costs you the weight of agony–and a flustered face when you reach you destination.

Do you notice how people drive different in dense cities compared to the driving behaviour in less populated places? People aren’t assholes. We underestimate how much of an influence context shape our behaviour.

When you are on the road, you get to be either like the lot of us driving as if we are always late for the 5th job interview, mubbling to ourselves how idiotic others are when they drive… Or, we get to be the minority that counteracts the norm.

If we see what the norm is, everyone is trying to get ahead in every sense of the word.

Mark Twain said,

“The moment you are on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.”

A grandmother knows how to take the time, knows how to be present, and is not about to travel at the speed of light. A grandmother sees things that you might miss. When you travel at the speed of light, you just might miss life.

Father-Figure and The Good Ancestor

September 3, 2021 / / 1 Comment
I watched a 4-part documentary called 10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki. It was based on the renowned japanese anime director (known for his movies like Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle and My Neigbor Totoro). I’m not exactly a huge fan of anime, but his storytelling in his films and creative process captivated me.
 

I was struck by two things:

  1. His par excellent devotion to the craft.
  2. He was a lousy father.

 

His adult son works with him in Studio Ghibli. His son premiered one of his very own film. Midway through the show, Hayao is seen walking out of the cinema. Hayao speaks to the director of the documentary and says, “His show is too similar to my work… He shouldn’t make a film based on his emotions.” When the crowd comes out, someone walks to Hayao and says, “”(Your son) has made quite a philosophical film…” but Hayao walks away. Hayao then speaks to the documentarian, “You have to change the world with film… Otherwise, what’s the point?”

The painful part about Hayao’s assessment was that he might be right… and entirely disconnected from his role as a father.

 

Continue reading

Point Your Camera to the World

May 6, 2021 / / 4 Comments

In fact, tape away the self-pointing lens.

Change the focus from the Self and to the World, and then let the world teach you.

As writer John O’Donohue notes,

Love begins with paying attention to others, with an act of gracious self-forgetting. This is the condition in which we grow.
(From Anam Cara, p. 28).

When we take pictures of ourselves, our cognitive resources are channelled towards ourselves. The big trade-off when we become self-absorbed, we miss opportunities for what the world can teach us.

In virtual video meetings, once you’ve checked you are in the frame, it pays off to turn off the self-view. It is cognitively taxing to see yourself when you are supposed to pay attention to the other, as you would in face to face conversations.

Take pictures or videos of the world outside, and–is is the important bit–pay attention.

Take this as a metaphor to live by. Pay attention to the people and the world outside, and the make the picture good.

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