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Inner and Outer Life

Category: Reflections (Page 4 of 6)

Is “How Are You?” A Greeting or a Real Question?

November 22, 2019 / / 3 Comments

Since moving to Australia in 2010, I could never wrap my head around the social convention of asking each other “how are you?”

I took the question too seriously at first, and I soon realised I didn’t really need to contemplate the meaning of life as all I needed to say was “Fine thank you. And how are you?”

I think I’m getting the hang of it. I’m accepting that it’s really a hello or a G’day.

But 9 years later, I rethinking the “how are you’s.” Here’s what I think we should do to this social convention:

We should ask ourselves, on a daily basis, “How are you?”

And then patiently wait for a full-bodied felt response.

We don’t check in with ourselves enough. Most days, we are bustling around getting from one place to another, nailing down one task to another, from home care to schoolcare to the workforce. Meanwhile, we neglect to listen to our bodies.

Our mind is there to take care of the mind and the body. This is not just about being self-aware, because you can self-aware and still fail to ask fully embrace this beautiful question of “how are you.”

Hint: Like a call-and-response, if you ask this question to yourself and let it ring through from the top of your head to your pinky toes—and give yourself time—you might find yourself automatically letting out a sigh. That’s a good sign.

So, how are you?

Recalculating

November 15, 2019 / / 1 Comment

Jewish Buddisht teacher Sylvia Boorstein said,

“The GPS never gets mad at me… It just says, ‘recalculating.’ No matter how many times I don’t make that turn, the tone of the voice stays the same.”

Instead of being rigid and demanding of what we expect of life, perhaps our approach to parenting, relationships, and work should be have an improvisational quality of recalculating, recalibrating, or re-routing, and being openly responsive to what life presents.

The real challenge perhaps is how to stay unfrazzled.

Here lies a paradox: while we hold steady to pursue or goals and maintain our focus, we must continually let our expectations die. When we learn to let go of our demands of life, then maybe we can encounter life; the opening to live.

Daily, we must recalculate. And let the tone of our voice be fiercely gentle. 

Note to self: Remember this when my kids don’t do what I tell them to do.

“Will You Forgive Me?”

November 6, 2019 / / 2 Comments

“The lesson here is that there is no fix. There is, however, forgiveness. To forgive yourselves and others constantly is necessary. Not only is everyone screwed up, but everyone screws up.”

~Annie Lamott, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope.

 

My spiritual director the late Fr Claude Barreteau, MEP once told me a story about a man who repeatedly climbed a hill every week to arrive a small chapel where he made his confession to a priest. He felt bad that he had been doing so for such a long time, and seemed to  make the same mistake. On the exterior, it looks like this person hasn’t learned.

But I suspect Fr Claude’s story speaks to the business of forgiveness, which is a daily affair.

Today, out of sheer frustration, I yelled at my daughter. She burst into tears. She was inconsolable. Maybe Mom would come and sooth her. I was rendered helpless. I chastised her for being rude in the first place. She cries even louder. Mom’s not coming.

Then, in exasperation and lack of ingenuity, I realised I scared her. I sat down on the floor and I said, “I’m sorry. I messed up. My loud voice must have scared you. I’m gonna try better again the next time…”

She stopped crying. She looked at me. I brought her close. Meanwhile, in my mind, I was resisting even ounce of my being to correct her faults. There’s another time for that.

For now, “will you forgive me” is enough.

We need to climb up that hill and come to our senses that “everyone is screwed up… and everyone screws up,” and come back down again.

See this video by Fred Rogers.

(If you can’t see the video above, click here.)

Weeds

August 28, 2019 / / 0 Comments

I was a really good gardener, until I had a garden.

Never in my entire adult life, have I been so consumed by weeds.

Perhaps growing up in Singapore, where the majority of us live in high-rise apartments, other than the ones in pots, I never had to consider the upkeep of a patch of greenery.

Living in Australia on and off for the past 9 years now, I find myself wondering if I’m not doing something right with my garden. I mean, I’m not growing anything spectacular (or anything, as a matter of fact). Somehow, weeds seem to blossom with rage in my garden.

I secretly wish there was something I could do, once and for all, to stop them from ruining my life.

I was told by my neighbor that “it’s an ongoing business.”

A Builder vs A Gardener

All analogies have a point. Somehow we were indoctrinated to a Builder’s mindset. Plan, develop and build it. Maintain. Done. This doesn’t seem to apply to the messy business of life.

Instead, we require more of a Gardener’s mindset. Scatter some seeds, nurture the soil, protect and water it; let it grow. Prune.

Even before I grow more stuff in my backyard, I need to fully appreciate the business of gardening, or rather, to weeding. Subtract, not add. (See Point #3 of this blog)

And then I can consider to add. Add stuff like mulch and plants, in order to subtract.

When we think of adding a new project, we must consider what we need to remove for the new ideas to grow. When you choose to focus on one aspect of your development as a therapist, be ready to weed out what is non-essential. And if things evolve, things change. Your learning edge will change.

Chase two rabbits, and you’d catch none.

Pay Attention?

July 18, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Protect your attention the way you protect your money. Because unlike money, when time gets robbed it cannot be retrieved.

“A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.” ~ Decision making scientist, Herbert Simon.

In the endless flow of information streaming at us and social media platforms designed to mimic casino slot machines, attempting to hook us in with more dopamine-driven feedback loops, not only our attention gets robbed, our intentions gets screwed over.

And in order to live intentionally, this doesn’t happen by default. This happens by design.

Be intentional on what you attend to.

Tenderness is Not Weakness: What I’ve Learned from Jean Vanier

May 7, 2019 / / 4 Comments

Today, a spiritual and intellectual hero of mine has passed away.  Catholic innovator and philosopher, Jean Vanier, founder of the L’Arch and Faith and Light communities

Listen to an interview with Vanier on the Podcast, OnBeing. 

Vanier had also inspired another one of my favorite authors, Henri Nouwen. 

Here’s some critical lesson’s I’ve learned Vanier:

 

Protective Systems:

“We all have a deep fear of our own weaknesses because my weakness is what makes it possible for someone else to crush me. So I create mechanisms of defense and compulsion to protect myself. We all have protective systems designed to prevent people from seeing who we are.”[1]

What I could do:

“Recently a father asked me to go and see his wife. She was forty years old and eight months pregnant. She was in tears and a bit hysterical–this was her first baby and she knew that the child had a disability. I saw immediately that I couldn’t say a word to her. There are times when you must not say nice words. What I could do was send her to visit another mother who’d had a child a year previously with similar disablities to the child she was going to have. The two women got together and wept.” [1]

 

On Love:

“If you discover that somebody really loves you, listens to you, then you begin to change. You come out from behind the barriers of fear that you have erected around your heart.” [2]

“We seek security in life, but truly how insecure if really is…”[3]

“If God is love, then how vulnerable God must be.”[3]

On Culture:

“It’s the realization of how to create a culture which is no longer a culture just of competition, but a culture of welcoming, where tenderness, where touch is important, and it’s not — neither sexualized nor aggressive. It has become human. And I think that this is what people with disabilities are teaching us. It’s, it’s something about what it means to be human and to relate and to celebrate life together.” [3]

 

On Community:

“Some people say that communities start in mystery and end in bureaucracy…”[4] “True community is defined by how we treat the weakest.“[3]

“L’Arche is not a solution but a sign…You see, once I was speaking to a man in a big city in the United States. He said, ‘Give me the formula and I’ll create 300 L’Arches in the next two years.’ I said, ‘It doesn’t work like that. It’s a transmission of a vision and it’s counter culture. But that’s OK.” [5]

~~~

Dedication to Psychiatrist Dr Gwee Kok Peng, who also passed away today. May you continue to dance.

Footnotes:

[1] Jean Vanier, “Living Gently in a Violent World,” p. 68

[2] Jean Vanier, Encountering ‘the Other’ p 38

[3] https://onbeing.org/programs/jean-vanier-the-wisdom-of-tenderness/ 

[4] Jean Vanier, Community and Growth, p. 114.

[5] Meaningful Work, by Shawn Askinosie and Lawren Askinosie, Location  2156

Moved By Music

May 6, 2019 / / 3 Comments

It’s been a long time since I’ve discovered a new artist that moved me. Rosie Carney‘s music doesn’t scream for your attention. It’s probably not going to hit some charts. It’s quiet, but penetrating. It’s soft, but her songs invites you in.

I am so taken by her music.

I first hear this track that she did called Thousands. In this track, she had the backing vocals from someone she looks up to, fellow Irish singer Lisa Hannigan (formerly singing with Damien Rice)

Here’s a live performance of the song, Thousands.

I wanted to learn more about her. The Web isn’t sprawled with information about Rosie Carney.

I was surprised that she’s only in her early twenties. At the age of 16, Donegal’s Rosie Carney signed a record deal that guided her away from the unadorned and honest songwriting that she wanted to pursue. After that false start, Carney knuckled down and got even more real and began to address her battles with anxiety, depression and an eating disorder that occupied her teenage years. “I lost so much weight. I don’t know how I didn’t die.”

Here’s a short documentary about her battle with anxiety at a young age:

 

 

In the video above, she said that the catalyst for change was when her grandmother, who was suffering with dementia.

“One day, (my grandmother) asked my mother if I had cancer, as I was so thin…. that’s when I realised I need to completely sort myself out.”

Music really became a form of therapy for her. The song “Thousands” speaks about her grandmother

Carnie Rosey’s music reminds that our life is not about comfort, but about courage. It not about living an anesthetic life, but to be awaken each day to the aesthetics around and within us.

Work Hard, Play Hard?

April 30, 2019 / / 0 Comments

Modern life dictates we should “work hard, play hard.”  

Why must everything be so hard?

Why is there such an overvalued idea on being so hard on ourselves?

When can we nurture the times for softening and lightening up?

Maybe we should  “Work well, play freely.”

Go easy. Life is tough enough already.

The Speed of Life

December 28, 2018 / / 5 Comments

We attempt to lead the speed of life as if we can travel at the speed of light.

Only recently, this dawned on me, that my attempt to deal with the stresses of life was—in a true civilised 21st-century approach to living —to speed things up.

Go faster, read faster, write faster, do chores faster, put the kids to bed faster….so that I can buy more time for the next.

Inadvertently, I became impatient to others. People who were walking slower, people who were late, people who were blocking my way. The truth is, I was becoming agitated with my wife and kids. Simply because, on hindsight, they weren’t traveling in the same speed as I was. Especially for my 5-year-old, who has a very different concept of time, takes a fairrrrrr amount of time… to get ready to go out.

Something’s not quite right with this type of speed.

The speed of life is not the speed of light.

Therein lies the paradox: Time speeds up when we are rushing. 

We see much more when we are walking by our familiar street than when we are driving by in the comforts of our car.

I’m still grappling with this. Daily, I remind myself again not only to slow down, but to do less, and embrace this persistent paradox with time.  

Make Time

November 21, 2018 / / 1 Comment

Sit on a chair, and look around you.

The table in front of you took many hours to be built; it’s four legs shaped symmetrically. The finishing of the wooden top, coated to protect from wear and tear.

The music that is playing in the background. A singer with a four-piece band, playing through the speakers. The layers of production to give you this sonic experience.

The building that you are in, sheltering you from the afternoon heat. The house that is now your home.

Four thin pieces plus a slap of wood on the top took more than 40 hours to be made. The 3.5mins song took more than 3 months to be written and another 3-4 months to produce (maybe a year’s worth of mulling with the muses—and writing other bad songs—to even begin writing that song). The house that you live in took more than a year to be built, another six months to make it your home, and a lifetime for its soul to come alive.

Everything takes time to be made, but so little to consume it. Even that chair that you are sitting on right now.

You are made in the passage of time.

Make time to appreciate the making of things and people around you.

Make time.

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