Who am I?

Say there was a god that made the world in seven days, including all the animals, and then he made human beings. Each species gets to choose a gift. The cow chooses many stomachs to digest grass, and the big cats want physical strength and agility.

But man chooses something strange and abstract. He chooses adaptability and potential. He is a blank slate on which anything can be written, and from which anything can be formed.

Human nature is like Pandora's Box containing infinite potential, and its slow unpacking is the unfolding of human progress.

But how do these big ideas about human nature help with everyday life?

That's my roommate's complaint when I talk to her about philosophy. "Life is just about two things: finding a good career, and a nice family," she says, being a practical girl who works in finance.

It's simple according to her - but I despise simplicity, and here's why.

When you look at any self evident truth closely they slither and multiply, becoming impossible to pin down.

Finding the right career and the right partner, or even knowing what 'right' means, leads directly to the big, existential questions of who you are and what you're doing with life.

Our adaptability creates many solutions to any problem. If that Pandora's Box is full of mysterious creatures, our various potentials, life involves picking the things you want to unpack from the box.

If we are a blank slate then life is writing a narrative, bringing ideas into black and white from an infinite sea. It's creation of a story and of a person. We are self-creators
and it's our longest, biggest, most complex project.

'Who am I?' is our challenge, and our handiwork. We are all project managers.

Of course complex projects are never easy. It requires discipline, delayed gratification, big picture thinking, and persistence. Many try to escape from the task (more on neurotics later).

This project is also unavoidable because life must have meaning (more on why later).

The idea that human life is inherently suffering has been knocking about in religions since forever. Maybe it's related to this difficult, long, and unavoidable task hanging over our heads, and which comes with the package of human existence.

Imagine how traumatic birth is, but we are constantly being born. Existential self creation is one of the roots of suffering.

A related suffering is how we pick potentials to realise, and which potentials to forgo.

Complexity

I often define depth as 'sensitivity to complexity,' or what Keats terms 'negative capability.' It's a theme I'll return to again and again, because there's such a bias in conventional thought that the most profound truths are simple.

But why would you say that about human beings, when you wouldn't dream of saying it about space travel?

Yes, space travel.

I make this weird comparison because space travel is the most high complexity technical system we have. And human life is even more complex than that.

Take the Grant Study for example, an extraordinary longitudinal experiment that followed a group of 268 promising Harvard students from 1930 until they died. Their lives turned out to be utterly beyond prediction.

As one NYT columnist said in this article, "There is a complexity to human affairs before which science and analysis simply stands mute."

A good analogy is a PIN number. Just four digits and you can create millions of combinations that a supercomputer couldn't crack. But there are many more than four elements in the make up of a person – like background, physicality, temperament and random experiences.

Societies and economies are even bigger PIN numbers as they combine millions of hugely complex individuals. This is why stock markets, and history itself, is non-predictable.

But that's not all. A ball rolling down a hill has many forces acting on it, and yet science can tease out its basic course by separating and simplifying them all, then adding it back together.

This works well on the physical world, but human nature has the added dimension of free-will. There is a mysterious gap between cause and consequence in human actions that does not exist in the natural world. It's a gap for which, as yet, we have found no tools to investigate.

And it's this mysterious gap that defines human nature, and which I want to explore.

Self rescue

I've always been in the business of self-rescue. Not just self help, or self development but a massive intervention in the cycle of dysfunction, abuse and despair.

But I did it mostly without therapy (and a bankful of money), or the great industry of self help. Instead I leaned on the ancient art of philosophy.

Some people say that in the post-modern world philosophy is dead. But I want to show with this blog that it weaves every strand in the narrative of life.

I've been absent for a while because blogs have been banned here. But the distance was good because I realised I need greater focus.

So I've decided to tackle self development because it's simply a travesty. Commercialization has made it a flippant, shallow industry of new age nonsense and charlatans.

But really changing reality is the most ancient, and complex project undertaken by the human race. It calls on our most profound ability - philosophy - to decisively intervene in the tyranny of fate and nature.

Also I have a problem with shiny, glossy, catchy motto's. They ignore the darkness that give life shape and dimension. Positive psychology reduces the magnificent beast of life into a squeaky, plastic toy.

I want to document the narrow path of change with the abyss lying close on either side.

..that thing is love

"I'm not frightened, not of anything. The more I suffer the more I love. Danger would only increase my love, sharpen it, give it spice.

I will be the only angel you need. You will leave life even more beautiful than when you entered it."

- The Reader

I've been thinking about love in a relationship, and desire. It struck me these are quite different things. A long term relationship, by definition, has to be practical and maintainable. It's like finding a joint venture partner. It's about the practicalities of how you want to live and where you want to end up. But desire is a totally different beast.

Desire ignores appropriateness because it worships different laws.

It is that door at the end of that corridor one flight up and at the back of your house.

It answers the siren call of black holes that were never filled.
Things lost and paths not taken.

Why would any of these things coincide with practicality?

They say in this sex obsessed society, that you can have one night stands, but it won't make up for a real relationship. What about the things real relationships can't possibly cover? It's far more than sex.

The French knew the lost art of the 'Affair' - and the difference between an affair and a one night stand is like the difference between a French Arthouse film and a porn film.

A haunting book I read once about love was titled simply, "Open the Door!"

Metropolis I

Big metropolises are a special world unto themselves, especially Asian metropolises where the forces of development, inequality and globalization come together. What does this do to the individual? I wanted to write a series of vignettes to explore this issue, but then days of self loathing got in the way. Inspiration comes and goes, and self doubt steps in to fill the remaining minutes and hours and days. Anyway I finished the first one of the series, based loosely on a conversation I had on the top floor of the Jinmao Tower. Comments welcome.

So many aspects to look at...

XXX

Clinking between cocktail glass and gold clad table, 85 stories above the city. We were laughing absurdly, carefree at the top of the world. For once the blur of speeding highways that took me from party to party, bar to bar wasn't an echo of bleeding loneliness. A wide-eyed companion was by my side and we moved at the speed of light, with the beat of the metropolis, hearts pulsating neon.

He looked out of 360 degree windows at the man made world glittering madly outside. The skyscrapers were alien giants winking lewdly back at us. "This view is amazing," he said. He was leaving in two days. "It's my favourite place here, and I wanted to show you." He turned to me with dark eyes holding something as other-worldly as the night outside.

I turned away. My absurdly expensive rings clinked against my absurdly expensive cocktail. "It's progress, and potential," I said turning the conversation to the abstract, "but pursuing potential is not the same as happiness."

His eyes refused to let go, "potential for what?" he asked.

And that's when I knew he really was an innocent who believed there was a difference. Potential for good, potential for evil.

***

In the spring of years ago I arrived - it was bitterly cold but bright. I was one of a great movement from countryside to city. The girls used to giggle, "maybe a rich city boy will fall in love with us." Our fertile, human hearts couldn't help receiving the seeds of spring.

But in the great seas and seas of human lives I soon realised I was just another dot. And in the crowded dormitories shared with ten other girls, snoring loudly after days of backbreaking work, I stared at the dark patches where paint had peeled and rust had come through on the bed posts.

I thought of my days in the countryside - escaping from school to steal oranges and dropping out at 16 with dreams of the city. My grandparents who lived with their illnesses because it was a choice between medical fees and eating. And I thought of the sister after me given away because she was a girl and there were already too many girls in the world.

And I knew I had nothing to offer.

But this machine of concrete limbs and fleshy heart pumped on, its metal mouth gaping open and hungry.

***

He was from a wealthy family, but he never talked about it as if he never cared. His mind was on other things and he threw away his birthright like handfuls of gold dust. I clutched my low cut designer dress - always successful - and the white gold necklace a gift from another man. All of it suddenly felt cheap. Like I had taken my
mother's heirloom to a pawnshop and got back two dirty notes.

"What happened to you?" he asked.

In all our previous 24 hours together he had asked questions, one after the other. Breathlessly curious it was all new to him, as if his imagination could devour all the night stars blazing. He thought he could uncover the truth about this convulsing human mass with just his open, searching heart. But it was he who brought humanity within him to our gaudily lit farce.

I tried to think of a plausible story. But what came out was the most impossible yarn, yearning to tell the truth.

"My family and I were moving to a better place, and we packed everything we owned on a boat," I fabricated, talking through layers and layers of years wasted and steps taken from that first spring.

"On the sea the boat sank, taking everything and all their lives. Except me. I survived on a tiny boat, just me between endless sky and endless sea."

The metropolis was waiting for me, always waking, arms and legs open. Every weekend a one night stand that I called paradise.

"When you have lost everything important, and still survived," I heard myself say through the giddyness of the height and the alcohol and the glittering madness, "you realise you never needed it in the first place."

He listened. He had no answers.

So eager was he to pose questions he never listened to the replies. That was the ephemeral nature of his being, his questions, and his passing through.

But he paused then.

And the heart of the machine missed a beat.

My muse

I found my muse.. a fact I can't talk about in real life so it's spilling onto my virtual world. A guy so deliciously unsuitable, and yet so poetic. A person I met in the depths of the Chinese winter, and who melted my heart. But by spring who knows if I'll need him anymore as the whole world thaws. That's the tragedy of muses.

He's a migrant worker, the lowest of all classes in this class concious society. But his spirit is unbroken, unlike these pampered, white collar kids who have grown up as emperors in their families. He has a wild streak, and yet no opportunities. He's smart but vulnerable and he remembers every single thing I said. I find the differences between us endlessly fascinating. I want to go with him to his native Henan province, see what it's like to grow up close to nature and the community.

We met at Christmas time, and when I came back to my real life to go to the parties, sip the drinks, and pretend to laugh with the people in my world all I could thinkk about was, "life has got to be more than this." I was just bored, bored, bored without the struggle and the injustice that opened a window into what really mattered, and who I could be.

But I don't have the courage to go forward with this. I'm a coward and a hypocrite and a liar. There's a reason why middle class Chinese people treat these workers like they're not human. There's too many people and too few resources in this country. Wasted lives and wasted potential is just par the course.

There's a danger to treating everyone like a human being. You can be polite and generous to the lowly waitress, or the scruffy builder but it's only at the very basic end of treating someone like a human being. At the other end is falling in love.

I don't want to fall for someone that can't even afford a coffee. Sounds bad but how can it possibly work? And it's worse because I know I'm capable of falling this way, ever since I decided to follow my heart.

It couldn't possibly end well.. and yet I am a moth to a flame.

The road less travelled

Everyone remembers these two lines from the Robert Frost poem, "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I - took the one less traveled by."

But I looked at the poem recently and the more important part is the verse above:

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

When I was at my soul destroying finance job many people advised me to stay there for three years, get a professional qualification and then pursue my dreams. Others justified their lives there by dreaming about some vague time after retirement.

In my mind this is about as logical as planning to marry a rich man, wait til he dies and leaves you all his money before marrying the poor painter you're in love with.

But this simple minded solution was an incredibly difficult and frustrating thing to argue against, because it papers over a point that no one wants to hear. The point made in that verse - that choices lead to other choices and you will never come back to that fork in the road again. It's impossible to keep the other road for another day.

It's impossible to have it both ways. And nowadays, that's a very controversial thing to say.

I recently met an aspiring, female writer in her late twenties. She was looking for a husband, and with it all the trappings of surburban respectability - 2.4 children, house and white picket fence. She concluded that the only way to have it all is to find a highly paid businessman who would support her while she writes. In her words "there can be only one artist in the family."

I wanted to shake this woman so hard - she's symptomatic of all that's wrong in the world.

What kind of writing would she produce with this kind of set up, this kind of mentality? Maybe she'd write great chick lit about women finding rich husbands. A conventional life produces conventional work. She didn't seem to understand that her means have defeated the ends because writing is a mirror for the soul.

Being an idealist, an artist, means really living on the edge of life, reporting back from the extremes of human experience. The edge of the abyss.

For me it's not about being a writer, it's about being that type of person. Writing is only the wrapping for a present. Too often I read bloggers who want to be writers with long, winding entries that have nothing to say, no point to make. Like a gorgeous present that's empty when opened.

I blame in part the relentless consumerism of modern life that tells us we should have it all because we're worth it, and we can have it all if only we try hard enough. But in that case what's the meaning of decisions? How do you find out who you are? Or what is worthwhile vs what's not?

The road less travelled leads to inbalance, and I'm struggling to accept my choice. To be unafraid of extreme experiences, and to not require the conventional.