21 Dragons

21 Dragons in 2012

Alvin Soon — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 04:57:08 +0000

The biggest thing to happen in 2012 was its move to Squarespace. I laid out the reasons why in the post Squarespace 6 versus Wordpress 3 and I'm still processing the change today, 3 months later.

It's not perfect; there are things I struggle with even today. But Wordpress wasn't perfect either. I'm still meandering on whether to switch back, but this constant obsession with the tools isn't helping me with my writing. There are people out there on basic Wordpress and Blogspot blogs producing even better content than mine, on a regular basis.

Here are four of my favorite posts in 2012:

Bruce Lee: A Man of Victory remains my favorite post of 2012. It's a tribute to the man who had so much of an influence on me when I was young. Here's to the real dragon.

Self-Defence Classes: A Shopper's Guide puts together many of the disparate thoughts I had about self-defence and the martial arts. Hopefully, it'll help a lay person choose a self-defence course that's practical instead of one that isn't.

Mindfulness on iPhone deals with a problem I see with people who put the blame on distraction with their tools. Yes, the tools are enablers - it's easier today to be distracted by my iPhone than my first mobile phone which could only text and call - but the problem lies deeper, with our monkey minds. You need to go deep and see where the root cause is, or your monkey mind will simply resurface somewhere else when you put the iPhone away.

The Past is Not Real sounds wooly, but it's based on a realisation I had while meditating. It was something I saw and experienced for myself, not a theory I plucked off from someone. That's what I like about meditation and Buddhism, the teaching is pragmatic; if you follow it you can experience it for yourself.

To Be or Not to Be

While Bruce Lee: A Man of Victory and Self-Defence Classes: A Shopper's Guide were two of the longest posts I'd ever written on 21 Dragons, the posting volume has dropped even further in 2012. The question arises: To continue with the blog, or to acknowledge it as an experiment that has run its course?

It's a question that frequently comes up when I face the reality that I spend very little time on the site now. I don't have an answer yet.

The Past is Not Real

Alvin Soon — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 12:20:04 +0000

The past is not real. Right now, the past is not a thing you can see, hear, feel, touch or taste. It does not exist in reality, except of course, in your mind's eye.

And yet, even the past doesn't always exist in your mind. At any given moment, your mind can be focused on what it thought was yesterday, what it thinks might be tomorrow, what it thinks had happened or what it thinks may happen. In rare instances it focuses on today.

But it cannot do this all at once. So the past only exists when you focus your attention on it - when you give it energy. You can do this consciously, or you can do this unconsciously, with awareness or without. Anytime you find yourself reliving a past moment, you have brought it back to life with the power of your attention.

There's no doubt that some people need to resolve past trauma. But it helps to remember this. The past doesn't exist. It only comes back to life when we feed it. And that very same, limited energy, can always be redirected to something else - like right now.

How to Choose a Life Coach

Alvin Soon — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 10:59:33 +0000

A good life coach should be like a good doctor: The less you see of him the better the doctor is. That's because any good coach worth their salt should be helping you become a more independent person, and not more dependent on them or their coaching programs.

The Fuck is Your Life

Alvin Soon — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 05:31:55 +0000

“Life isn’t some narcissistic game you play online. It all matters — every sin, every regret, every affliction. As proof, she offered an account of her own struggle to reckon with a cruelty she’s absorbed before she was old enough to even understand it. Ask better questions, sweet pea, she concluded. The fuck is your life. Answer it.”

— Cheryl Strayed

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You Don't Worry About Yourself

Alvin Soon — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 03:24:23 +0000

“It pays off in your life when you’re in an elevator and people are uncomfortable. You can just say, “That’s a beautiful scarf.” It’s just thinking about making someone else feel comfortable. You don’t worry about yourself, because we’re vibrating together. If I can make yours just a little bit groovier, it’ll affect me. It comes back, somehow.”

— Bill Murray

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You Just Have to Do Something

Alvin Soon — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 02:44:00 +0000

“When we are presented with moments of crisis, large decisions or new opportunities often we find ourselves crippled by the lack of knowledge. We justify inaction with our insecurities in not knowing the right way to move forward. Or we trap ourselves in an endless search for knowledge to attempt to reassure our actions. ...

You don’t have to do it right. You just have to do something.”

— Jonathan Moore

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It’s Your Life — But Only if You Make It So

Alvin Soon — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 02:41:38 +0000

“It’s your life — but only if you make it so. The standards by which you live must be your own standards, your own values, your own convictions in regard to what is right and wrong, what is true and false, what is important and what is trivial. When you adopt the standards and the values of someone else or a community or a pressure group, you surrender your own integrity. You become, to the extent of your surrender, less of a human being.”

— Eleanor Roosevelt

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Mindfulness on iPhone

Alvin Soon — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 13:48:39 +0000

Stephen Hackett is trading in his iPhone 5 for an old Motorola W385 for the next year, in a bid to simplify his life:

I — like most people I observe in waiting rooms and in line at Starbucks — kill little bits of time with my head down, the glow of my smartphone lighting up my face. Twitter, App.net, Google Reader, Instagram, Email, iMessage, Tumblr and more wedge their way in to my life in little two-minute increments throughout the day.

I’m tired of it. So I’m fighting back — by retreating. I’m giving up my iPhone — my daily life partner for almost five years.

I get wary when I hear about changes like this. It's a valid technique - want to break your addiction to chocolate? get rid of all the chocolate in your fridge - but I'm wary about mistaking cause for effect.

The chocolate itself doesn't do anything to make you eat it, what makes you eat the chocolate is your own desire for it. An iPhone 5 doesn't cause you to lose your focus and awareness of the present moment, it's just an enabler. What causes you to constantly check your phone for the Next New Thing is this monkey mind that constantly craves stimulation and excitement.

Again, I think it's a valid method to reduce distractions from your life by reducing their numbers. If you want to eat healthy, it's a good idea to clear your fridge of unhealthy food. But it's not skilful if you confuse cause from effect.

A renunciate gives up his worldly possessions, but that's not enough to gain peace of mind. Otherwise, the poorest people in the world would have the clearest minds. Instead, the renunciate then turns inward to gain control over the cause of his distractions - his untamed mind.

I suspect Hackett knows this, as he says that he could achieve his goal of simplifying his life by "imposing some will power." The problem is that even if you quit "cold turkey" by removing the stimulus, you are still you. In the midst of removing your distraction and eventually re-encountering it, have you done anything else to change your quality of mind so that your response eventually changes?

To put it simply, you could give up chocolate by purging chocolate from your house. But one day, when you do meet dear old chocolate again in the world, have you gained the ability to say "no" to it, or does your inner self remain as easily seduced by chocolate's charms as before?

Eventually, the goal should be to gain awareness of your own processes so that you can open up a space in-between stimulus and response, to be able to have an iPhone and notice when you're craving its touch, to have the ability to take a deep breath, be in the moment, and choose your own response.

(So how do you train your awareness to stay in the present moment and give you freedom of choice? One way is through meditation, which is sure but gradual and difficult. If you're interested, Mindfulness in Plain English is a free, no-nonsense guide to practical meditation.)

Adventure + Experience

Alvin Soon — Wed, 14 Nov 2012 03:50:44 +0000

“Whether in mind and spirit or in actual physical practice, give yourself adventure and experience. Do stuff. Some stimulus, some input is required as the raw building materials of a creative life. Profound is good, but unnecessary. What’s necessary are emotions, highs & lows, chinks in one’s armor, dents, road wear, and a range of experiences. What are yours? Some people go looking, others get hit by the truck, but in every case an experiential narrative is required for inspiration. So let me be blunt. Get off your ass. Given the chance to “go” or “stay”, you go. Whether you really go looking or metaphorically do, you won’t find “creativity”, you’ll find the stuff that creativity glues together. You’ve got to either cultivate, dig up, source, uncover or live these raw materials, these bricks, the sticks, and the meat to make something that only you can make. Live a life so that you can have a point of view.”

— Chase Jarvis

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The Fight

Alvin Soon — Thu, 08 Nov 2012 00:45:57 +0000

“After my own comparatively minor brush with death a few years ago, when I was 22, I pledged to live my life as fully as possible, as though I had nothing to lose. For a few months afterward, I consciously tried to fight against the status quo. It’s so easy to get stuck in the waiting place, putting things off until later, even when those things are vitally important to making your dreams come true. But the truth is that, in order to make progress, you need to physically and mentally fight against the momentum of ordinary events. The default state of any new idea is failure. It’s the execution–the fight against inertia–that matters. You have to remember to go against your instinct, to confront the ordinary, and to put up a fight.”

— Dustin Curtis

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The Heart Grows Smarter

Alvin Soon — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 15:14:47 +0000

“Body type was useless as a predictor of how the men would fare in life. So was birth order or political affiliation. Even social class had a limited effect. But having a warm childhood was powerful. As George Vaillant, the study director, sums it up in “Triumphs of Experience,” his most recent summary of the research, “It was the capacity for intimate relationships that predicted flourishing in all aspects of these men’s lives.””

— David Brooks

Looks like EQ isn't just good for making friends and emotional well-being.

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When You're Angry at People

Alvin Soon — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 14:27:27 +0000

“That’s what happens when you’re angry at people. You make them part of your life.”

— Garrison Keillor

May I Have Patience, Courage, Understanding, and Determination

Alvin Soon — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 11:27:23 +0000

“May I be well, happy, and peaceful. May no harm come to me. May no difficulties come to me. May no problems come to me. May I have patience, courage, understanding, and determination to meet and overcome inevitable difficulties, problems, and failures in life.”

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Lincoln's Great Depression

Alvin Soon — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 09:48:46 +0000

“With Lincoln sadness did not just coexist with strength—these qualities ran together. Just as death supports new life in a healthy ecosystem, Lincoln’s self-negation fueled his peculiar confidence. His despair lay under a distinct hope; his overwhelming melancholy fed into a supple creative power, which allowed him not merely to see the truth of his circumstances but to express it in a stirring, meaningful way. The events in New York help illustrate the basic progression: Wariness and doubt led Lincoln into a kind of personal crisis, from which he turned to work. Afterward he largely turned aside acclaim to return to wariness and doubt, and the cycle began again.”

— Joshua Wolk Shenk

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What if the Secret to Success Is Failure?

Alvin Soon — Wed, 31 Oct 2012 02:56:32 +0000

“As Levin watched the progress of those KIPP alumni, he noticed something curious: the students who persisted in college were not necessarily the ones who had excelled academically at KIPP; they were the ones with exceptional character strengths, like optimism and persistence and social intelligence. They were the ones who were able to recover from a bad grade and resolve to do better next time; to bounce back from a fight with their parents; to resist the urge to go out to the movies and stay home and study instead; to persuade professors to give them extra help after class.”

— Paul Tough

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Committed

Alvin Soon — Sun, 28 Oct 2012 08:57:36 +0000

As with all major affairs, there were bound to be some hiccups along the way. As for myself, I'm just happy to have friends and family come together to make my wedding day a happy one. What is external cannot be entirely without fault, but what comes from the heart is completely appreciated.

The Voice of Fear

Alvin Soon — Fri, 26 Oct 2012 00:35:12 +0000

“I tell them to bring their fears into the light, to give their fears a chance to say their piece, then to call bullshit and move on. I tell them this because the alternative is to leave our fears muttering to us from the shadows, the unknown places of our lives. They tell us we’re not good enough, or more reasonably, that we’d be better off waiting until we are ready, whatever that means. And so we occupy ourselves with the tasks our fears set for us, all of them benign enough that we rarely sit up and notice we’ve gone days, months, even years without doing our work, our art.”

— David duChemin

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Dan Inosanto: I Still Train

Alvin Soon — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 02:30:59 +0000

I have great respect for Dan Inosanto. Not just because he's an accomplished martial artist or because he was certified by Bruce Lee to teach Jeet Kune Do, but because he keeps learning, even at the age of 76.

Through the thing that you love is where you grow, that's where you find yourself. I'm constantly learning all the time, I don't think you ever stop learning, once you stop being a student you stop growing.

Why She Writes

Alvin Soon — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 02:29:16 +0000

“Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

— Joan Didion

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How Lack of Sleep is Killing You

Alvin Soon — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 03:07:02 +0000

“The study is still too limited to draw definitive conclusions, but the fact that subjects showed such dramatic changes after just four nights of sleep deprivation are shocking. The lead author of the study says, “This is the equivalent of metabolically aging someone 10 to 20 years just from four nights of partial sleep restriction.””

Lesson of the day: Get your sleep.

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