Finding balance

A little excerpt that struck me in the last reread of "Flow":

More and more, we seem to bury our heads in the sand to avoid hearing bad news, withdrawing into gated communities protected by armed response. But a good personal life is impossible while staying aloof of a corrupt society, as Socrates knew and those who have lived under recent dictatorships have found out. It would be so much easier if we were responsible only for ourselves. Unfortunately, things don't work that way. An active responsibility for the rest of humankind, and for the world of which we are a part, is a necessary ingredient of a good life.

The real challenge, however, is to reduce entropy in one's surroundings without increasing it in one's consciousness. The Buddhists have a good piece of advice as to how this can be done: "Act always as if the future of the Universe depended on what you did, while laughing at yourself for thinking that whatever you do makes any difference." It is this serious playfulness, this combination of concern and humility, that makes it possible to be both engaged and carefree at the same time. With this attitude one does not need to win to feel content; helping to maintain order in the universe becomes its own reward, regardless of consequences. Then it is possible to find joy even when fighting a losing battle in a good cause.

Just for now.

Seriously, such an amazing show. Let it be known, I did NOT film this, but thinking back on the experience, this is a smidgen of what it was like to be there that night. (:

Imogen Heap -- Just for Now

AT LAST.

Finally updated. This is the start of some new self-discipline, so might as well kick it off right!

http://manhattaneater.wordpress.com/

Enjoy!

Self-promotion

Part of my "job," if you will, for this next month and a half, is to really rediscover my voice as a writer. Easier said than done, right? I've been sorting through old clips and pieces in order to compile them into one easy-access site for future reference, and I think doing this has brought about several conclusions.

First, I have a long way to go to get to the point I want to be at (story of life, right?). And the first step on this unpredictable path toward voice is practice. I'm going to try to push myself to write and produce more than I have before, take a more active role in the process.

Second, the reason why finding my voice is so important is so that I can better communicate my ideas; what good are thoughts if you can't share them and bounce them off others? What use is a concept that isn't brought into fruition? A thought is a thought is a thought if you never do anything about it.

Third, and perhaps most important of all -- this break in the past month has caused me to reevaluate a lot of things, chief among them, what skill set I can bring to the table. I admire so much people who've created for themselves an entire library of "Things I can do" and am just now starting to realize that I've spent too much time on the bookshelves and not enough time on the books themselves. I'm preparing but not doing, and while luck favors the prepared mind, I want to be sure I can take that next step once luck comes a-courtin'.

All this to say -- I'll be updating a lot more regularly from now on, and keeping my word too. Count on it!

P.S. -- If you can spare a moment, several of my pieces for The Avocado Jungle. Thoughts, in ordered format.

Sepiatone loving

I've been spending a good part of my three-month work hiatus at home in LA with family, and more recently, in Taiwan with the extended family. Even through college, getting to spend this much time with fam was such a rarity, and what I was mostly able to salvage through those years were only bits and pieces of a larger picture. So I've considered these last few weeks a real treat in terms of quality down-time with the people who know me best.

Admittedly, being out in New York and away from my immediate family hasn't always been the easiest thing. On the surface, I embrace the independence and freedom that the city has to offer -- but it's both a blessing and a curse to be so easily accessible to everyone and everything in the vicinity. I'm lucky to even be able to experience life on a different coast, I know, to pursue my passions at a time when practicality might seem the better path.

But realistically, the pace of life can be pretty dang draining. I put myself on a two-week communication silence while I was in Taiwan, and I feel like I learned so much more and used my time so much more efficiently not being bound to the tether of technology. No email, no Internet, no Facebook, no phone. I spent more time living in the real "now" than in the demands of a contrived "now" made up of updates and Tweets and email counters. I wasn't running to catch up all the time; I could set my own pace.

Rather than living vicariously through other people in other time zones, I was actually taking part in my own life and really getting to see beyond the distraction of the Crackberry screen.

It was refreshing.

I've always said that health and family are the only two things that anybody needs. Everything else is extraneous and will fall into place somehow. My entire family made this trip back to Taiwan because my grandfather recently passed away, and in those two weeks, nothing else really mattered. I knew the job hunt would still be here when I got back. The emails, they would pile up. But nobody needed to get to me so urgently that it couldn't wait two weeks while I spent time with family.

My grandfather was 100 years old when he passed. He'd gone from living in the countryside to training to be a physician to being a surgeon to being a husband, father and grandfather. That's a lot of years of life. That's a lot of life in his years. But I don't think he ever would have (nor would anyone in his life) defined himself by just any one of those labels. He was human, and therefore multifaceted, and I think being there at the funeral really caused me to think a lot about mortality and death and, truth be told, life.

I titled this blog "quarter-life musings of a life in transition," and taken literally, that means I'm already (almost) a quarter of the way through with this thing called life. It's pretty terrifying, really. It's not that this means I have the sudden urge to grow up, necessarily, only that I'm more conscious of my thoughts and actions now, and how it'll all make for a projected "later."

The crazy thing is that the people that I've surrounded myself with now are the ones who'll be able to help piece together the bits of my life later on down the line. They're the ones I'll be reminiscing with and sharing memories with and the ones who'll become characters and names in the story I call my life. And these things I'm doing now, they're all leading to a big unexpected place called "the future," and as unpredictable as that place might be, I've got to pay better attention to the now in order to trace back my deliberate steps to wherever I end up.

Hearing so many stories about my grandfather, learning about the intricacies of the family -- politics and history and all that -- is inspiring. I don't think I'm alone when I say that I want to live a life worth telling about. And so I begin. Now.