朋友向我匯報近況，說一切都好，唯一就是「7/5」令她感到「有點」不安。我那一刻完全不知道什麼是7/5，也沒有嘗試去理解什麼是「7/5」。然後出於禮貌，我隨便回了一句「7/5？」，之後就去睡覺了。

今早醒來拉屎、翻手機，看見她回覆了我的問題，轉發了一條關於金城保和竜樹諒的各種關於世界浩劫的預言的link。於是這條link就正式把最近轉得火紅火綠的滅絕預言塞到我的awareness。更有意思的就是其中一個大事件，就是會在今天7小時後發生：

哇。好啊。我覺得自己很幸福。我明白，說這樣的話，會令人覺得我在幸災樂禍，顯得我很刻薄。但這真的是我很真實的感受啊。我覺得幸福，是因為最近情緒「經期」又到了，令我心情稍微低迷。跟此朋友這段關於世界浩劫的幾個messages，把我從腐爛的languishing中拉出來了。陰沉無聊想死的烏雲，竟然被更陰沉更充滿死亡的濃霧打散了。我覺得很幸福，因為一件如此無聊的破事，救了我。

所以我覺得很值得紀錄一下這些無聊的事情，一方面可以用此post來對這些預言的一個非常合時宜的紀錄和印證，另一方面此post可以用來提醒未來的自己，任何的情緒低迷，總會被一些最意想不到的瑣事，如同小朋友輕輕吹散蒲公英般，悄然消散。

要提醒自己，以後當自己又一次沈淪在低迷情緒的淤泥時，不要著急，不要放棄，雖然會確確實實地覺得徹底地無助、徹底地絕望，但一定要記得，總是會過去的。是會過去的。

At my last job, I had trouble shaking off certain thoughts. I would replay arguments, rehearse future debates. From waking up to walking my dog to workouts, it was non-stop. My gym sessions, once a mental reset, stopped helping. I tried harder workouts, longer meditations, more books—but nothing worked.

Today, my thoughts are mostly about the school: its future, what needs fixing, the students, families, teachers, and the fights my wife and I are having about it. The volume and intensity are some of the highest I have ever experienced—or at least as far back as I can remember.

And yet, these mental spirals feel different. Still stressful, but not as destructive or lingering. They are still there, but lighter. Fluffier. Almost whiter. They do not weigh me down as much.

This contrast between how my mind spins—then and now—has helped me gain a bit more insight into how I can protect myself from being overwhelmed by my own thoughts, and how the choices I make in life shape that experience. It also confirmed one thing for me: the importance of having a coherent answer to the ultimate question.

When a frustration reaches the point where we cannot fix it, resolve it, or control it, we are left with the ultimate question: What is the purpose? What is the meaning? What is the f*cking point?

When I was working at a company, and the issues at work spiraled into untamed, unresolved, and uncontrollable thoughts—when I was pushed to face that question, “Why am I doing this?”—I could not find a satisfying answer.

But today, when shit happens at the school—say, a difficult situation with a child and their family, or the stress of finding new students—and I am pushed to ask that same ultimate question, my answer is always clear, honest, and coherent.

I know—this realization is not groundbreaking. We all know it: if we cannot articulate a rational, emotional, and intellectually honest answer to the meaning of what we do, we struggle. It is that simple.

What made this re-remembering of a not-so-groundbreaking truth powerful was that I got to vividly live through two diametrically different versions of it in close succession. Within six months, I experienced the mental toll of meaninglessness in a corporate job, and the mental toll of a purposeful—but endlessly challenging—mission of building a school. That contrast sharpened my awareness of my own inner life.

And that, I think, is priceless.

I don’t think his problem is a lack of awareness. The biggest problem is that he genuinely doesn’t think there are better solutions.

In the latest book on Musk by Issacson, Musk acknowledged his situation multiple times. He was aware of his issues, his tendencies, and the impact he makes. He appears to genuinely believe that nothing can solve his issues—not therapy, not gong baths, not psychedelic trips. He’s intellectually disciplined and well-read. He’s used his brain to crack some of the most difficult problems, from landing rockets to making electric cars a reality. He’s probably researched, consulted, and read widely about potential solutions to his psychological conditions. He probably believes the people that have the best shot at figuring himself out, is him, and he is trying his hardest. His conclusion likely stems from rational analysis rather than emotional reaction.

This is a very common dilemma for smart and successful people. They are so intellectually rigorous they genuinely cannot rationally accept alternatives they deem inferior to their own conclusions.

When it comes to our personal journey, it’s hard to shake the belief that no one understands us better than we do. It’s tough to accept that there might be better ways to address our problems, especially when most routes are time-consuming, imprecise, and borderline unscientific. It took me three therapists and over five years to see even a glimmer of progress. Medication was a temporary aid but never a solution. Improvements were hit-or-miss, hard to attribute, and took forever to show up. I never knew if my improved mood was a result of well-practiced CBT tactics or atmospheric pressure du jour or warm sourdough toast. It was tough to figure out what was working and what wasn’t. The worst part was that life didn’t wait for these experimental methods to work. In reality, more often than not, nothing worked when I needed them to work, and hence I had to fall back on trusted but flawed coping mechanisms because even though they were destructive and harmful, they guaranteed some predictability – the only source of comfort I could find.

I’m concerned about Musk. I think he’ll have a tough time finding his way out. He’s ramping up his coping mechanisms, whether it’s “surge modes,” chaos, or seeking love from finding more partners and having more children. His increasing success and power further validate his analysis of his intellect and skills, making him even more doubtful of anyone else’s solutions. I’m worried that the chaos he needs might one day harm humanity. He now wields the kind of power and influence that can cause real damage, from his Twitter antics to his involvement in Ukraine.

At the same time, I commend him. Many of us flawed souls end up in jail. Most of us who have daddy issues achieve nothing. But he has managed to turn darkness into such greatness. And for that, I wish him peace. He deserves it.

In this particular interview, he shared how he looked at mindfulness. I used to consider mindfulness a term that encompasses all meditative practices. He disagreed and posited that mindfulness should be an ecology of practices. These are practices that work on our ability to see more clearly, perceive more broadly, and then intuit more cohesively.

Specifically, he included three things in the ecology of mindfulness practices:

1. Meditative practices
2. Contemplative practices
3. Mindful movements practices

The meditative practices are to inspect the “lens” we have on our experiences. These lens typically include emotions and sensations. Meditative practices work on our ability to notice these “lens,” and to work on seeing things without these lens, and then integrate this realization back to our day to day life, when we have the “lens” back on. In other words, we meditate to see how feelings arise and change our awareness. We meditate to accept them, label them, and experience how to be with these lens.

Contemplative practices work on our ability to look at ourselves from a 3rd person perspective, a wider perspective. These are practices to see the identities of us, and identities we assign to ourselves. For example, one of the contemplative practices is to ask, “what’s within our control and what’s outside of our control.” This question requires us to step away from the identity of us being the main antagonist of the situation, while at the same time investigate this antagonist’s circumstances and options. What’s in his control and what’s not?

Lastly, mindful movement practices work on using the rest of the machinery of our body to “gather information” about us and everything around us. The first two practices work on the brain, and the 3rd practice work on the entire body. These movement practices need to make us move consciously. Dance, Tai Chi, martial arts, are example of such practices. These practices have clear definition of form, movements, and effort. It also involves the brain, the lungs, and the body. It’s both thinking, perceiving, breathing, moving, feeling and not doing all of the above. It’s so woo woo I cannot not love it!

I am glad John provided such clear ideas of how to live more mindfully. I am eager to practice. I have large voids that I do not know how to fill, and so I am grateful there are ways to make this void useful – the urge to fill this void has become the single most tenacious source of motivation for me to try and live better. I suppose that’s the best way, the only way, to make use of this void (contemplative practice in action).

Here are my notes from the episode:

Lex and John 7Sep2022
https://pca.st/episode/6af11efc-d005-4294-8665-6c23361987e9

• Sin is failing to love wisely
• Bullshit is triggered salience without triggering reflective truth seeking
• Meaning is being. Being is non being. It is participating.
• An ecology of practices: opponent processing. Check and balances:
  Mindfulness is both meditative and contemplative practices. Meditation is stepping back and looking at, reflecting upon. Contemplation is looking through, deeply into. It’s both looking at the glasses and looking through the glasses. Framed awareness to improve self regulation and insights. It is both to break an inappropriate frame and make and realize a new frame (insights).
• If you just do contemplation you can suffer from inflation and projective fantasy. If you just do meditation you could suffer from withdrawals, spiritual bypassing, avoiding reality. You need to cycle through both.
• The integrated practices:
  • Meditative: Vipassana – the Len is the sensations and emotions. Labeling the process and the distractions.
  • Meta contemplative practice: stoicism. wake up from constantly assuming an identity and assigning an identity. It’s meta because it’s looking at ourselves from a bigger higher wider perspective. You have to do it step by step.
  • Mindful Movement. Flow induction – tai chi:
    • flow state – slightly beyond your abilities. Best experience and best performance. It needs clear information, immediate feedback/no time lag response between your actions and the environment, failure must matter. They report oneness because of the clarity of info and feedback. On going sense of discovery. It feels effortless because there is no effort in guessing and wondering. Realness. Participation of Grace. Super salient. Implicit learning. Learning outside of deliberate locus. You don’t know how you came up with that knowledge but you know you came up with that knowledge. This is intuition. Explicit learning removes all the adaptiveness of implicit learning.
• What do we need to do explicitly to facilitate implicit learning? Create an environment that helps us distinct causations from correlations. How ? Experimental environments, where variables are not confounding, too variable, ambiguous, hypothesis can be falsified.
• Depression is anti flow.

I also feel dread more frequently. I find myself feeling dreadful when I had too many ideas, because I felt like a failure as I have not been able to start any of those ideas. I felt dreadful when there was nothing meaningful to do. I dreaded about the morning workout, the 10am coaching call, the afternoon binge-eating, the dinner, the dog walking.

My mind has been jumpy. My thoughts have been mostly negative. This is a destructive combination. I have not had long periods of calm. I have given up on feeling positive for more than 5 minutes. I just want to be calm and peaceful. Perhaps that’s because I haven’t been meditating as much since we adopted Honey. Perhaps.

The good news is, I am doing better, objectively speaking. I am spending a lot of time with my wife and my kids. I am certain I am being a present parent to my kids. I am engaged in their lives. I am an active participant of their hobbies and struggles. I am a vivid character in their journeys.

My current theory of life is that we are supposed to go through it with others. Specifically, the riddle of the journey of life is untangled by engaging deeply with 3 groups of family members: our parents, spouses, and kids. Think of these as the 3 circles in the Venn diagram of life. The intersection of the circles morphs ceaselessly, and it is this ambiguous and never-ending intersecting where we could glimpse the purpose and meaning of our short existence. Life cannot be fully lived unless when we immerse ourselves in the intersection.

I find solace in thinking through this theory of life, albeit the maddeningly unfocused mind of mine.

I could not get out of this never ending worry for my health. I went on a no carb little meat diet almost 10 years. Then I fell into this on-going battle with binge eating after the 10 days silent retreat. I still struggle to feel safe to eat breakfast, because I am not confident that I can withstand the intense urges to devour buns after buns, ice cream after ice cream.

I have been on medication for a few years now. In the beginning, I told them to manage my rage and depression. It worked. I was numbed but was far more stable. The rising rage was gone. The depression wasn’t as persistent and intense. But then everything was replaced with binge eating. We switched medication, and the urges to eat didn’t go away but became more manageable. The price of this particular combo of medication was disastrous sleep. I had vivid and very eventful dreams. They felt like they would last the entire sleep. I was constantly tired, especially in the afternoon, when I would be rendered completely non-functional and would fall asleep on benches and in the back of buses. But it was worth it, because I didn’t have to lose to those binge-eating urges and didn’t have constantly feel like a loser.

Then we decided to ween off some of the medication, and the depression is creeping back. Then about a month ago, a classmate committed suicide. He just got a promotion, but everything felt unchanged. His wife was devastated even though she knew he was struggling.

I tried so many different things- CBT, meditation, exercises, video games, writing, quitting my job, playing the violin. Still, it reminds the same- it’s cracked, broken.

I want to accept that this crack in my soul cannot be removed. I want to see this reality for what it is and accept it. I want to be able to embrace the feelings from feeling broken just as I have embraced all other feelings that came and went.

But it is hard. The most annoying is I would inevitably arrive at the part of these voyages in my mind where I would give myself the permission to think that it is ok to be defeated by these feelings. Even stronger souls, from Bourdain to Spade to my friend to my uncle, lost to it. Who am I to think that I am stronger than them?

It is sad to know that perhaps I will be forever dependent on medication. It is frustrating to know that every time when I tried to ween off of it the withdrawal would take over. It sucks to feel I am forever cracked, since that year 2011.

Lastly, before Iris Chang, the author of “The Raping of Nanjing” killed herself, she wrote,

I promise to get up and get out of the house every morning. I will stop by to visit my parents then go for a long walk. I will follow the doctor’s orders for medications. I promise not to hurt myself. I promise not to visit Web sites that talk about suicide.

I attempted many things, and most of them ended in … failures. Yea I can say I learned from them, but to me, the best way to salvage those lost time is to muse about them.

1. Journaling

Gosh I tried so many times- morning journals, dusk journals, bullet journals, 5 minute journals, 5 year journals, gratefulness journals, stoic journals. I tried to use pencils, paper, notebooks, writing apps. Nothing worked. I could never stick to the habit for more than 4 weeks. All the internet gurus swore by this habit. Yet, I felt more pain than enjoyment, could not feel the fulfilment that’s supposed to come after the dread, witnessed no awe of interconnectedness with the universe from … thanking the sun for rising for the 45th time.

2. Write in Chinese

I only wrote in Chinese 7 times. The issue was a classic and boring one- –

• The less I wrote in Chinese, the harder it got.
• The harder it got, I struggled more.
• I could not find fun in the struggle and as a result I wrote less.

I did write in Chinese more using real pens and paper. But still, all in all, I did not meet expectations.

Even though I know I should move on, focus on pushing myself to do better in 2021, set some goals, do something different …

去你的。我就是想在自責中沉淪。凸-.-凸

3. Battle with food

I had no idea why it started. It could be COVID, the pressure from the school, the lack of progress in my work. But it happened without warning. What’s more confusing was I never had the issue. I began to binge eat.

Those hours were tough. Some days I could manage and consumed just 2 – 3 pieces of bread. Some days I would devour 10+ pieces of bread in less than 2 hours. I would scour every single bakery near me for food. Then other weeks I would get stuck on chips. Then ice cream. Then chocolate. It was terrible. Not only the guilt was debilitating, the struggle and back and forth with myself to try not to binge eat was demoralising, because I lost the battle most of the time. I would try to compensate by skipping meals, which turned into another problem because my kids were confused why I would only cook and not eat.

I am not entirely out of it. It is the thing I fear the most, every day, because I still cannot be certain when I might fall into yet another spiral of torture. There are temptations everywhere. It is very difficult.

4. Blue Biden and Yellow Trump

Similar to the rest of the world, Hong Kong has become more polarised in 2020. The “yellow” faction took the streets to rebel against the government, while the “blue” team stood behind the police and the CCP.

Meanwhile in the US, there was Trump and there was Biden. There was the woke-left and the alt-right.

The most dispiriting thing was how these two poles in two different places converged: If you are yellow, you are pro-Trump; If you are pro-Biden, you are blue. Because Biden is pro-China, and Trump is anti-China.

As a result, we got very stuck and confused. How could one be supporting and fighting tyranny at the same time? How can one be pro-democracy and pro-authoritarian?

I could not find a way to make it work. I pissed off those who were on “my side” in Hong Kong because I celebrated their nemesis in the US. I didn’t please those whom I shared the same US political viewpoints with because I stood by the wrong color in Hong Kong. As a result, I failed miserably trying to bridge gaps. I think I burned more bridges than building them.

Perhaps the most important thing I learned, or was reminded of, was to never settle. I must try and remain open by reading more broadly. I must work on my will and wit to debate productively. I must strive to engage.

Strong opinions, weakly held.

Yum.

In the last 2 months, every day between 11am-3pm, my brain would give up.

It would become stuck. I would fall asleep constantly – at a bench in a park, on a bus, anywhere. Summoning motivation was taxing. Staying focused was hard. It is detrimental to my ability to function.

It’s likely the medication. It seems to be getting worse.

Today I skipped my morning routine. I broke it.

Or I am finally broken.

My streak was probably … a couple of years long.

The riddle I am trying to solve is, if I have to have breaks like this, or are there other ways to take a break, without having to struggle through taking a break from my routines.

It was a struggle because I have been battling it every morning for a few weeks now.

Also, I am asking myself, how am I feeling? Am I tired? Bored? Depressed? Unsatisfied? Lazy?

As always, I don’t know.

Another thing I need to embrace is to notice the positives from this journey. One of them is how the side effects of the medications made me more “mindful.”

Recently, we had to change the combination of drugs I was taking because I struggled to contain novel manifestations of my condition. The side effects of the new drugs were stronger. They included weight gain, sleepiness, and drowsiness. Throughout the day I would yawn more than I breathed, and sometimes I wouldn’t be able to keep my eyes open. Sometimes I needed to nap immediately. Other times, I was just tired/drowsy, and the only thing that would help was to close my eyes and rest.

I couldn’t do much during these rests. I wouldn’t be able to sleep nor to think. What I ended up doing was to stare at whatever that came to my mind. It was as if my brain was completely exhausted, and it was sitting motionlessly on a park bench, noticing every leave, cloud, bee, child laughter, thought, feeling, in and around me.

This is essentially a “open-awareness” meditation practice.

Since the side effects kicked in often and randomly, I have been thrown into this state more. I am struggling because I have lost control of my productivity. Yet every now and then, I would be able to get a glimpse of the nothingness and stillness that apparently only enlightenment and or psychedelics could guide us to.

I am going to enjoy this while this lasts. Who knows what the brain will take me next.