Expectation

Working in a new market different from where you come from can be tiring.  You have your own set of expectations for work, for the ways things should be done. There are some certain standard and experience you hold as a benchmark. You get frustrated because things don’t seem to be right. You push hard.  You scream from the top of your lungs. You pour your negative energy to people around you. You keep pushing, pushing and pushing until you feel that you are running out of your energy. You go back home thinking what you are there for. Things just don’t move the way it should be moving. Going back again with anger you still keep pushing into what you expect. And then you come back and ask yourself, whether you have too high the expectation.

Should you lower down your expectation and let things flow the way it is, then enjoy life? It is not bad taking the job in a more relaxing place as a holiday and then enjoys it. Why push while things don’t move anyway? Or otherwise if you push too much things may fall apart.

You are expecting things to happen the way you want.  You hit the ball to another side and you expect someone to hit it back. When it doesn’t bounce back, you blame on the other side that they cannot hit the ball. Have you ever taken a look back and then study closely how wide the gap of experience and culture you and your opponent is?  Maybe you have to start to expect yourself to work a bit harder to hit the ball right into their racket. When they got it right, you start to make them move around a bit further. Think of them as your student and you are training them up. They are not your opponents. Higher expect yourself to perform better not expecting them to perform better.

The World

There are too many things in the world, many problems that depress you. You look at it, sometimes you feel hopeless, you scream whether there will be anyone who will help solve those problems. You pray for God so He will help remove all natural disasters. You demonstrate so that politicians and government will corrupt less. You focus on problems. It makes you even more confused. Life becomes more demoralize. You lose hope.

The world is just like a cup of coffee. It is bitter but has nice aroma. You either choose to drink black the way it is or you add more milk and sugar so that it is creamier and more sweetened. That is how you should do as well. There are a lot of conditions and consequences to deal with problems. It will tire you down because when the problems continue to exist it will not be healthy to persistently solve them.  At the end when you cannot solve, the problems actually wear you down.

We cannot solve all the problems in the world. The problems sometimes are in other hands. Sometimes they are even in the hand of God.    But there is one thing that you can do right away, not to change anyone else, is to do even a small good thing for the people and for the society. Kahlil Gibran once said, “Are you a politician asking what your country can do for you or a zealous one asking what you can do for your country? If you are the first, then you are a parasite. If you are the second, then you are an oasis in a desert”. Kennedy had brought this into one of the most famous and most powerful speech in the world “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country”. If each one of us just do a small good thing for the community for the country we live, for the world we all reside, millions drops of water can fill the ocean. It is just that we need to shift focus from negative things and stop asking questions why and start doing the opposite.

Before we can start giving we need to feel that we give ourselves enough. Before we start loving we need to ensure that we love ourselves enough. The positive energy for loving will start spreading to other places, to other people and to the world. It is the power of stop asking question why and just go ahead and do it.

A Boat

Our life is a boat. Our body is our physical effort of trying to roll the boat. Out mind is the captain. We leave the shore. We leave the past. We go to another opposite side, the destination – the future. When the ride is smooth, we enjoy it.  We look forward to the bright future. Sometimes when the ride takes too long, we starts to question the ride. We start to imagine about the future whether it actually exists.  We start wondering about the past why we leave too early.  We start worrying.

When the ride is rough with storm and strong currents that even our body can barely stand. We start to give up the ride. We want to go back to where we left because we think something is better on another side.

Riding life, we always think of the past that will never come back. We always think of the future that not yet arrives. Instead of concentrating on making the best ride so that the boat will move to the destination we desire.  The more worries we have, the more chance that we will lose our strength and the more chance we sacrifice with destination. Use the energy to ride the boat. Concentrate to the presence.

I just talked with a friend that his father is very much in suffered of worrying about the economic situation. During economic turmoil the weather and storm gets strong. Life is tough. We are looking at the storm and think how bad it is instead of pouring the energy to balance the boat. We concentrate moving the boat forward; maybe we should concentrate on balancing the boat to survive the storm first. Or if there is still enough energy, this maybe time to move ahead surpassing other boats. We cannot control the storm we either choose to ride with it or just to balance it. If we still have the energy to dream that the storm would be over, why not use that energy to counter it.

Bridge to Change

Bridge by definition is what we use to cross or to connect from where we are to where we want to be. In the tangible world, it is easy to know where we are since we have the physical map either on paper or in our mind. Our sight is clear since it is right in front of our eyes.

For intangible, it starts to be a little difficult. We choose to  believe as where we are  and we usually are comfortable with the status and the current position. We choose to believe that where we are is the best place in our comfort mind.  Change becomes needed when we are not comfortable about where we are. We start to look for the place that we will feel more comfortable. But to get there is not easy. We need to create a bridge to cross. In order to build bridge right we must know clearly where we are and where we want to be and why we want to get there.

We can use our mirror to check where we are and why we are not comfortable with the current place as well as where we want to be and why we want to be there, and whether it is good to be there. Will we be comfortable and love to be there? Will we enjoy it there?  We have to be honest about where we are now with reasons why we do not want to be at the same place. We have to be honest as well where we want to be and question it whether it is really what we want, what would be the consequence of being there or to get there. We have to imagine whether we can live with the consequence that will happen as the result of  taking action to be in the place we want to be.

Our mirror image is what we want to be seen physically and emotionally.  When we watch advertisement which is sharply and successfully targeted to us, we feel that it talks to us. We feel that we can put ourselves in there. When we watch our favorite series, the drama carries something that we want to express. It is all the value that carries in us. If we feel that we like it whatever the image we see in the mirror, it is fine. But once that image is not comfortable for us; we might feel guilty of something; we might feel uncomfortable of something; we  might feel it is not right, maybe it is the time to change.

It is worthwhile to jot it down what we like and what we don’t like and then find out what we would like to be. After that we can build a bridge a strong bridge to get there. The bridge is useless if we don’t use and we don’t cross. The bridge is also dangerous if we don’t build it strong enough. The bridge could be wrongly built in size, in materials and not strong enough to hold our wills.

Be clear with the destination, be clear with the starting point, be clear what is needed to build a bridge so that it is really clear for what is wanted.

Mirror

“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who in the land is fairest of all?”

Of course, you would love to hear “You, only you, are fairest of all.”

But if the respond is, “you are full fair, ’tis true, but there is one fairer than you.”, you would be devastated.

When you wake up in the morning, the first thing you do is walk into the bathroom. The next thing you know is look at yourself in the mirror. You check whether you look the way you are used to. You touch your hair into place it is supposed to belong. Then you start to wash your face, brush your teeth, and take shower. In front of the mirror again, you dress up to look the way you think you should look. You get used to with the image you have been seeing in the mirror. Anything deviated from that firm image you hold on to is not acceptable.  When something drastic comes into your life; it doesn’t matter whether you think it is positive or negative, you might want to change your look – coloring your hair, changing color of your outfits, changing lipstick colors etc. – just to look different, just to welcome new things into your life.

You walk out of your house. You smile to people who smile to you. You don’t feel good when people you expect to smile to you don’t smile. You walk into the office with the same pace, greet your colleagues with the same words and you expect them to do the same thing. When things don’t happen the way you think it should be, you start to wonder why, and then you start to be uncomfortable.  They are your mirrors.

They reflect how you perceive and expected from people. If the image starts to twist from the way you believe, you start to question.  You start to find ways to blame – the environment, the people around you. You start to question whether there is something wrong with them. You start to question the world.  Have you ever thought of questioning yourself, what disturbing you can be your image – your mirror? The environment may not change. People around you may not change. But it could be you, who change. You react to things coming towards you. You expect things to happen the way you want them to happen.

Our emotional image starts to be stirred when something touches or invade into our value system, whether we agree or disagree, whether we accept, or not accept, whether we like, or dislike, whether we appreciate or not appreciate.  It is twisted by our emotion. It is our mirror image.

Mind is a great machine. It will perceive things the way we want to perceive.  When we go shopping for apparels, all we see are apparels.  Sometimes we would be surprised that we never noticed them before.

Our mind can link our past emotion with our current situation. Many times we generalize things just to fit with our frame of references. They might have no linkage at all. Just like the Chinese says, “being bitten by a snake once, being afraid of wet rope for another 10 years.”   The more we use the linkage in the same pattern the more we pave the path for it to activate effectively and it becomes behavior.

Our mind is selective. It will set a perfect frame to our value and belief.  We tend to select what fits into the frame and act on it.  All emotions, anger and frustration will filter to what we want to hear. We conclude what we listen to fit into the frame we set.

Information is like rain pouring down from the sky and our mind is a glass to collect. We will be able to grasp the rain as much as the size of the mouth of the glass. If we pretend ourselves to be the ground, the earth that can entertain everything, it will help absorb all the rain that pours. It takes a great mind with great generosity to be able to receive everything with no judgment. Let it absorb with no reaction and with no linkage with the set value.

The glass is like our mind, water will change its shape the same way as our emotion changes, sometimes twisted with jealousy, sometimes torn with anger, sometimes encompassed with pleasure or rounded with relaxation. The same person can hold the same rain pour differently at different time or by different persons at the same time.  The rain the glass holds will shape itself in the same shape of the glass.

When you sit in your office, and your assistant comes in aggressively shouting yelling about what he is not happy about the situation in the office. How would you react:

“I am your boss, why don’t you just better behave?”

“Why are you always complaining? Just get the damn job done?”

Smile, and said, “let’s talk, so I can understand more of his issues?”

If you do the first thing, he is the twisted mirror image of you.  He becomes a threat. Your image is being a “boss”. You want to see the mirror as the person who will look at you with respect and at the same time comes with a more obedient manner. You are linking the word “boss” with “polite and obedient”. You would dislike “aggression”.

If you do the second thing, he is the your ugly mirror image. He is ugly because he always acts like that with no reason.  You are linking the current behavior with the previous collective perception that you used to hold. Is there any link in that? The reason he does it this time might be different when he did it last time.

If you smile and pay attention to his behavior, you might understand more of the issues. You don’t presume that you have the mirror in front of you.  You have a preset value. You become selfless. Whatever you see from the mirror is the real image of him, not your mirror image any more.

We link something and hold them so strongly that we would feel uncomfortable to lose the link.  Losing link is losing “me”.  What that means is that “I “do not exist anymore. Is it too important to lose oneself? When it rains, the ocean is the place that can hold every drop of the rain. Does the ocean lose itself of being less “ocean”? It is always difficult to let go of everything, to let go of self-image Mind is just like dominoes; when one falls, the rest will fall. If we take every other piece in the row away, each one that falls will not lead others to fall. Can we remove those dominoes? Rows and rows of dominoes are our values and believe. They are just like our backbones. They make us stand straight to be a proud person with so-called “integrity and pride.  When we remove them, will we be able to stand? Can we remove the idea that we have the backbones? Can we see ourselves stand up with no egos?  It could be interesting to explore how to remove the dominoes as well as standing with no backbones.

Mirror is magical. It can reveal our past. It can reveal our future but it doesn’t often reveal what it is, “now”. We look at the magic mirror and want to see the image that we are used to. We hold to our past perfect image. Sometimes, we keep looking in it and trying to project our future in the mirror. The mind is so great in twisting the images. We see our suffering towards the current uncomforting situation. We see ourselves as progressively happy when we dream of being something great. But, we never see our current situation as it is. When we wake up and look at ourselves in the mirror, we think it is so unattractive. We already project ourselves how to look better.  When we get a bit older we look at ourselves and mourn for our youth that would never come back. We then start imagining the nice image of having plastic surgery while being scared of how people would say about it, how painful the process we have to go through etc. But we cannot accept our current image as it is. Like what the Buddha put it, “Not to mourn for the past, not to worry about the future, and not to anticipate troubles, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly.”

I think that is why during the meditation process many monks go to the cave, into a dark room, so that he would see no mirror.  But he has to deal with a scarier mirror inside his mind – darkness, loneliness, seclusion, solitude, sadness, and all are pure emotional mirror.  When we cannot relate the images from outside as the mirror, we are dealing with inner side of it. That mirror is even scarier and more uncontrollable. Like we are throwing a ball to the wall, it would bounce back. But when we lock ourselves in the dark room – we are throwing ball to ourselves, to our body. We have to pick it up ourselves. It doesn’t bounce back. We have to make sure it is still in our hand.  The backbone that used to support us is even stronger because we want to straight it up even further to stand against something in us.  But for how long it could stand since there is nothing for it to lean on. There is no food from outside to feed in our ego. Our mind would be so hungry to fight for food to survive. When it has no food it will start to eat into its own self if we allow it to.

I Am Murdered

I was weaker than you

You aimed the gun at me

You fired

I died

Is it a suicide or a homicide?

I failed the exam

You shot the blame on me

You fired the bad words

I was weaker

I died

Is it a suicide or a murder?

I got HIV

You shot the shame on me

You fired ignorance

I was weaker

I died

Is it a suicide or a massacre?

I was bankrupt

You shot the responsibility on me

You fired liability

I was weaker

I died

Is it a suicide or a bump off?

I was friendless

You shot loneliness on me

You fired emptiness

I was weaker

I died

Is it a suicide or a bloodbath?

I am here to be shot

I am so weak to withstand

I surrender

I commit suicide

I am murdered

You Beat Me to Shine

Darkness steals the light

In your eyes thunder strikes

I dance I sing I tap I fall

I want you to know how much I try

You beat me to shine

Darkness steals the night

In my mind thunder strikes

Every day every night, I sweat

Never want you to see my mind, I cry.

You just deem that I can shine

Darkness leaves, the light shines

My dark corner hides

I dance I sing. I tap

Laughter, sheer, joy in front of my eyes.

Now I shine as you mold me to shine

Daylight, my glory rises

I shine as bright

Every night I sing, every night I tap, every single night I fly

Your eyes are in my mind

I hide the darkness, now I shine

I search for love, I long for caring tenderness

I look at all eyes around me,

I look at all the stars surround me

I just realize not a friendly eye I can really see

Darkness widens, my mind, sinister night

In their eyes thunder strikes

I dance I sing I tap and I fall

They just laugh at the sight

I can’t shine, I cry

I can’t really shine as bright,

I don’t understand, I really don’t understand why you beat me to shine

Where Have All the Friends Gone

Moonlight shines the night

Smoothens sky with soften light

Stars dance, always an enjoyable night

While the moon doesn’t shine too bright

Flickering, tickling, I move

Glittering the unresisting charm

Striding, hopping I giggle

Getting tired never in the sky I rove

I just hope the night will never end

I just hope I cam dance the night through

I just hope, I think I can just hope

I don’t have to leave you

But the time must come

When all friends have to go

The party is over

Nothing, nothing I can do

Radiant hits the sky

Sharpen my eyes to tears

I am happy to see the day

Or am I sad leaving the night?

Just hope the day can be as enjoyable as the night

The sun is strong

All the friends are gone

I close my eyes and wish

That I could come along

Mine And Yours

What in my mind is thought different in yours

What I think truth is what you think a lie

What I believe in is what you think as self centric

What the value I holds you think there is other way out

What roads I walk on you think they will go nowhere

Do I have to see things the same was as you

Do I have to believe the same way as you

Do we have to walk on the same road

Can’t we just hold hands while walking on different roads

And enjoy the different journeys

Rainbow Road

I searched for treasure

Once my mother told me

It was at the end of the rainbow

 

I gazed at the colorful bridge

My dream wondered there

It was always very fun to walk on

 

I could choose colors

I could walk on the blue lane

The red one was also interesting

I could pick one color a day

My life was never dull

 

Every time after the rain

I would be there looking at the sky

I dreamt once I grew up

I would be able to reach the end of the rainbow

 

Up I grow

Hard I work

Gone the rainbow bridge

Gone the dream treasure

I explore reality

 

I walk every path of my life

I rush my aim

I forget the treasure at the end of the rainbow

 

So dull the road I walk

So foggy the pathway

So unfriendly passers by

So weary I stop

 

No more dull road

No more illusion

No more search

No more

 

My dream comes back

The seven colors in front of me

But I just can’t see how I can walk

My legs are too drained

I have walked far too long

 

I wish I had chosen

To walk on the rainbow

 

It doesn’t matter whether there is treasure at the end

As long as I can enjoy while I walk
The joy is what matters