I hated the fact that I had to give up tai chi, I found it very relaxing. One thing that I never really understood and have been struggling with is the idea of chi energy. Strangely I found a helpful pointer to aid my understanding from listening to the philosopher’s zone podcast, from Australia’s ABC national radio. The mention of it in an episode about translation almost passed me by and I was going to try and re-listen to it. I couldn’t because of the auto delete settings I have on my podcast program. However I did manage to look at the transcript. I’m glad I didn’t listen to it again as the pertinent fact was glossed over in a single paragraph that I’ll quote:

Alan Saunders: There is a show on Pay-TV at the moment called The Bullshit Detector, and this week they were looking at Feng Shui. They were analysing the works of three Feng Shui practitioners, all of them Caucasian and presumably not Chinese speakers. And I was thinking, Well look, the Chinese grid, the way in which classical Chinese thought divides the world up, is not the way in which Western thought divides the world up. So it’s going to be different, and you cannot translate concepts one for one. So if you talk about ‘chi’ and you’re an English speaker and you translate ‘chi’ as ‘energy’, well that is bullshit, because it doesn’t behave in the way that energy behaves in western science. The world is simply divided up very differently.

Karyn Lai: That’s right. And so given what you say, and I agree with that, that you can’t define, properly define, or hope to catch the universal meaning of a concept purely by definition, you have to look at it’s instantiations as well, so Chinese language is very anti-essentialist in terms of the meaning that’s embodied in particular characters. It’s non-absolutist, and I believe that’s very much correlated with the way the Chinese might see the world. For instance, I think there are very close correlations between the way the symbols represent meanings and how the meanings are articulated differently in different contexts, and the way they understand the self. So there is a self, but they refuse to talk about the self in abstraction, it’s always the self in that context, or in another context, or as a relational self and so on and so forth.

Of course this doesn’t give any answers at all, but it does give me some better questions to ask.

After you’ve watched this:

Or at least this year anyway.
Friday: Went to Canterbury to visit Laura, and see Canterbury Acoustic. A night of truly fantastic music, and then after the music to the pub where we got to hang out with the performers! I found this to be slightly surreal, one minute someone is moving you deeply with their music and song, the next your chatting away, flirting even… mad. Then there was an after party at the organizers’ flat, which was also very cool and surreal 🙂
I bought the music of the two main acts, the headliner played fantastically relaxing music and to be honest it felt a little wrong that we weren’t listening to it outside with the sun setting.
Saturday: Back to Guildford as Dave and Matt were visiting, spent the afternoon chilling out watching spaced and generally not doing a great deal, which was fine. Then in the evening we fired up the BBQ, and put on the music from the night before. And yes it was playing as the sun was setting. Perfect.
Out into town after the BBQ, six friends many of which I hadn’t seen for a long time out in Guildford laughing chatting and generally having a damn good time. Superb.
Sunday: By definition this had to be a chilled out day, started with grilling some of the remaining food for breakfast and watching Top Gear and the remaining episodes of spaced. Then after Matt left myself and Dave went into town to buy tickets for speed racer and then relaxed in the sun for a few hours and had some lunch.
Speed Racer review: Definitely a kids film but we were watching it for the visuals – mind blowing. The colours were so incredibly intense there is no way of describing it. It was almost like when I tried Cannabis in Amsterdam. That was the highlight (no pun intended) of the film, so you can imagine the strength of the storyline.
Then more food, and bed. It may not sound like a stunningly good weekend, but everything just seemed right and in place, wouldn’t have changed anything… well apart from I’d have asked for the number of the girl I was chatting to in Canterbury, but other than that 🙂

… some speakers or headphones, and preferably a quiet place… Watch this, it’s very powerful:

Update:
I’ve found that the embedded video doesn’t work very well, so here is a direct link

that I think that this is the coolest thing ever!

Hope it’ll be real some day!

“There’s no substitute for experience”

“Don’t confuse age with experience”

For me there has always been a simple answer to this question: No.
It turns out that I may be wrong! Read on…
I was recently reading about how you can break perfectionism into three different types, and here they are:

• Internal perfectionist: you have very high standards for yourself
• External perfectionist: you have very high standards for other people
• Social perfectionist: You perceive other people to have high expectations of you (regardless of what they think).

With this breakdown it becomes quite clear that I suffer from Social perfectionism. The idea that other people expect me to be a better person that I am is probably incredibly egotistical, but there you are. Now some people would quite rightly say that striving for perfection is no bad thing. But of course there are problems with setting the unreachable goal. There is the stress of never being good enough. There is the very real problem that having standards sitting at the level of perfection can actually result in complete paralysis. The unwillingness to do anything because it won’t be good enough. The planning and planning and planning of something without ever getting to the execution stage, because lets face it even the plan needs to be perfect.

In my case it can lead to a lack of participation, feeling a non-existent social pressure to be perfect will of course manifest in social situations. So performing, trying something daring or new (I’m thinking of Capoeira moves here) is out of the question because I’ll likely fail – at least the first few times, and in front of a load of people no less!!
So with this realization I feel I need to start a new resolution (never wait until new years for this kind of thing, it may be too far away!).

That resolution is simply this: Dare to fail.