Secret of Life

"You've heard the expression that you get what you put in. Life is reciprocal. How you treat it is how it treats you. Live life with humility. With dedication. With joy. Cherish it and it will cherish you. Add joy and it will add joy back. In work, in daily life, in your everyday environment. And lastly respect its temporality. Even if your life is less magnificent than you thought it should be. Because what you learn here will come in handy in the unknown future beyond this life."

These anime just keep getting deeper and deeper. The things you can glean from a two season isekai comedy never fail to surprise me.

I'm no sage. I just write the wisdom I hear from elsewhere.

I figured it out

It was 2020. I found the passion of my life: coding, a career, a purpose, a goal. This was what I was going to throw myself into, commit myself to, and go into the deep end with. I was good at it. It clicked. It was fun. I liked my job. I was making money. I really loved my apartment. Even at that time though, my job didn't feel all that meaningful. It wasn't like the project I was working on was changing the world or something. But I didn't mind. I was having a good time. Then I left.

The second company was distressing at first. Not because it was busy but because it wasn't. Nothing was happening it seemed. Things weren't moving forward. When do I get to write code? It was a large fintech company. The weeks went by. My passion began to cool. I got bored. Months went by. Was this what my profession entails—to become a corporate cog? Finally I had enough. I found a position with a nice consulting company. Friendly folk. Meaningful work, maybe. This is my break, I think. But as my last day drew closer I grew apprehensive. I began to doubt myself and my choices. Then when I started the new job I panicked. This wasn't the right choice. Even though I didn't enjoy that last job I had great relationships there. I must have made a mistake somewhere along my journey and this is one of them. The internal voices were overbearing. I pressed the eject button.

I went on a roadtrip. Maybe something was wrong with my head and I just had to clear it out a bit. After interviewing with the fourth company I was excited. Lots of coding, tight-knit team, new technology. Once again, as the start date approached I got doubts which turned into a sinking feeling about what I was getting myself into. But I told myself this time would be different. This time I wouldn't listen. The job itself wasn't too bad. I was basically playing the role of the messy haired programmer cramming out code in a dark basement, except it's in an office instead. But right away I became afflicted with crushing anxiety. It was like something inside was pulling my heart so hard it got stretched out and now they were tying knots with it. My intuition which I had cherished all my life was screaming so hard and causing so much pain that I wasn't sure if it was hijacked or another entity altogether. My mind was the one that tortured me, and there was no escape. I took on a second job for a while to distract myself, but to limited avail. The months would go by and eventually the pains would subside. But up until the last month I was susceptible to anxiety attacks.

I'm in Australia now. It's somewhere I had in mind to visit sometime in my life. After getting that project over the hump and completing roughly the second third of its front-end code and burning out I decided it was time to move on. I spent a lot of time processing everything that had happened in the last 3 years, but could make little progress. I was confused and still suffering from mental disturbances. I worked on a sheep farm for a few weeks. Then I landed another software job. I was ambivalent going in, but I wanted to give it a chance. Then for the first time in my career I got fired. Well actually I was allowed to continue but presumably with drastically lowered wages. I didn't see eye to eye with my boss and let him know it. Then I lost the job. Four days after that I was hit by a car while biking. I don't want to get into this now, so in summary I'm recovered and just waiting for some of the face fractures to fully heal.

I've been doing a lot of thinking. Some of it helped. But there are still questions. Perhaps I had messed up my career so badly I couldn't go back. Maybe I wouldn't be able to return to the good old days of enjoying being a software engineer because a series of precise triggers unleased my mental-aberrations-predisposed mind's deepest darknesses. Eventually I realized how much this mid-life-like crisis sucked out meaning and happiness from my life. But one day when I was feeling particularly down a realization hit me: I had subconsciously allowed myself to be defined by my career and my goals. When these things collapsed so did I. When I was not actively pursuing these things I would feel purposeless. But I remembered that first and foremost the aim was to be me. Then I could be in tune with my desires and wishes. Sometimes we take the objects of ourselves—our goals, our treasures—so seriously that we become detached from who we really are. It's almost like making a copy, or an image/idol of ourselves and becoming that idol. We forget that by being born we've already achieved the ultimate goal: to become ourselves in the flesh. And when I remembered that it lightened me up and made me happy because that's who we are: the human spirit is happiness (The second part, "in the flesh", can lead to difficulties but this is the struggle of life). It's a gift to be incarnated with our spirit still intact because that's the ultimate treasure. And every day whether you're unemployed and strolling through a park or working but not loving it you're free to be happy, and also to change your environment or pursue other goals as your true self pleases, because to your actual self, everything you do including being alive is meaningful. But should the pursuit of worldly things overwhelm you, you can always scale back and remember this—that the most valuable thing is your spirit. It's who you are, and you are happiness. And you are always free.

. . . . . . . . .

Maybe my complete journey into this coding career was to teach me this lesson. But will I be returning to this career? What will I do next? Come back again and perhaps we will find out in a future chapter.

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In your deepest dreams you are able to see it: the foe with which you struggle with: the demon which possesses your mind and drives it to insanity. In those moments it appears like existence is once again real and you are healed of this belief called reality. Upon waking the enlightenment lasts for a brief while, your mind clear as if like the reflection from a still pond. Still lucid you see the dream overtake your view again.

They say that imagination sets you free, but from the same place that sprung the imagination is born the fetters that limit your experience. In those moments when I realize I was truly awake I become cognizant that my waking life is but 10% of what is really there, 10% being less a number and more an expression. Was it that we could not handle life at 100%? Or does the brain weaken in its ability to translate the richness of life through its lifetime of being assailed, both physically and spiritually? Probably this is part of our purpose here: to experience life, not as a soul, but as a soul in a mind, in a body. Good night. Tomorrow morning when I wake up I will try once again to resume awakening.

"There is nothing that can stand in the way of a person's will. Although a person's will is not his essence, nevertheless it contains the power to sway the soul in the desired direction." ~ Rabbi DovBer of Lubavitch

History 1989 - 2002

I was born in a large industrial city in Northeast China at a time when Soviet communism was dismantling and Chinese communism oversaw a famous incident. Just before starting grade school I immigrated to the United States with my parents, and then to Canada. We moved a lot, so I would subsequently attend 4 elementary schools, 3 middle schools, and 4 high schools. I believe this is my biggest accomplishment as a child. ;P

I didn't know what to write about

If you get writer's block, hash it and start a blockchain. Each block will record your futile attempts at producing something. Then have that blockchain kept on thousands of servers around the world documenting your embarrassing fails in full detail for time immemorial. See, it's not so bad to publish something while you have writer's block.

welcome to the global masquerade

The coronavirus pandemic makes for a great analogy. The world is a masquerade. We are all wearing masks (our bodies, our personalities). We are here to participate in the party. You decide what kind of mask(s) to wear. You decide how to 'party'. People sometimes take life too seriously. The earth doesn't need you to go on. Your country doesn't need you. Your job doesn't even need you. So why are we here? To bring life to the party in our unique ways (which could be living as a hermit). You come with nothing to lose and everything to gain. The 'you' beneath the mask cannot be destroyed and is already perfect. But the you that the world perceives is different from 'you' beneath the mask. 'You' have the freedom to choose or alter your mask at any time. The problem is after a while people identify with their mask rather than with their actual 'you'. They become stuck, rigid. They begin to follow rules no one set for them. Adhere to the static program as dictated by the mask. What some writers call "the flow" is just a drunken stupor where you lose yourself and nothing matters, which means your next move is everything. The present is magnified to its rightful place because we don't occupy ourselves with what our masks believe to be "important". Note that this does not necessarily involve consuming alcohol ;) This doesn't mean that nothing matters and there are no consequences to our actions. But if we let our masks decide these things and go about conducting our lives as masks, then the party cannot truly begin.

History 2003 - 2015

I was an academic achiever in high school, PSAT 222, SAT meh bombed the writing section (can you tell?), full scholarship to college. By my second year I wanted to drop out, chickened out, and instead finished with a degree in arts and technology (seemed more liberating than the institutional subjects I studied in school. Plus I was interested in game design).

Having not had an internal compass for the past 4 years I applied for some jobs, didn't find anything, and moved to another city in another country to explore local bakeries and be partially employed as a food server. After a few months I moved back into my mom's house (would be her basement if she had one), did some more restaurant work, moved out to another city in another country, moved back, moved to another city in another state, moved back, and repeat one more time. By then I had enough W-2s from all my employers to make a children's book. Meanwhile, my straight C's friend had graduated PT school and was making 60 a year.

Delicious irony. This is why I love to crack open the guise of intelligence and strip it from its pedestal. Brains are good, yea, if you know how to use them. If not they will use you. They will cause you to worry more, overthink more, waste energy dealing with unwanted thoughts and feelings, maybe even go mad. I was so smart I got out-smarted by my mind. But from this point on I began to regain the reins.

Quote of the week:

Today is a fine day to die ~ Native Indian Saying