Today is a good time to take stock of where I am, to share some learning and to celebrate. Life is so good it has to be shared.
Where am I?
I’m entering the blossoming phase of my life: so much excitement, so many opportunities, abundance of energy, lovely people. College has been quite a journey, and I am loving every moment of it. Classes, involvement, people, personal time, sleep, books, adventures. I don’t see life as much as a juggle but rather a process of alignment: when everything is aligned, life moves smoothly.
This is also a good time to check in with my theme of 2016 – Integration It is fascinating how useful the act of crystallizing a theme can be. Even when I’m not conscious of it, different parts of my life are somehow coming together: mind and body, technical and social, fields of study, relationships.
Being somewhat older than my peers, hanging out with older people and reading books of dead authors gave me a bit of thought-fulness. At the same time I am also feeling a sense of personal renewal, as if I’m becoming more and more youthful as I mature. Being youthful has little to do with what young people “should” do – it’s very much a spirit of openness, wonderment and innocence. To quote David Whyte, “innocence is not a state of naivety. It is, in a way, the ability to be found by the world.” Somehow that innocence is often lost as we grow up, and I don’t want that to happen.
I am feeling more engaged with Tufts as well as the greater world. Someone recently asked me “What does it feel like to be alive?” and I came up with two words “engagement” and “ease”. I was surprised by my own answer, so much that I made into my own definition of success: to engage in what needs to be done with greater ease.
What I am learning
I like to keep track of my development through the lessons I am learning. Here they are:
- On impact: I’m starting to have a better sense of the impact I have on other people. While actions may indeed speak louder than words, the latter can be quite powerful. Sometimes the best thing I say or write is completely spontaneous, but in general words deserve to be deliberate. The energy each of us bring into an interaction can have a strong impact too. Something I learned recently from Ben Zander is that glowing eyes matter. Nothing delights us more than the glowing eyes of someone else, and it is totally a worthy cause to make eyes glow more often! On that note, a recent feedback from a friend: my eyes glow when I feel connected – mental, emotional, physical. Really good to know!
- On reframing life: In the past, I adopted the radical acceptance motto of “I suck, you suck, we all suck”, which has been very helpful to cope with stuff. However, I put on a quote on my door recently ”I’m a gift. You are a gift. Life is a gift.” Operating this new requires a fundamental shift of mind, and as far as I can tell, this newer motto works like charm. Life is indeed full of gifts – even when shit happens, I have a blog post Indeed, my attention, energy, vibe, questions, thoughts, resources, relationships, youthfulness, thoughtfulness, rashness, spontaneity – all these are gifts. We all have a lot to give and receive from each other and from the world; we just need to figure out how best to do it.
- On being: As I get older, there is a gentler, more graceful sense of being. Perhaps this is the way to live: as we age, we keep getting lighter and lighter until the day we are gone and the world wouldn’t feel sad about us leaving. A friend recently gave me a beautiful imagery: we live like a helium balloon; the lighter we are, the more we can rise above, but we don’t just fly out of the atmosphere into space. Instead, we look back. We see the world in its entirety, and we become even more we become engaged in it. Such an “uplifting” image – literally and metaphorically.
This imagery well captures two paradoxes: first, being light doesn’t mean being disengaged, leaving everything behind and going into the forest like some monks. (not all though – look at this guy) The better question is “How can we remain gentle while being deeply engaged in the world?” The second paradox is that people who have that quality of lightness to their being, those who don’t seem to care as much about the outcomes of what happens, are the ones who will make the most impact in our lives. In lightness, there is power. There is so much we can add to the world just by being.
- On enjoying myself: Over the years, I learn the importance of developing a genuine sense of appreciation and respect for myself, not more, not less than other people. Do I treat myself every moment with attention and care and acceptance and curiosity? The quality of my relationship with myself has got so much better; sometimes I even have this thought “Oh wow, Khuyen, you are daydreaming about this person or that scenario – isn’t it interesting?” One benefit of attaining a distance from myself is that I can be genuinely surprised by what I do in the moment, which is a lot of fun. Paradoxically, not taking myself seriously also means to accept who I currently am and to know that it will change anyway. We are all work-in-progress mistaking we are finished, to paraphase Daniel Gilbert.
- Focusing on contribution: a few years ago I used to geek out a lot on self-improvement – how to do certain things better, how to improve the way I operate. I still do, but am a lot more relaxed now. We work hard on ourselves because the work is meaningful, but not too hard to the point it becomes a burden. We are all growing all the time, and sometimes too much focus on growth itself may not be the most sustainable thing. The better question is “What am I contributing? What do I need to know, to learn and to do to make it happen?” If you want to motivate me, paint me a rich picture of how I can help!
Peter Drucker once said “people grow according to the demands they make on themselves, according to what they consider to be achievement and attainment.” The words “dream”, “achievement” or “ambition” somehow don’t jive with me too much; “aspiration”, “contribution” and “responsibility” do. Keep that in mind when we work together next time 😉
- On learning: from the last part of this interview of Edgar Schein in Google: “whenever you are in an experience, stop and ask yourself: what else is going on? In this place? Among us? Inside me? This is where the real learning occurs” One big influence of mindfulness practice on me is this awareness of the fertile negative space. A related and deeper point is that everything needs a container – music needs silence, painting needs canvas, texts needs screen, people need relationships. That means if we can create the right container, the right thing can happen. The farmer spends lots of time cultivating the soil for a good reason!
Two guiding questions for myself these days are: How can I be more connected to this whole evolving world, and how can I co-create the conditions for flourishing? I don’t take myself too seriously, but I do take these questions seriously 😉
Some reminders for the future
- Choose where I pay attention to:
the real power lies in our ability to ask this question: Is what I am paying attention to energizing, liberating, fulfilling? On a related note, I love this quote by Mother Teresa: “There is no great thing. There’s only thing done with great love.” Whenever I feel stuck in my small self that is anxious, calculative, wanting to get ahead, getting caught up in being “great”, it is a good reminder that I can be larger Self that is loving and free. It sounds easy in theory, but really hard in practice. It gets easier with time though.
- Never do it alone
Recently the thought that I’m almost one-third into my twenty dawned upon me. If anything, that thought made me feel a greater sense of responsibility not so much as a growing up independent person but rather an interdependent being in the world. As I am writing this reflection in my room, I realized that I am not alone at all. Because we never are. I also realized that what I’m looking first and foremost in any kind of relationships is togetherness – then comes tenderness and intimacy. Quite a piece of self-knowledge.
- Ready, Fire, Aim (notice the order)
A motto by Pierre Omidyar for his work as well as his life: it’s important to be ever ready enough, yet never 100% ready. Fire first, then aim, then fire and aim again. Preparing is good only to a certain point, and in general it’s better to have a bias towards action – take reasonable action, learn as much as possible from feedback, recaliberate, do again.
Gratitude
If you have read this far, please take a moment to celebrate our shared joy of being alive. Not only that, we have good eye sights, a device to read this post, enough English ability to understand and a willing heart to celebrate together. If these aren’t worth being grateful for, what is?
Thank you for being with my journey,
Khuyen
Khuyen 