sacha chua living an awesome life

Reflections during the flight back:

I try not to take even everyday routines for granted. There are only so many weeks and weekends in a lifetime. Extraordinary times — significant moments, all-too-short visits of family and friends — pass even more achingly.

This is part of life as an immigrant visiting home. Every second ticks toward a departure. Every departure involves a Stoic confrontation of inevitable loss. It’s not just the big losses. Even before then, you lose the everyday moments and the untold stories.

The only way through it is to hold on to the reasons for this part of the story. It’s difficult to remember this when I leave for a different horizon, but I’m getting better. Part of it is learning so much more from the varieties of love and life around me. The trick isn’t to extend the lessons I’m learning from the people around me, with so many this learning phase, just as students can’t be in school forever. The trick is to learn more deeply, apply what I learn quickly, and share what I’m learning along the way.

All things must end so that new things can begin. Moments must become memories so that we can apply the lessons we’ve learned from them.

So we’re going back to this second home we’ve created for ourselves. We’ll do our laundry, pick up the cats, restock our groceries. We’ll go to work and focus on our projects. Fall will turn into winter. (We call it baking season to dull its edge.) We’ll get on with the rest of our lives, and other people will do the same. It’ll be fun.

Looking ahead… You know, it’s okay. Time passes. That’s what time does. This is neither good nor bad. It just is.

The road ahead looks exciting too.

Over the past two weeks, I had been planning to go see Hugh Jackman’s concert with some friends. Apparently, he can sing quite well.

I found myself hesitating even as I juggled coupon codes and RSVPs. With a week to go and seats selling out, I ended up deciding not to go. I realized that I’d rather spend a quiet evening with W- or by myself than watch a concert.

One of my friends really wanted to go. He asked me if there was anything stopping W- from watching with us. I replied that it wasn’t really W-’s kind of thing. Come to think of it, concerts aren’t particularly my kind of thing either.

That made me think about what activities I might share with friends, and about introversion and friendship.

It’s easy to reflect on this because J- provides good contrast. She’s on her summer break. At 13 years old, she’s independent enough to choose her own activities, such as sketching at home or walking over to friends’ houses. She’s comfortable spending time on her own, but she lights up when she hangs out with friends. Not a day goes by without a get-together.

I remember being a bit like that: enjoying lunch with friends at school, inviting people to our house for snacks, suggesting things to do and movies to watch. But I’m also really comfortable by myself or with W- and J-, so it takes effort to organize or go to get-togethers.

Time to break out a tool that I sometimes use to help J- think of ideas: the list. If I think about activities I can share with other people, then it might be easier to get out there and do it, and it might make it easier for other people to share activities with me.

Some ideas:

• Concerts and symphony performances: Probably not. They tend to be more expensive, too.
• Musicals: Very rarely. I enjoyed “Evil Dead” and “Wicked” greatly, and sprung for the awesomest tickets I could get. Other musicals tend to be .
• Opera: I like opera. Watching opera makes the music come alive for me. I prefer community opera by the Toronto Opera Repertory over the Canadian Opera Company. Maybe it’s the memories (the particularly awesome date with W- that kicked all of this off). Maybe it’s knowing that the singers are doing this on top of their other lives.
• Movies: Hmm. I watch some movies in theatres because I want to vote for them with my dollars or because I think the theatre experience will be worth it (usually great effects or decent 3D). Watching a movie is a fairly passive sort of experience, though.
• Movies at home: I much prefer watching movies at home, actually – a cat or two on my lap, subtitles, the ability to pause it whenever, a comfortable couch, maybe laundry to fold… The library is awesome.
• Exercise: Biking. Walking around. I’d be up for that, even if biking involves relatively little conversation unless there’s some sort of picnic.
• Cooking: Definitely. I wish more of my friends organized potlucks, or were up to coming over for one. In the meantime, I host tea parties as an excuse to prepare interesting recipes. I enjoy the process of cooking, particularly when I’m sharing it with other people, and I like sharing the results.
• Writing/reading/drawing/sewing: I think it would be really cool to share more of my learning activities with friends. I might be up for a book club, for example. Or a writing group with exercises. Or drawing lessons. Or sewing lessons, although I’m more keen on writing, reading, and drawing. =) I’d much rather develop skills than consume experiences.

It’s a little weird working on understanding this. J- plans the other way around: she calls people and invites them to hang out, and then they figure out what to do. I feel the influence of my introversion here. I often prefer to spend time writing (look! here I am) than hanging out.

I suspect it’s good to put myself in the way of learning from other people’s lives, though, especially since many people share their lives in conversation and not online. Maybe it’ll come in time. (I’m starting to have parent-y conversations about summer enrichment!)

What activities do you share with other people?

Quinn wanted to know how I respond to systemic injustice, wicked problems, and other things that are so far beyond individual scale that they tend to reduce people to helplessness.

I used to be paralyzed by these thoughts. I fumbled with class divides, marked as privileged by language and accent and access. I avoided relationships because I worried about the statistics showing discrimination against married women and mothers. I felt torn apart by guilt over being part of the brain drain, tempted to think of what-ifs.

I’m learning to pick my fights and focus on doing the best I can.

It isn’t about solving the world’s problems. It’s about facing the world lovingly, finding unknown depths of energy in yourself so that you can keep on going even if life challenges you.

Here’s something from people wiser than I am:

The bodhisattva vows to save all sentient beings, but that is not a
goal in the relative sense. The bodhisattva realizes that what she is
saying in that vow is completely impractical. You can’t really do it.
We see this from the mythical story of the great bodhisattva
Avalokiteshvara. He had a literal mind in the beginning. He took that
vow, “Until I save all six realms of existence, I will not attain
enlightenment.” He worked and he worked and he worked to fulfill his
vow. He helped beings, and he thought he’d saved hundreds of millions
of them. Then he turned around and saw that an even greater number
than he had saved were still suffering, and he had flickers of doubt
at that point.

At the beginning, when he took that vow, he had said, “If I have any
doubts about my path, may my head split into a thousand pieces.” This
vow came true at this time. His head began to fall apart. He was in
tremendous pain of confusion, not knowing what he was doing. Then,
according to the myth, Amitabha – a great buddha of compassion – came
to him and said, “Now you’re being foolish. That vow you took
shouldn’t be taken literally. What you took was a vow of limitless
compassion.” Avalokiteshvara realized that and understood it. Through
that recognition, he became a thousand times more powerful. That’s why
the iconographical image of Avalokiteshvara often has twelve heads and
a thousand arms. You see, once you take the meaning of saving all the
others literally, you lose the sacredness of it. If you’re able to see
that compassion applies to every situation, then compassion becomes
limitless.

… The path is what there is to work with, and that work is there
eternally, because sentient beings are numberless, and we have to work
with them eternally.

Trungpa, Gimian, and Kohn’s Work, Sex, Money: Real Life on the Path of Mindfulness (p73-74)

Sometimes it feels like the world rolls backwards faster than we Sisyphi can push it up. That’s okay. We get better and better at making little differences. We get better at making bigger and bigger differences. There’s no game over. There’s no happily ever after. There’s just the constant work and growth of being human.

Sometimes I roll backwards faster than I can push myself up. I forget something. I ignore someone’s needs. I make mistakes. But if I can keep focusing on small things I can do to move forward instead of trying to keep score over the entirety of things, then it’s easy to find the energy to start again.

The world also rolls forward, unexpectedly, through no effort of our own. Keep an eye out for those moments. The world is full of things that aren’t right, but it’s also full of things that are.

One of my friends is dealing with a quarter-life crisis of the “what have I been doing with my life?” variety. Comparing himself to other people or to where he had hoped he’d be at this point, he feels like he comes up way short. I shared some advice, and here are some other thoughts that came along the way.

It’s a common feeling, right around birthdays and other yearly milestones. Where did the year go? Why does time fly so quickly? Look at all these people your age – or younger! – doing incredible things. What have you been doing with your life?

Here’s how I deal with it: I write.

That’s because no matter how good your memory is, your brain’s probably going to be bad at remembering the highlights, lowlights, goals and accomplishments of the previous year. You have to deal with a number of limitations. The recency bias means you remember the most recent items better. That leaves lots of fuzzy areas. And because the brain is optimized for associations, not linear access, you’ve got to have the right hooks to get back into some memories.

Photographs are good, but they can only take you so far. There are a lot of important moments you can’t take pictures of: you don’t have a camera handy, you don’t recognize it at the moment, it’s intangible… Writing – even just a quick sketch, a private note – might help you remember.

Write about your thoughts, your goals, your accomplishments, your experiences, your questions, your answers. This doesn’t have to be public. This doesn’t even have to be coherent, although it helps if you can read your writing afterwards. This gives you a record that you can review at the end of the year to see how far you’ve come.

You don’t even have to wait until the end of the year. Use your writing to remember why your goals mattered to you. Use your writing to celebrate the little victories as well as the big ones. Use your writing to make everything in life part of the story you’re becoming – and yes, that includes the tough parts.

Use your writing to slow down life – not all the way, just enough to make it livable. Not too much. Writing about life means standing at a little bit of a distance from it, so that you can turn it over and look at it from different angles. Might not work for everyone. But for the people it works for – maybe you! – it could turn the quicksilver in that hourglass into something you can work with.

Doesn’t matter if you haven’t been doing it before. Now’s as good a time as any to get started. Doesn’t matter if you keep stopping. Even a spotty trail of stones is better than breadcrumbs in the forest of Hansel and Gretel. Doesn’t matter if you feel inarticulate. Start somewhere.

Don’t like writing for yourself? Tell people stories through e-mail or text messages and keep a copy for your notes. After conversations, jot down notes to help you remember. Ask people to help you recall.

What have you been doing with your life? Probably more than you can remember. =) Make the most of each year, and that’ll help you make the most of your life.

I’ve switched to printing out my blog archives monthly instead of yearly, so now I’m all caught up again. It’s surprising how it all adds up. Here’s my blog since just 2007, printed single-space, double-column, double-sided, with monthly indexes:

There’s more beyond that, as I didn’t print out my older posts. Here’s a visual summary from my reflection on 8 years of blogging:

I’m surprised that I quite enjoy reading my old posts. I find it difficult to listen to my presentation recordings – I get impatient, I want to move on – but I like reading, particularly when I come across posts I’ve forgotten writing. There’s a lot in here. It’s fun remembering what it was like to look for my first apartment, hanging out with friends, dealing with challenges. I like revisiting my questions, decisions, and plans. There are many things that spark ideas for new posts and sketches.

This print-out is part of playing the long game with writing. I’ve got electronic backups of my blog. A paper backup further increases the chances that I’ll be able to revisit these ideas decades down the line. And it supports serendipity and reflective practice, too. Who knows what I’ll rediscover or review?

Pretty cool. Thanks for sharing the journey so far. Looking forward to what’s ahead!

Soha wanted to know what I thought about the differences between spending on stuff and experiences. This took me several drafts to figure out, and I don’t think I’m all the way to a clear understanding yet, but I’m trying to say something I haven’t really found in the personal finance books and blogs I read.

Stuff or experiences? Neither. It’s a false dichotomy, and one that often starts with the wrong question: “What will make me happy?” If you aren’t happy, it’s very difficult to buy happiness. Probably impossible.

“What will make me happier than I am now?” – is that a better question? Not really. What’s “happier”, anyway, but something that draws an ever-moving line between you and some ideal?

I like this question instead: “What do I want to learn more about?” No guarantee of happiness, no pursuit of happiness, just curiosity. Happiness doesn’t have to be pursued. It just is. Happiness can be a chosen, developed response. So what I decide to spend money or time on is determined more by what I’m curious about.

I confess to having a strong distrust for people trying to sell me ways to happiness. A designer handbag won’t make me happy (or happier). Neither will a three-week vacation of idle relaxation on a pristine beach. Quite possibly even an enlightening weekly course on meditation wouldn’t do the trick. My life will be a good life even if I never stay in the best suite in a five star hotel, see the aurora borealis, or learn to fly a plane (ideas from Richard Horne’s “101 Things to Do Before You Die”, which does have amusing forms). It will simply be different if I do, and that only matters if I can do something with the experiences and ideas I pick up and recombine.

In fact, I’d rather spend on stuff – the raw ingredients of an experience – than on pre-packaged experiences. I’d rather spend on groceries for experiments than on a fancy meal at a restaurant or a cooking class with a famous chef. I’d rather spend on lumber and tools to build a chair, than spend on a cottage rental. Turns out this is based on sound psychological principles: we value what we work on more than what we buy. (For more on this, read Dan Ariely’s “The Upside of Irrationality.”)

You can’t untangle good stuff from experiences. The bag of bread flour I buy leads to the experience of making home-made buns, the experience of enjoying them with W-, and the lasting enjoyment of developing skills and relationships. Fabric and thread become simple gifts accompanied by stories.

Besides, it doesn’t have to be the question of what you want to spend money on. That’s just a matter of budgeting. Many things are possible, but you may save up a little longer for things that require more money. What it really comes down to is a question of time: do you want to do this more than other things you could do? (For example: yes to cooking and gardening; a theoretical yes to improv, but it’s not as high as other things on my list, so I focus on other things; no to the massage deals I see on dealradar.com when I wander by.) If yes, then budget appropriately. Don’t get distracted by low-cost, low-value activities or expenses. (Or worse: high-cost, low-value ones.)

If you feel you’ve made a mistake about spending, don’t beat yourself up over it. Learn and make better decisions next time. Not saddling yourself with consumer debt helps, as debt has a way of multiplying regrets. Stuff can be second-guessed more than experiences can, but it’s even better to break the habit of second-guessing yourself. Think of your sunk costs as tuition. You’ve paid for the learning, now go and use it.

Money can be considered in terms of time, too. Is the incremental benefit you might get worth the opportunity cost of enjoying other things earlier, the compounding growth you may give up, or the corresponding days of freedom in the future? (For me: yes to some wedding photography in order to reduce friction, but no need to get the top wedding photographer; yes to a wonderful bicycle I feel comfortable with; no to the latest version of the Lenovo tablet, although I may reconsider in a year or two.)

Stuff or experiences? Start with what you want, not what other people want to sell you. Treat it as an ongoing experiment. Evaluate your purchases and improve your decisions. Think about what you want to spend your time on, not just money. Good luck!

2011-04-24 Sun 16:45

Sometimes making things at home is cheaper than buying them. Sometimes it’s more expensive. For example, the batch lunches we prepare and freeze come out to $1-$3 per meal, labour included. They’re definitely worth it compared to eating out. The coconut cocktail buns (pan de coco?) I spent this weekend learning are cheaper at the store, but they were still very much worth making.

We followed a recipe from an book that W- had bought from a pastry store in Chinatown a long time ago. It was a different way of making dough. The first step was to mix yeast, warm water, and flour. I was a little nervous in the beginning because it was more of a slurry than a paste. Once it rose and I combined it with the rest of the flour, it was beautifully dough-like, made smooth and elastic through kneading. After several rounds of rising, I filled it with the coconut mix, wrapped the dough around it, let it rest some more, then popped it into the oven for 15 minutes. The result:

The buns were scrumptious. Not too sweet. Complex taste. Yummy yummy yummy.

I had a lot of fun making the buns with W-, playing around with the voice and mannerisms we’d picked up from a Julia Child video. I also made some pie crusts for Pi Day (March 14). W- filled the first pie crust with lemon meringue. I sewed up some tea towels from the fabric that W- helped me pick out, and those passed their field test. We salvaged some wool scraps from one of my bins and repurposed an empty paper salt shaker into a dice roller for J-’s math study sessions. It was a great weekend for maing things.

We spend a lot of weekend time doing things ourselves: cooking, baking, sewing, fixing things, even woodworking during the summer months. Some of things cost us more in terms of time and money than we might spend on functionally equivalent alternatives, but we get a surprising amount of value from these activities. For example, baking coconut buns results in yummy coconut buns (for which a reasonable equivalent can be bought for a little more than a dollar each), but the activity is also:

• intrinsically enjoyable for us
• a way to develop skills
• shared relationship time
• an opportunity to create or build on in-jokes
• an opportunity to strengthen other relationships (friends, neighbours)
• a way to reinforce and express our shared values
• a good reason for a blog post =)

So although baking buns takes time, it actually pays off better than many of the other ways I could spend weekend time, such as:

• reading
• watching movies (borrowed from the library, but still passive)
• programming or working (important to invest time into relationships; doing well in programming and working at the moment, I think.)
• writing, even

There’s a reasonable limit to how much time I would spend on baking or making other things at home. I don’t want to mill my own flour (just yet). I think I’ve got a decent balance right now, and I look forward to picking up more as I get better and more efficient.

Am I trading off, say, more brilliance at work, or racking up income through side-hustles, or becoming more famous through writing? Maybe. But this is good, and all of those other aspects of life are pretty okay (even awesome!). Life is good.