Rite of Coding, Code of Writing

Today is a public holiday and I'm currently sipping coffee at Starbucks, at the Curve in Mutiara Damansara. Feeling a bit sleep as I've been up since 4am. I enjoy my early morning work session. I see it as a kind of practice session. Coding is a skill which gets rusty when you do not practice it often enough. It is also why I keep this blog--it is my weekly writing exercise.

Coding and writing are skills that need to be honed. Coding is 'easier' than writing because you always know exactly where you are heading. The end-goal is clear: you are always trying to deliver some feature or functionality. How well you do it, depends on your skill and creativity.

You can also say that certain forms of writing, say writing a report, requires you to know exactly where you are heading too. You have to convey certain points and messages. But writing, unlike coding is harder because your choice of words is vast and there are a thousand and one ways an idea can be expressed. Sometimes you grope in the dark in search of the perfect word or phrase to express what you have in mind. Often what comes out is not exactly what you had wished to convey. But that is part of the challenge of writing. It is finding a way for thoughts and impressions to material into the physical world as printed or written words.

Coding, on the other hand is constrained by the programming language. Despite that, there is still a lot of room for creativity. The goal of the programmer is to achieve its goal with an economy of means. An elegant piece of program has no superfluous statements. Every line has a purpose. And a good programmer aims to make his code clean and maintainable. One thing I've found out the hard way is that a messy and unorganized piece of code will always come back to haunt you. Architecture is very important and code has to be constantly refactored to make them general and reusable.

Therein lies the key difference between coding and writing: when it comes to coding, the more reuse you can achieve, the better a programmer you are. You do not want to reinvent the wheel every time. If you can make use of components you have built before, that means you have done your job well. Whereas as an original writer, you strictly abhor repetition. Even if you have to write about the same thing again, you will not be looked upon highly if you just cut-and-paste sentences that your readers have read before. Never under-estimate your reader and always try to express something new, even if it revolves around the same subject.

I treat coding and writing are two important ritual that keep my mind constantly sharp. They are to my brain what my jogging sessions are to my body. They are my inviolable codes of conduct. Everyday when I start my morning work session, I feel grateful and blessed that I am able to still perform these activities well. And long may it continue!

A Life for Show

My blog article last week was a pretty heavy one. I don't think I'll even want to attempt something like that this week. Let this week's topic be light and easy, simply because I have been working since 5am and am feeling quite exhausted.

So today, I'll just take my fingers for a stroll on my computer keyboard, just allowing words to pour out, no matter what the subject might be. In other words, I'll just be rambling. Since this is my blog, I can do whatever I like and I don't have a readership to please. That's the perverse pleasure and advantage of keeping a blog that no one reads.

The generation who grew up on social media today has a lot of challenges to tackle. I'm referring to the recent news of a K-Pop star who committed suicide. During my time, bullying could only happen during school-hours and your reputation is only limited to a very small world. Nowadays, cyberbullying is 24 hours and is global in scale.

When Facebook and Twitter first started, I was among the early users. It was a lot of fun in the early days. But unfortunately social media have taken over our lives. They have made everyone's life a kind of reality show. Think how strange my last statement is. Life, a reality show? Yes, we've turned our real lives into a kind of show, with a global audience in mind, until we are not able to see what is real and what is not.

Isn't it not surprising that there's such a thing called 'fake news'? Because we treat our lives as show (and shows are by definition, not real), we cannot discern what is real and unreal anymore.

I think I've mentioned elsewhere before that social media is an amplifier of human virtues and weaknesses. Like technology, it can be a force for both good and bad. Be it fame or infamy--anything can be multiplied a thousand fold in cyberspace. Issues flare up and die down in rapid cycles and we live in a incessant wave of these distractions.

It is natural for human beings to crave for attention. We want to share things with friends and with the people we care about. We used to do that when we meet face-to-face in meatspace. That is the real meaning of socializing. Nowadays, we seem to think that every brain-fart of ours is headline material. So we tweet, we upload, we post, we share with a deft swipe of the finger.

Cyberspace could be infinite. But human lifespan is finite. Is your life a 24-hour social media show where you constantly have to coax and cajole people for their attention? Maybe that's a good life. Maybe not. You decide. It's your show.

Absolute Abstraction

Brutes abstract not - John Locke

Today I'm lucky enough to be seated comfortably at my favourite spot at the Coffee Bean Cafe. This means that I can really relax and settle down on my thoughts of the day. Or rather, what I've been thinking about lately.

I have been working on my personal projects most of the time, doing a lot of coding. When you code, your main preoccupation is getting the application functionality done in the cleanest and simplest possible way. That's something that's easier said than done.

All developers know that they are always working within time constraints. Your users wanted it yesterday. So you try to push out something reasonable quickly, often having to resort to workarounds and quick fixes. Users are happy as long as the application works. They only see the facade of the software--its user interface. As long as it meets all the requirements and does not break easily, they walk away happy. You live to code another day.

But six months down the road, they come back to you with more requirements for the application. And when you open the hood, you realized that you do not understand your own code anymore. What seemed so logically clear and obvious previously now looks like spaghetti code to you. All your workarounds and quick fixes have come back to haunt you. You have to invest a lot of time to try to understand what you or another co-worker have done. Without understanding it again thoroughly, any change could break the entire application in unexpected ways. You have to suffer the karmic consequences of your coding sins.

There's a whole slew of best practices for the programmer to avoid these pitfalls. Clean code requires modularity and separation of concerns. Every part does a small well-defined job with clear inputs and outputs. At the lowest level you have objects with encapsulated data and methods, which collectively performs the function of a specific layer or a tier of logic. The entire 'application' could also be a microservice--the building block of another larger service or application.

Each level is abstracted from the other. You can be working at the microservice layer and sees each component as having clear and clean APIs. That's all you need to know. Details and dependencies that you do not need to know are hidden away from you. Abstraction is the key to peace of mind. As a programmer, you might be responsible for all the layers of logic but at any moment in time, you are only working at a particular level of abstraction. And that is the most important thing.

Life too consists of many levels of abstractions. To a CEO, all the divisions and departments in his companies are objects and layers of abstraction. He only needs to know what resources are needed by each and what deliverables are expected of them. The departmental heads are working at another lower level of abstractions. He has workers with well-defined job functions. They need to do their part to ensure that the goals of the department are met, which then feed into the overall delivery mechanism of the company, orchestrated by the CEO.

Any individual is also made up of many levels of abstractions. You can consider your physical body as the lowest level. You have no control over how your individual cells and organs operate but you can ensure that you eat the right food, do the proper exercises and keep it safe from external harm and make sure it is well-rested. That will ensure that the machinery of your body continues functioning--you can walk, you can talk and you can think and reason.

Our ability to think opens up another dimension of abstraction. This is where we often encounter 'spaghetti code'. If we know how to abstract different domains of our intellectual and emotional lives, we'll never get them mixed up together. A lot of pain and conflict in life arise because we are too muddled-headed. We let personal issues affect work and vice versa. We are unclear about what resources are required for each and every aspect of our lives. We allocate too much time and money to unnecessary things, simply because we have no clear boundaries between the different domains, each with its individual demands.

The practice of mindfulness helps us to abstract things. We see a thought as an object that has a lifecycle. Nothing more, nothing less. No single thought hogs the entire process. They come, and they go. There's inversion of control--your awareness controls them, and not the other way round.

A bunch of thoughts make up a personality: your Self. The self is another layer of abstraction. It has an ego, which is an apparent interface requiring certain dependencies as its input. But the self is nothing more than the amalgamation of your many thoughts, which are the result of the neuro-physical activities of your brain and body chemistry. Who is it that plays at this level of abstraction? The soul, perhaps?

The soul sees the self and the human body as having a lifecycle. There's inversion of control again. The physical self is but the souls momentary instantiation. Many religion plays at this level of abstraction. They claim that the soul lives on after the physical body dies--to be judged in an afterlife or to be reborn again in another cycle of instantiation. But is the soul too another level of abstraction?

Perhaps there are infinite levels of abstractions? And we in the smallness of our self-oriented consciousness can only speculate as far as the soul. Are we not part of a higher existence which plays at many levels of abstractions? Our language is only suited for describing our very level of abstraction--so we can only speak of human-like God or gods. Are these not mere models, mental stepping-stones for exploring higher levels of abstractions? To speak of the soul, is already an achievement of abstraction of sorts. How else are we supposed to ascend to even loftier levels?

Well, let's meditate on it. Let's abstract it. It's the least we could do.

The Wisdom of the Ocean and the Sky

As I type these lines, I'm perched uncomfortably on a high stool, with my usual mug of Americano at the Coffee Bean cafe. Sometimes the cafe is a bit crowded and you don't get the spot that you like--especially one with a power point. But I'm used to working from uncomfortable places everywhere. Once you get into the flow, you are oblivious of the surrounding.

There's a depth of mind which we only glimpse during periods of deep concentration or meditation. If you manage to tap into it, you get access to a wellspring of ideas. Which is why I often ramble on for a few lines whenever I start a blog post, just to get into the groove--an invocation to the inner world.

The most rewarding thing about meditation is that, you always get some new insights on the nature of your mind. These insights help you in many ways. For example, the other day, while I was struggling for a while with wandering thoughts during my meditation, I hit upon the idea that these thoughts are like the wind and rain that continuously lash at a flag-pole. But the flag-pole holds steadfast to the ground no matter how furiously the flag gets blown and beaten by the wind. By imagining myself as the flagpole, I immediately gain strength in my concentration. All spurious thoughts had no hold on me.

This reminds me of the famous Zen story about two monks arguing about a flag. The first monk said: "The flag is waving". The second one says, "No, it is the wind that is moving". And then the patriarch who happened to be passing by, commented: "It is your mind that is moving".

It is the mind that chooses to 'move' with thoughts. Thoughts come and go and if we follow them, the mind gets distracted. Allow them to drift into our consciousness like clouds in the sky (another useful mental model to adopt when meditating). You are the sky in the background--vast, immovable, ever-present, all-seeing, all-knowing.

But what is the sky? It is also not 'something'. It doesn't have a permanent colour or substance. It is the witness of all the activities that happen within and without. And even within and without is just an illusion. There's only incessant change of which we are a part of.

The ocean is another good metaphor for our existence. The waves--if you freeze it in time, looks like some perfect sculpture, designed by some unseen hand. But no wave has a single permanent existent and even to speak of a 'wave' is an artificial division of the expanse of water which we call the ocean. Each of our individual existence is like a momentary wave. We rise and subside just as swiftly, if we view our lifetime from a cosmic perspective. And here we are clinging so desperately to a wavelet in the ocean, sparkling momentarily in the sunlight, mistaking it for an immutable diamond.

If you remain on the surface, you'll always be thrown about like flotsam. But if you dive deeper into the depths of the ocean, you merge into the whole and the wisdom of the entire ocean is yours to tap. And like a diver of the deep, a hitherto unimaginable world of beauty is finally revealed before your eyes.

Grace and Gratitude

Weekends are for 'sharpening the saw'--the seventh habit of Dr Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. We should never be too busy sawing and completely forget about sharpening it. Renewal and rejuvenation is essential to maintain a healthy working life.

I'm happy to have been able to jog both today and yesterday. And today, I also spent some time cleaning out some old stuff and as a result, I have 3 more bags of 'offerings' to the God of Karma--stuff that I have not touched for ages (some for more than 10 years). These are old karma that needs to permanently resolved with gratitude. One feels greatly unburdened after such an exercise.

We spend so much of our lives chasing new experiences. The human soul needs to be constantly challenged, entertained and awed. When we are young, this spirit surges ahead like a mighty tsunami, overwhelming and obliterating everything along its path. As it moves, it expends its energy and finally the tsunami has completely worked out its 'karma'.

When we seek new experiences--we are actually looking for outlets for karma to find its resolution. It is karma that gives us life. It is a force that creates and destroys. It is, as Dylan Thomas puts it: "the force that through the green fuse drives the flower...is my destroyer". Karma always mean consequences. When we use the energy of karma to chase new experiences, sometimes we generate even more karma, creating an endless cycle of action and reaction.

The meditative man is like a good heat sink. He is constantly dissipating heat/karma. That is what meditation does in your mind--it isolates thoughts, and then let them decay naturally. Everything in the universe decays and dies. Meditation is simply good karmic management--an absolutely necessary mental house-keeping activity. Meditation helps to maintain the equilibrium of the system and allow karma to be dissipated efficiently.

Every action begins with karmic energy from a single thought. This thought gets its energy from another previous thought. The thought either snowballs into a bigger one by gathering energy from other related thoughts or it simple loses momentum and fades away. In the silence of our meditation, you'll know which thought does what. We do a 'ps -ef' on our mental processes as we strive to become better system administrators of the mind.

Sometimes, we just need to reboot the system. And that's what I try to do with my mind on weekends. Cleared of karmic residues, it is ready to tackle the start of another week--one which my heart welcomes with grace and gratitude.

The Dance of Daemons

I'm typing these lines at Espressolab Cafe, Empire Subang. Had some salad for dinner and here I am trying to figure what to write for today's blog post. I'm feeling quite exhausted from all the work I did over the past few days. It is great to have a reason to work.

I wrote about Aristotle's Eudaimonia last week. 'Daimon' means spirit in Greek--the original root of our word, demon, or the slightly more archaic version 'daemon'. Eudaimonia can be loosely translate as 'good (eu) spirit (daimon)'. That's another key to understanding the meaning of Eudaimonia: there's a spirit within us that seeks to be aligned with a purpose. For some reason, the more modern version of the word,'demon' has come to mean something evil. But daemons are a different story.

When you boot up a computer system that is running Unix (like the laptop that I'm using now), you will find lot of processes running in the background--also called 'daemons' in Unix parlance. I love writing daemons--they are processes that work quietly in the background providing useful services, essential to the health of the entire system.

Maybe daemons reflect my natural inclination--I too enjoy working quietly in the background. I'm happy as long as I'm doing useful work and serving my purpose. Daemons never blow their own trumpet. You'll never know they exist. But when they fail, something will go wrong.

Some people are meant to be loud--like graphical user interfaces (GUIs). They display themselves to the world. They too serve their purpose in their own way. The world needs both background daemon processes and GUIs to function well. Come to think of it, 'GUI' is Hokkien for 'ghost'. It looks like these creatures from the netherworld make the world go round.

Processes which have died but for some reason have not been cleaned up by the operating system, are called 'zombie processes'. These category of creatures are absolutely useless. They are processes who used to do useful work but have somehow crashed or died an unnatural death. Their resources have not been properly reclaimed by the operating system. If you have worked in any large company before, you'll know that they are employees who are like zombies. They occupy space, draw salaries but do not contribute anything useful at all. Some have degenerated into such a state because they have lost their motivation to work.

That is why it is important to always have a purpose in life--telos in Greek. Telos is central to Aristotle's philosophy. Everything in the universe has an inherent purpose. A purpose is simple a goal and direction. Whether there's a universal divine purpose to our lives or not is immaterial. Even a nihilistic existentialist will tell you to define your own subjective purpose and pursue it. Without a purpose, nothing happens in the universe.

So be actively like those daemons--dancing quietly in the background serving their individual duties. The alternative is becoming a zombie.

The Music of Eudaimonia

Today is another public holiday: as a matter of fact, it is Malaysia Day--a day that should be celebrated with a lot more enthusiasm than how it is currently done. These days, I think Sabah and Sarawak whose citizens take great pride in their diversity of culture and religion should be the model for the rest of the country. Maybe we should follow Indonesia's lead in moving the capital of the country to the island of Borneo!

I've been working from home the whole day. Come to think of it, I did not even step out of the house today! But what a productive day it has been. I woke up early at 5.30am. After a brief meditation session, I managed to work on my app project until 8am before I went down for breakfast. After that it was more work until dinner time, with a short break for tea. It has been a productive day and that makes me happy.

Sometimes people ask me why do I never seem to stop working. Today while enjoying my afternoon cup of Earl Grey, the thought occurred to me: Why was this question never posed to professional pianists or athletes?

The answer is clear: performance artists and sportsmen need to be constantly training and practicing to keep their performance in tip-top condition. And that is exactly how I view my work: I need to be constantly practicing to be mentally fit.

I see my work as training. An athlete's or a musician's job is never 'done'. To keep himself mentally and physically in peak condition is his job. To me, if any piece of work gets delivered, it is like the completion of a performance for the musician or a race for the athlete. There will always be some hits and misses. He or she has to go back to the studio or training ground and try to work on those weaknesses. One is never ever satisfied with one's performance.

I take great effort to ensure that I do not wear myself down from overwork. A balanced lifestyle is important. I do socialize, even though not as often as I used to. I give priority to my backlog of hobbies, of which reading is at the very top of my list. I enjoy my weekly exercise sessions at the park, where I also get to listen to my audiobooks. I subscribe to Spotify, from where I also get to sample a wide selection of music--especially those from obscure Baroque or medieval composers.

We live in a great age when there are a lot more content and information than we could ever consume in a lifetime. Hence we need to be selective and to know how to use our time wisely. You don't need a lot of money to enjoy life because all the good things in life (at least the ones that matter to me) are cheap.

Aristotle defines the purpose of life as achieving 'Eudaimonia'--which is often loosely translated as 'happiness'. But it means more than that. To me Eudaimonia is a state of well-being, in alignment with one's inner spirit. Work, if motivated by the right spirit, is an opportunity to achieve Eudaimonia. And no one expresses it more beautifully than Kahlil Gibran:

"When you work, you are a flute whose heart the whispering of the hours turns to music".

And to me, that music is Eudaimonia.

The Demons of Distraction

I'm meeting a friend at 6.30pm to discuss about some of our on-going projects. I have about 45 minutes to write this blog post before the meeting. It's a public holiday today--one of the 3 long weekends we have this month. So it doesn't feel like my usual Monday at all.

I worked from home today, starting very early in the morning around 5 am. I love these early morning work sessions: the mind is so fresh when you wake up in the morning and during these golden hours, there are no distractions from anyone at all.

The good thing about clocking in some work in the wee hours of the morning is that you are guaranteed of a productive day, even before your day actually begins. It gives you a great sense of accomplishment for the rest of the day. Whatever you manage to do after that becomes almost like a bonus.

The most difficult challenge about starting the day early is of course having to go to bed early. I've been hitting sack before 12 lately but to really ensure that you wake up early and fresh, you'll have to go to bed almost like 10pm! That's kind of challenge in our lives today because a lot of our social life--dinners, outings with friends or family--extend until late at night. One such social event could disrupt your routine for days. Nothing is worse than feeling lethargic the whole day due to lack of sleep.

I've learned how to harness the tides of energy and concentration that I experience throughout the day as they ebb and flow. Do your best work when it is rising and allocate some time to relax when your energy is beginning to wane. Early morning after rising is when your powers of concentration is the highest. These are golden hours that should not be wasted doing web-surfing or other time-wasting activities.

Finding the right rhythm and balance is the key to productivity. A work session should not last more than 3 hours. Take a break in between to recharge yourself. I find that Baroque music works best for me. Coffee breaks and meals are also great activities to relax the mind. These breaks are also the best time to catch up on the messages that pile up on your phone while you were concentrating hard on your work.

That's the ideal scenario. In reality it seldom works out that way. We get interrupted and distracted many times during the course of our work session. Sometimes we subconsciously welcome then because--admit it--work can be pretty tedious and difficult. So you jump on the first Whatsapp message that drops into your phone.

The way I overcome distractions from the phone is not by turning it off but by lowering the notification sound and configuring the apps in such a way that nothing pops up on the screen. It's best to treat Whatsapp messages like email. Most of the time, they are not that important anyway.

So one needs to be extremely wary of distractions to be productive. Another trick that I use often is to reserve some 'easy work' for the next work session, so that you can get started easily. Without that convenient stepping stone to work, sometimes you won't get started at all because you'll probably have to search through lots of files to figure out what to do. And in the process, something will happen that distracts you away from work.

Remember, the demons of distraction are extremely devious. Be very very careful of their machinations. Godspeed.

The Education We Lost

There has been a lot of discussion about our education system lately. But come to think of it, education has always been one of the key national issues for as long as I can remember.

The older generation often lament about the declining standards of our education system. I am not old enough to be considered part of the English-educated generation. I had my entire education in a public Sekolah Kebangsaan. Was the standard better then compared to now? Let's examine this further.

My dad went to the old colonial English-medium school. I inherited many of his textbooks. I remember feeling envious that my dad got to study poems by Shelley, Wordsworth and Byron as part of his secondary education. I did read a lot of sajaks too during my school days and even wrote a few myself. But I was the exception. I don't remember any of my classmates having the same kind of interest in poetry and literature as I did.

I am a hundred percent a product of the national school. Was the standard of education better then? Thinking back, I think there were a lot more bad teachers than good ones. But as students we did not know any better and being the foolish schoolkids we were, we actually liked teachers who walked into the classroom and declared: "buat kerja sendiri hari ni". It meant we could spend the period, chit-chatting or playing games with our classmates. It made our day. We didn't appreciate the good teachers who were usually strict disciplinarians. But they were few and far between. Most of the teachers never prepared any of their lessons. Some just dictated notes to us; the entire period would be spent copying notes.

Unlike kids today, I didn't go to any tuition during my primary schooldays. My parents guided me whenever they could. They inculcated in me the discipline to study everyday. The good thing was that there were not much distractions then--limited TV (black and white), no internet, no smartphones, no computer games. They only 'distractions' were outdoor activities--playing football, marbles and other outdoor games with neighbourhood friends.

I think that made our childhood education more meaningful. We were never distracted; we had healthy outdoor activities and going to school was a lot of fun because our friends were there. We wanted to hang out with friends--eating together at the school canteen, getting all sweaty during PE lessons and hanging out in school after class for extra-curricular activities. Sometimes we would venture out into the rubber-estate behind the school and had great fun frolicking in in the stream, catching fish and playing ducks and drakes.

Perhaps that was the best part of our education. No, I don't think the teachers were not any better or worse than the ones today. The syllabus--I don't know and we didn't care. We learned enough science, mathematics, English, BM, art and even a bit of Mandarin for us to pick up any other advanced subjects later in life. I can still write and read in elementary Jawi, which we all learned in school.

I feel we were a more cohesive society then not because race-relations were a lot better then. No, for as far as I can remember, politically, there has always been suspicion between the races. But socially, in the national schools, there was a good mix of different races studying and playing together everyday. That was the best part of it. It was nothing unusual and it was fun. We spoke Malay all the time, even among the non-Malays.

When I see schoolkids today being picked up by parents from their elite schools to be shuttled immediately to their tuition centres, I pity them for not having the kind of 'education' that we used to have. No, our teachers were not better, our syllabus were not superior, our standard of English wasn't that good either.

But we interacted a lot. That was the key difference. We played after school together, Back home, we watched the same TV programs (Combat, Six-Million Dollar Man, Empat Sekawan, Drama Minggu Ini, Bintang RTM) and talked about them in school the next day. Most of all, we shared a common space. That to me was where the real education took place. And sadly, that is something we have really lost.

The Piston of Time

I like to keep my weekly blogging schedule because I like discipline. Discipline helps to shape the soul of a person. However when applying discipline, one needs to find the right balance: too strict a regiment suffocates a person and induces fear and distaste; too lax a routine invites laziness.

Balance is the key to everything. But that is the hardest thing to achieve. A sense of balance comes from having wisdom, but wisdom itself is a product of learning and experience. One of the key challenges of life is that, we are uncomfortable with uncertainty. We want clear, fixed answers to everything. We want rules: what is right and what is wrong. But a lot of things in life do not have such clear binary distinctions.

At every point in life, there's a best fit solution and never a perfect one. Finding the best fit solution--the balancing point that optimizes everything, is what we have to deal with all the time.

I like to use the analogy of a surfer when it comes to navigating through the ocean of life. A surfer has to find his balance every moment, reacting to the movement of the waves beneath him. By remaining in balance, he surges ahead. A surfer can never determine in advance, how he should position his body at any moment: balance comes with practice and experience. With enough practice, the skill becomes hardwired and instinctive.

For example, parents have to make difficult decisions everyday: How much freedom should they allow for their children? How much time should they spend playing computer games? How late are they allowed to stay out? There's no definite answer for all these. It is a problem balance again. And with experience, you get a feel of the right answer for the situation at hand.

I used to blog everyday. It was the discipline I imposed on myself then. But that was more than 15 years ago. The circumstances of my life was very different then: I had a very simple life in Indonesia, living alone with little care or worry. The discipline then was good for me. Without the strict regiment I imposed on myself, I wouldn't be able to do a lot of things that I am doing now.

With the current circumstances of my life, a weekly blogging schedule suits me perfectly: not too frequent and not too slack. I still feel a bit of 'pressure' when blogging day (Monday) comes because I have to figure out what to write and I have to will myself to type words onto a blank screen.

But I've had enough experience to know that, having a fixed schedule makes things easy and automatic. The ticking clock is the piston movement that powers the engine of your day. When the time comes, you just do it, because you are pushed by that perpetual machine that is Time. But you see how powerful that piston is. It has pushed me to this last paragraph of my blog post for this week. So when it comes to work, find the right balance by adjusting the regularity of your activities. The piston of time will do the rest for you.

Limitless Lists

There are a few subjects I have in mind which could be today's blog topic. As a matter of fact, I keep a whole list of them on Trello. I'll refer to the list if there's no pressing topic that I have in mind to write about. And it just occurred to me that 'keeping lists' itself could be today's topic!

I am constantly making lists. When I start my day in the office, I'd usually write down a list of tasks I wish to accomplish for the day on my scratchpad. It helps to organize my thoughts and the act of writing sets things into motion.

Trello is a great tool to keep lists. Since I started using this free tool in 2016, I've been using it to track, among others: books I've read, audiobooks that I've listened to, big items I've purchased, things I've discarded and insights I've gained from meditation. For books I've read, I start a new list every year. So I know exactly how many books I've read for each year. And using Trello, it's easy to jot down my thoughts for each item. I also summarize my takeaways from each book there. There's also a Trello app that allows me to do it from my phone easily.

I also have lists of todos, ideas and possible projects that I wish to pursue. I also keep technical notes on various subjects, so much so that I've come to rely on it as my extended memory. I used to write notes on text files but organizing those files systematically and searching for information becomes a bit of headache. With Trello, I managed to overcome all those problems.

Listing items is a great way to start thinking. Every time I'm planning something, I'll start a list with the first item: "1. ..."--and that gets the ball rolling. I have a paper scratchpad notebook that is full of lists. When I'm having discussions with my colleagues on the whiteboard, I start with a list of discussion items too. Each item branches off into further lists. Which makes the Trello app great as you could do that easily and also sort and re-sort items out in the order you want, besides being able to insert images, paste labels and even put timelines on tasks.

Listing helps one to think systematically in a step-by-step manner--algorithmizing thinking. Lists are like programs for the mind--you enter your instructions and you could also put your output into another list. That's what I do compulsively. No list, no work gets done. As simple as that.

As we grow older, the number of items and events that we have to keep track of, increases dramatically. As a result, nothing stands out anymore--and that makes people complain that their memory is failing. But in actual fact, it is the novelty of input that is lacking. To remember something, we have to see its uniqueness in relationship to the rest of your experience. But when you meet so many people and tackle so many mundane tasks in your daily routine, nothing stands out anymore. So it is difficult to recall people's names or remember what you eat for lunch yesterday. That's where lists come in.

I know exactly the sort of things that I will definitely forget. So if they are important, they immediately go into one of my lists. The challenge next is to actually remember that you've captured them in a list! But luckily, Trello is searchable. You just train yourself to go to this single place where you keep your lists and that would be a good starting point.

I also keep a list of movies I've watched every year. So far my list for this year has been pretty empty--I'm not particularly fond of the superhero movies that are hogging the screens these days. But there's a good movie in town this week from one of my favourite directors. So I plan to put that movie on my list today. I will probably blog about it in the coming weeks. So I'm done for today's blog post. That's another item checked on my list!

Audio-fication

It's a public holiday today, so I'm writing this from home. It has been a long weekend which I spent jogging and decluttering--two activities which I seem to have acquired a taste for.

I love to jog because like driving, it gives me a good opportunity to spend some quality time listening to my audiobook. I usually have two audiobook titles which I am listening to: one when I'm driving and the other when I'm jogging and exercising in the park. Nowadays there so much audio content out there that the problem is a shortage of listening time. I think people who don't listen to audiobooks are wasting away 50% of their time--time which could be spent learning so much.

The internet makes it so easy to learn anything. Learning is a pleasure in itself. I do not care if whatever I learn is useful for my work or whether it improves me as a person. Learning is like tasting good food. The mind craves for knowledge because it is its source of sustenance. Neurons simply want to forge connections and it needs new information to do that. When an insight occurs, you know, something in the brain has changed permanently. And that is a good feeling.

I have many pairs of bluetooth headsets. I keep one in the car--for my audiobook listening while driving; I have one in the office--for hooking up with the iMac, which I use, usually for listening to Youtube, while I'm doing more routine tasks. I have a light, sweat-proof pair which I put on while I am jogging. Generally, I do not like in-ear phones, as I do not like to be cut off from surrounding sounds. The bone-conduction ones are the best.

Given the amount of time that I spend listening to various audio content, I think my ears have replaced my eyes as my main input channel for knowledge and information. I also have bedtime audio-stories--usually, a chapter from an old audiobook I've listened to before. I usually fall asleep at the 10-minute mark--which is exactly the reason why I only use familiar audiobooks. I listen back to the parts I like and also get to refresh my knowledge on the subject.

A lot of people told me that they have problems listening to audiobooks because their minds tend to get distracted and then they lose track of what they are listening too. It ends up as background noise. That rarely happens to me, because I've developed a habit of relaxing into a listening mode when I'm driving, jogging or doing some monotonous task. The habit can be cultivated. I have years of practice as I've been listening to audiobooks for more than 20 years--beginning with the days of cassette tapes and Walkman.

Most audio content are already available free from the internet. And there's no easier--even lazier--way to do so than to listen to them. Imagine the entire wisdom of mankind, available for your edification. To live is to learn. Not doing so would be great sacrilege. so hark!

Woo Woo Nothingness

I had intended to blog last night but the Community Shield--EPL's curtain raiser of the season--was on and my favourite team was playing. Even though Liverpool lost on penalties in the end, I thought their performance in the second half was pretty good. So weekends won't be quiet anymore for the season has begun!

I have a serious topic in mind today, which I am hesitating to put into words. I don't want to treat it too casually and it is along the lines of psychology and religion, which I am fond of writing about. I had a long work session in the office today, working quietly on my project, so I'm pretty exhausted now. I thought it would be fun to just write another post about...nothing!

OK, how does one start to write about nothing? I am immediately reminded of Lawrence Krauss's book which I read 2 years ago: A Universe From Nothing. When it comes to cosmology, the question is often asked: How did the universe began? Everyone knows the answer: The Big Bang. OK, but what caused the Big Bang? Some will say, it is an irrelevant question because, both space and time emerged from the Big Bang and it doesn't make sense to ask what caused it because, time did not exist and hence what happened 'before' the Big Bang is a nonsensical question.

That of course doesn't give much satisfaction to the average person. Krauss's book goes a bit further by saying that the universe of space and time emerges spontaneously from 'nothing' because in the sub-atomic realm it is natural for particles to pop into existence and then disappear. Everything is probabilistic. Universes can come into existence because 'nothingness' itself is unstable. Like fireflies in the night, an infinite number of universes are winking in and out of existence all the time.

It is a grand vision of the cosmos. Something which New Age gurus like Deepak Chopra like to latch onto to illustrate the impermanence and illusory nature of our reality. We can literally 'recreate' our own existence every moment because quantum mechanics suggest that is the nature of particles. It gives hope to the individual that he or she can change his world by tapping into a deeper 'intelligence' which presumably is where the universe springs from.

New Age gurus often over-stretch quantum mechanical concepts to suit their philosophy. Intuitively, they are appealing. That often is enough for one to use as a guiding philosophy for living. It's woo woo but the alternative is institutionalized religion, which arguably has done as much harm as good.

In my blog here, I am basically expounding my own woo woo most of the time, for my own amusement. That's one of the purpose of this blog--for me to see how well my own spiritual philosophy stands on its own when exposed starkly in writing. At least I'm not inflicting it on others and the act of writing actually helps me to gain further insights. OK, that's enough woo woo for the day. I've accomplished my goal of writing about nothing!

The Ultimate Servant

We are all blessed with a servant who works for us without wages. Once given the necessary training, he will work unobtrusively in the background, doing what needs to be done without having to be ordered to do so. He is timely and tireless. And over time, he gets even better at what he does.

Sounds too good to be true? What's the catch? Ah, this servant is very independent minded! If you do not specify his job scope as thoroughly as you could and then show him how it is to be done, he would go about doing things his way. And you never want him to do that because once he has caught on, it is very difficult to make him change.

Make sure you do not leave out anything important and go through with him, step by step, how you would like it done. He might not pick it up very fast. But repetition is the key. During the training phase, make sure he does everything to the tee, based on how you would want it, again and again and again.

He could be stubborn initially. Sometimes, he is reluctant to do things your way, preferring the easy way out or what he is already used to. But if you can overcome this difficult phase, you'll have the most efficient and loyal servant you will ever find. Once you convert him to your ways, he is your greatest friend and protector. He will an asset you can rely on for the rest of your life.

For when he is properly instructed, he literally runs your life--more efficiently than you ever could. Life becomes worry and hassle free because he automatically handles things on your behalf. Once set on course, he does not deviate, which reemphasizes the importance of investing time in training him well.

What futuristic machine or robot is this? Am I talking about an AI-based personal assistance? No, it's someone who has been assigned to you since you were born. He could be your blessing or your curse, depending on how you use him. If you do not realize his existence in you life, then it's because he has been working quietly without you realizing it. And please take note: He may not be doing what's best for you! He may even think he is the master!

So seize him. Impose your authority over him. Tell him clearly what needs to be done and how it is to be done. Handhold him. Walk him through everything, ad nauseam. Show him who's boss! Ah, and before I forget, let me introduce you to him: his name is Habit.

The Labyrinth of the Heart

Since I emerged that day from the labyrinth,
Dazed with the tall and echoing passages,
The swift recoils, so many I almost feared
I’d meet myself returning at some smooth corner,
Myself or my ghost, for all there was unreal

- from the Labyrinth, by Edwin Muir

I thought I'd try to write something different today. Since this is my blog and I am writing mainly for my own pleasure, I shall do what I like. I've been writing too many topics that focus on the mind. Let me for try to tap the heart for a change and sees what comes up.

There was a time when I used to write poetry. Being a fan of the romantic poets, what I wrote often came out in the style of Byron, Shelley or Wordsworth. During my university days, I had many of my poems published in the local tabloids. I shudder to reread them again for they are full of amateurishly lyrical lines, written in imitation of the masters. So much of them were on nostalgia for childhood and the solitude of city life.

Passions reign supreme when you are in the flush of youth. I had often thought that life was like fireworks: the sole purpose of life is to dazzle, to soar high and to express the innermost soul, no matter what the consequences. I believed in Romanticism perhaps to the extreme.

Sights and sounds consumed me. Music and movies were a big part of my life. To live was to be intoxicated by the senses. In Thoreau's words, "I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life". I wanted to rediscover that Noble Savage within that modern life had forced us to conceal. I was bedazzled by the lyricism Wong Kar Wai's movies. The effect of watching Days of Being Wild for the first time, at the Majestic Theatre in PJ Old Town, I remember, was quite life-changing.

I read Milan Kundera's Unbearable Lightness of Being, and felt the heaviness of my soul--the burden of responsibilities, the imprisonment of a soul that yearned to be free. I read Bertrand Russell deep into the night seeking to find a glimmer of insight from the philosophers of old, and in my darkest hours, I found mild solace in Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga.

Every night, I cut out my heart. But in the morning it was full again. The heart trumps the head all the time for the restless heart is ever-urging one to move, to strive, to sacrifice. Oh, the heart with all its intrigues and treacheries!

The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of. And I had complete faith in the wisdom of my heart then. But then the heart is an organ of fire. When it is inflamed, it is often beyond our control. And think not you can direct the course of love, for love, if it finds you worthy, directs your course.

Oh these deceits are strong almost as life.
Last night I dreamt I was in the labyrinth,
And woke far on. I did not know the place.

A Workout of Self-Perfection

It's very early in the morning and I happen to be up early, as I've been doing over the past 1 week. You see, I'm trying to regain my former practice of being early to bed and early to rise. I find the hours in the morning after a good night's sleep very conducive to work. The mind is at its sharpest and the quality of work produced is often the best.

Many people, yours truly included, has a habit of working late at night. That is understandable because that often is the only stretch of time when we are not disturbed by the phone or other human interactions. Quality work requires a concentrated mind and that is usually brought about by silence.

Work is very challenging in today's era of social media and the incessant bombardment of content from the internet. The very space where you are supposed to concentrate and work is also the gateway to a thousand and one distractions. At a click of a link, I can launch myself off to another trip of distractions, surfing from one gratification to another. To concentrate on what you are supposed to do requires a lot of discipline.

Many of the young claim that they can work or study better if they are listening to music or having the TV on in the background. "It's not so boring". "I can still study effectively". That's what they'll claim. But have they every wondered why they can't just work and study without all these distractions? If they could, wouldn't the session be a lot more effective and intense? Wouldn't the utilization of time be a lot more efficient?

It is true that, with the skillful application of a conducive work environment, one can get into the mood for work easier. Sometimes music helps simply because it drowns out other types of distractions. The music helps your mind to focus, and at the very least keeping you at your desk and putting your mind in a pleasant state. To me, that is only useful as a starting point. Just like sweeteners to hide the bitterness of medicine.

Having enticed the mind to start working, one then needs to get into the groove of work. That is often difficult because work is often dull--reports to write, bugs to troubleshoot and other repetitive chores to execute. A lot of our distractions are willing inducements to put off work. It's much more interesting to surf news sites or watch trailers of the latest movies.

This is when a good metaphor for work helps. I try not to think of work as something you have to do to make money. Work to me is an exercise in self-perfection. I don't work, I workout. Just like going to the gym to build up your fitness. Running on the treadmill can be a boring chore too if you are not motivated by the fact that you are getting slimmer and fitter and hence physically healthier and perhaps looking more attractive.

Work is often dull when you look at what you need to accomplish as a long and laborious project. Break up work into tiny chunks of tasks. All you have to do for the next hour is this tiny piece of exercise. It's an exercise that has a finite payoff--say a chapter of a report done or a diagram for a presentation drawn. Look at the task in isolation and not to be too bothered about the larger effort of fitting it into the rest of your work. When it is done, you are already closer to your end goal. Work gets finished simply because you are constantly moving in a forward direction through these tiny steps. That is the most important thing: moving forward and not sideways or backwards.

Breakup your work into a list of tiny tasks. Have the list somewhere you can easily reference. There's always one task that's easier or more fitting to the present mood you are in. Use that to start the engine. Once the engine is started, it simply has a tendency to continue moving.

The mind is like a distracted child. You need to give it the right inducement for it to follow your orders. When you know how to tame your monkey mind, you have an ally who could help you perform miracles. And that's what I try to do everyday. And the fact that I'm typing the last few sentences of my weekly blog post is testament to the effectiveness of my method. Any now, I'm enjoying the payoff of my task: clicking the 'Publish' button. And I'm off on another productive week!

Modes of the Mind

I'm blogging a bit earlier than usual for the week. As I am sitting here at a cafe with my laptop running only on battery power, initially with the intention to do some work, I've decided to just use the limited time available to do my weekly post instead.

I'm going to be very speculative today. I've been thinking a lot on how the human mind has evolved over the ages. Today, we often hear that today's generation are prone Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), perhaps due to their busy digital lifestyle. They hop from one digital stimulus to another: from a tweet to an Instagram story next, to resuming a paused Youtube video before launching off a link received via Whatsapp, opening up an e-commerce site and before they know it, they have already purchased a gadget on offer and immediately shared their experience with friends on Facebook.

Well, we are all guilty of doing this, not just the millenials. What I'm curious is this: how has this kind of lifestyle affected the human mind? Have we lost our ability to concentrate? Has the digital lifestyle made us fickle and restless dopamine junkies, ever-seeking the next gratification at the speed of a swipe?

I'm also interested in playing the devil's advocate: is this in any way bad? Perhaps the world of the future requires people with the nimbleness of mind to switch context from one thing to another quickly and performing multiple tasks almost in parallel? Hasn't our ability to catch things that happen quickly improved a great deal because we are so used to watching sub-second music video sequences and grasping fleeting events that play on our tiny screens?

Doesn't today's computer games train the mind to be adapted to the challenges of the future where wars will be fought using remotely controlled drones and machines? Isn't this a 'skill' that our generation has mastered--a kind of evolutionary adaptation that give us a definite one-up on our lumbering ancestors?

If we read some of our classics like say Moby Dick, War and Peace or Les Miserables, we notice that they are all long works where the authors take their time to slowly build their characters and scenes. Certainly no publisher would accept new works in such forms anymore for today's reading audience. Was the reading public different then? Did people have that much concentration power and stamina to labour through such mighty tomes then for the sheer pleasure of it? Were their minds then different from ours? Isn't the so-called ADD-afflicted young simply functioning within the demands of their milieu, as we have compared to the exquisitely-paced thoughts of say, the Victorians?

This opens up an intriguing thought: How has our minds changed since the beginning of our species? The invention of writing has certainly changed the mind significant ways. What were our minds like before writing or even language was invented? Did we function purely on instincts? Were we better honed, just like many animals do, to our natural environment--detecting what is edible using a heightened sense of smell and simply knowing our physical location in space and time through a holistic experience of light, temperature and perhaps even earth's magnetic field? Did humans have the ability to communicate telepathically once? And more importantly, have we lost our natural instincts in exchange for the ability to reason and analyze, brought forth by the advent of the written word?

These are all interesting speculations. We need to be open to the ability of the mind to operate in many different modes. Psychedelic trips and the experiences of mystics show us that the normal mind is just the tip of the cognitive iceberg. By learning to operate and function through different mental modes, perhaps we can better tap the true potential of the human mind.

The Karma Disintegrator

I'm writing this on a Sunday instead of my usual Monday evening after work. It's a typical lazy Sunday at home where I tried to catch up on some podcasts, do a bit of light work and pursue my on-going task of de-cluttering my living spaces.

De-cluttering has been a major pursuit of mine these past months. Over the years, I've accumulated a lot of stuff--clothes, bags, cables, computer and other electronic accessories. Many of them have already outlived their usefulness. I have a simple rule of thumb these days: if I haven't touched them for more than a year, then there are a candidate for the garbage bin. Or if I find something that have totally forgotten about its existence, then I can certainly banish it out of my life forever.

I have a tendency to hold on to things for their sentimental value. I have old hotel receipts of memorable trips, movie ticket stubs, airline boarding passes and other pieces of memorabilia that mark significant chapters in my life. But with my newly acquired resolve to de-clutter, they have been made as sacred offerings to my 'karma disintegrator'--that's what I call my heavy duty paper-shredder.

Decluttering has become something spiritual to me. Every piece of old junk that I offer to the altar of the garbage bin carries residual karma that can be eliminated for good. I humour myself by thinking that this as a super-quick way of working out karma. I feel a deep sense of spiritual release after a heavy session of house-cleaning.

It is a great feeling to see your room cleared of dust and other unnecessary stuff. I like the feeling so much that I have even set myself a quota of ditching at least two garbage bags of unwanted stuff every week. I have been faithfully adhering to this ritual for the past couple of months and I'm amazed that I still have a huge pipeline of stuff waiting for disposal. At this rate, I'll probably end up with only bare necessities, which would be a wonderful achievement. Who knows, maybe I'll even become a minimalist!

Decluttering is just one part of the equation towards leading a more minimal life. We should also try to minimize acquisition and consumption. I am ultra-conscious of what I buy nowadays--weighing their usefulness against their potential to clutter my living spaces very carefully. Everything I buy has to contribute towards learning, improving productivity or simplifying life. Things that satisfy a certain craving of the senses or pander to the ego do not deserve any consideration at all in my life.

If you do not have any spiritual practices like daily prayer or meditation, consider regular decluttering instead. I think it ranks on par with the rest in terms of spiritual benefits. Instead of buying incense, prayer beads or other paraphernalia of worship, consider getting yourself a karma disintegrator. I guarantee that the gods will be very pleased with your offering of personal garbage.

The Fire of Religion

If I look back on all my blog postings, religion is one of the topics that I've written about most often. Just check them out here. For some reason, here I am again, parked at my favourite cafe, ready to write another blog post on the same subject.

One might ask why? Well, I guess the easy answer is that it is the only thing that troubles me so much. My views about religion have been well-articulated here before. I certainly do not belong to the new movement of militant atheism, though I agree with many of their views. I am sympathetic, even admire people who renounce the world to pursue a spiritual life. If you have read my list of favourite books in my previous posting, at least one of them is written by a very tradtional Hindu renunciate.

I've also written a post stating my belief that the religion you adopt is a matter of chance--the culture from which you happen to be born in. And if you are blessed with the good fortune of being able to freely adopt a religion of your choice, it could still be a matter of taste.

I've offered a pseudo-psychological theory of the value of religion as an 'architecture' by which one could find meaning and purpose in one's life. I've also come to accept the fact that, even if religion were to be eliminated from the world (say, the vast majority of the human race have been wiped out in a nuclear holocaust and all the religious books and artifacts in the world have been destroyed) mankind would still invent new religions through its remaining survivors. Just as they would surely come up with art and music.

Religion, like art, is an expression of human civilization. And like music, it might not even serve any useful purpose, but it will arise quite inevitably as an evolutionary byproduct. As long as the human species survives, a mode of existence will take place and that is expressed in its culture, art and religion.

The point I'm making is that, like it or not, we have to learn to live with religion. Societies can be run in a secular way, but we still have to allow people to express themselves, in their one way, through their religion-like how we allow and even encourage artistic expressions.

But the problem with religion are its practitioners. Like people who are fanatical about a certain type of music or soccer team, they think theirs is the best. That is the root of all the problems. The certainty of religious practitioners about their doctrinal version of the truth is the greatest problem that mankind faces. It is an infantilism that continues to plague us, even though we have come so far in terms of technological, political and social achievements.

The is the biggest issue and to me it outweighs things like climate change and economic uncertainty. It is the only thing that makes me feel angry and disappointed. There are perhaps more theists than atheists in this world but, I think the world would be a much better place if the latter dominates. The so-called religious people, don't know much about their own religion. And there-in lies the biggest problem.

Most God-fearing people are nice and decent human beings. But I would argue that their decency did not come from their knowledge of religion--it is human nature to try to be be nice to each other because that's the only way that one can exist in a society. Any other mode of behaviour will ostracize one from it. The Golden Rule is the norm simply because society disintegrates without it.

So, simple God-fearing, even slightly superstitious masses, who don't really give too much thought about the doctrines of their religion are quite harmless. The problem begins when religion is being mixed with idealism--that's like when a child starts playing with the proverbial fire.

If we bother to master the use of fire, we can actually go far. The problem is that most people don't. They thing that the small spark lit by a match is already a glimpse of the ultimate, that they want everyone to start playing with matches.

Some use this fire to cook and feed people, others use it for arson. Religion is a fire can engulf us if we let do not know how to handle it. If we can, I'd prefer that we do not play with it. Learn to cook with it instead.

Treasures on a Desert Island

Today is one of those days when I'm not sure what to write about. But here I am at one of my favourite spots after a simple poke bowl dinner, sipping an Americano, contemplating in front of an opened laptop.

One of the simple pleasures of life is sitting at a cafe, reading a good book. My current read is a rather surprising choice: Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson. This adventure yarn is of course a great classic, one that is often read, willing or unwillingly, by schoolkids. I've read simplified and abridged versions of the book before but I've never read the original.

There are many of such books which are popular among schoolkids of my time but they are often available in simplified English suitable for our age. Among these are works by Dickens like A Tale of Two Cities and David Copperfield and also short stories by Edgar Alan Poe. Who can forget the Telltale Heart, the Pit and the Pendulum, The Gold Bug and other immortal tales by that master of the strange and morbid.

Stories like Treasure Island thrilled me as a child. And now I'm reading the original as a sort of a light interlude in between heavier tomes of philosophy, psychology and spirituality. I try to vary my reading diet greatly. I would attempt to squeeze in some fiction every now and then. It is good to have a varied diet. I have many books that I had bought ages ago but have somehow remained unread still. They are like seeds that are awaiting their right time to germinate. Every now and then, one of these books would catch my fancy again, and it would become my main read--plucked from obscurity, like an instant celebrity.

My recent read The Nudist on the Late Shift by Po Bronson is one of such books. I bought it in 1998 at the now closed Borders, Singapore where I had spent many happy evenings after work scouring its well-stocked shelves. The book is about the unique personalities who populate Silicon Valley during the good rush days of the dotcom boom. Reading it brought back many pleasant memories of those heady times when the internet threatened to revolutionize every industry out there. It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...

A question often asked of celebrities is what books they would bring if they were marooned on a remote island. I like to amuse myself by thinking about this too. If I were to be allowed only 10 books to read for the rest of my life on a desert island, which ones would they be?

My selection would be very eclectic. Firstly, Merging with Siva, by Gurudeva would certainly be on my list. I would say it is one of the books that had influenced me a great deal during my years in Singapore. Every time I dip into its pages again, I unravel another layer of its wisdom. It is books like this that can nourish me for an entire lifetime.

History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell would certainly be among my selection too. Only the other day, I was fondly flipping through the yellowing pages of the paperback copy of this book that I still keep on my shelf. I still find great pleasure in Russell's very opinionated sweep of the greatest ideas from all the major philosophers of the Western tradition.

For poetry, I would certainly bring along Palgrave's Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics. I've written about the significance of this book before on a previous post. Like an old friend, it has remained a faithful and indispensable companion to me through my entire teenage and adult life.

Thus far I've only named three of the ten possible books that I would bring to a desert island. I won't be able to decide on the rest of them at this point in time--there are simply too many to choose from. But those three that I've mentioned, I am certain of them because of their emotional and intellectual influence they have had and continue to have on me. And on that hypothetical desert island, if I have these books to keep me company, who needs buried treasures?

Mining Meaning from Mindlessness

It's a working day again after a week-long break for Hari Raya. I have been reasonably productive though during the holidays, working on my favourite projects. I like to put every second to good use. Even idleness has to be 'meaningful' idleness.

Now, how do we gauge what is meaningful and what is not? Why should 'meaning' be an important aspect of life? Why do we have a need to seek meaning?

Meaning is a vector--it has both magnitude and direction. Doing something meaningful in life means that you have a direction or goal to aim for. And then you expend time and energy towards it. How much time, how much energy you invest---that's the 'magnitude' part of the meaning vector.

As long as our lives are guided by over-arching principles and purpose, even moments of idleness will automatically have meaning. How? Let's say you are watching TV, channel surfing randomly until you hit something that catches your fancy. And then you sit there on the couch for an hour, watching whatever that caught your attention. Is this activity meaningful or a total waste of time?

One could argue that watching TV can be meaningful in many ways. Maybe you just need to relax and take your mind off work for a while. That could be a good reason. It's a 'sharpening the saw' activity that is essential for us to be fit and ready when we are required to do so.

But sometimes we tend to over-exaggerate the need to relax. A short nap or a walk in the park could be a better way to refresh oneself. Most of the time, watching TV is just a way of putting off work. It's simply easier to press a button on the remote control and let your mind shift aimlessly in tandem with the channels. It's basically a form of daydreaming.

We can, if we choose to, watch TV in a more meaningful manner. Many TV series are quite educational. I'm not talking about serious documentaries that are obviously directly educational, but even fictional ones. Fictional films, drama or serials, especially the high-quality ones, can help us learn a lot about history or other domain subject matter like law, or government, or criminal investigation. We just need to be smart to know where real-life ends and fiction begins. All fiction are based on real-life situations, only exaggerated for dramatic effect. If we are smart in knowing these boundaries, we can extract the essence from the dross.

Hence watching TV is like a process of mining. There's a lot of junk that's being fed into our minds, but every now and then, a gem of a lesson emerges and you lap it up with relish. We are like those underwater filter-feeding creatures. They live by allowing water to flow continuously through their 'mouths' and have food nutrients extracted from it.

Watching TV is certainly not energy sapping, only time-consuming. So it is an activity that's performed at the cost of your time. But always remember this: time is a finite resource. Even though we can filter educational nutrients from this activity, it is better to be smarter in the process. We can enter into this low energy mode but still have a better flow of content fed into our minds. That way, we get the most value for the time spent.

Actively choose what you feed your mind with. That way, you can better control the quality of meaningful nutrients that are being consumed. And do have a conscious intent to extract. Extraction requires some effort. Energy is involved, but it is minimal, if you've already acquired the habit. To extract, you will need to be questioning, comparing, assimilating and noting facts throughout the entire experience. Only when these activities are present in your mind, and not simply passive reactivity, can knowledge or even wisdom be extracted.

So, treat the mindless experience of watching TV as a process of mining. You'll be surprised to find out how much meaning you can extract from it.

Pixels of Thoughts

It has been a happy weekend for me because Liverpool FC won the EUFA Champions League Cup again--for the sixth time. That made up for the heartache of just missing out on the Premier League title by 1 point to Manchester City. Also the pain of last year's Champion League's final has finally been healed by this great victory against Tottenham Hotspurs.

I've been supporting Liverpool for ages--since the days when Bob Paisley was the manager. There have been many managers and new players since then; so many ups and downs. By sticking with the team you support through thick and thin, you earn your right to enjoy their victories simply by partaking in the pain of the defeats. Being a football supporter is great training in karma (the subject of my previous week's post).

Every blog post starts with a single thought. Students of the Buddhist text, the Abhidhamma will know that thoughts, at their most fundamental level, are discrete. One thought sparks off another thought and another thought--a Markov Chain of events, propelled by its karmic force.

In our everyday life, we experience physical activities such as walking, sitting and sleeping and also go through a whole gamut of human emotions such as joy, anger, fear, jealousy, love and hate. This is where we operate in our normal mode of existence. Our moral conscience, ethics and education guide us on how we should react, respond and act on these experiences. Religion, at a superficial level provides principles and guidelines on how we should or should not behave at this level of existence.

However these are but experiences at a macroscopic level. The everyday drama that runs in our mental screens, on closer inspection are made up of small pixels, like your TV or computer screen.

A sensory input, say the sight of an expensive watch on the display window of a mall, can trigger an impulse to possess it, which result in you perhaps parting with a huge chunk of your salary to purchase it, which in turn results in pride of its possession, an inflation of your ego, an awareness of your rising social status, a need to possess even more material accessories that fall in line with that status and perhaps leading you to suffer financial difficulties, which trigger you to consider better-paying jobs elsewhere and so on.

Each one of these experiences are actually made up of even smaller pixels. Just think, why should the sensory input of the image of a watch itself would trigger a need to possess it?

This is due to the condition of your mind. The watch is not simply an image of an object. The impingement of its light on your retina, triggers a series of mental stimuli and responses that are automatic, apparently beyond your control. Our consciousness works at a very coarse-grained level. We don't see these individual pixels that make up the total mental picture. That is the main cause of our downfall.

As Victor E. Frankl famously wrote:

Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.

The ability to see the space between stimulus and response, like seeing images as consisting of pixels on the LCD screen requires a higher resolution in our consciousness. How easily do you get angry? That is a good test of your mind's resolution. Are you able to see the arising of anger within you before you respond?

Increasing the resolution of the mind requires training. That training is called mindfulness. Mindfulness is a skill that can be cultivated. Just as the piano player can through practice increase the flexibility and precision of his fingers to produce the subtle tonal variations, so can we cultivate the ability to see our experiences clearer, at better resolution, so that every pixel of experience is seen as it is. By seeing out thoughts at the pixel level, we choose more wisely. And of course, wise action leads to better outcomes in our lives.

The Palette of Pain

I'm blogging right after midnight, so technically it's already Monday morning--my usual blogging day. I've had a productive week. Here's to another great week ahead.

I spent the weekend working and decluttering my room. I'm getting a bit addicted to throwing away things--even stuff that used to carry sentimental value for me. I reckoned that, if something has 'sentimental value', it means there's some unresolved karma associated with it. It helps to unravel it: you either outgrow your sentimentality or simply let it go. It is very cathartic to throw away unwanted stuff. You are rid of a chunk of karma for good. Your soul feels unburdened instantly.

You see, we are often held back by our past. So much of our actions moving forward is defined by what we've experienced in the past. We avoid things that we have come to learn to be painful and pursue those that we think give us meaning or pleasure. We are that pleasure-seeking missile that never seems to find its target.

We should be brave in facing pain. Pain has to be suffered consciously--only then does it yield its value. Every time we seek pleasure, we'll inevitably encounter pain, before or after its attainment. If you sum up the total pain that you would have to live with to achieve the desired pleasure, you'll find that they are actually equal in magnitude. It is not wrong to chase after pleasure; just be prepared to pay its price. Then your books are balanced. There's no residual karma.

The problem with life is not the many sufferings that are plainly obvious before our eyes. It is the hidden suffering gnawing us from within that poses the greatest harm. Look around you. See all the stuff that you've accumulated for yourself. These are the fruits of your so-called hard-work: the pleasure attained through a lot of pain. But ask yourself, have you fully paid for them in karmic cash?

All your worldly attainments have been achieved by paying it's price in pain. I've often told my friends that in life we just take the pain that we are willing to suffer. There's no right or wrong to every action. There's only the pleasure that you seek and the pain that you willingly take in exchange for it. Some people are willing to sacrifice family time for work. They might excel in their careers but their family life suffers. Some play brutal office politics to stay ahead. That's fine too if you have the aptitude for it. If you want something in life, you'll have to work for it. Desire is that karmic force that propels you forward. And for every karmic action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. For every pleasure you attain in life, there's an equal and opposite pain that you'll have to endure.

We are all born with some natural immunization for certain types of pain. Wisdom is knowing what kind of pain you are immunized for. Taking on those types of pain is less of a suffering. There's a palette of pain that one can choose to take on. The pain you choose, defines the pleasure that you'll get. The right type of pain edifies you. The wrong one could break you. So choose your pain wisely.

Sparking Joy Through the Flight of Time

I am blogging a day earlier today because tomorrow is a public holiday. So here I am on Wesak Day (a Sunday, hence tomorrow is a replacement holiday), writing these lines from home.

I've written a lot over the years that I've maintained this blog. Even by blogging just once a week, I am surprised by the amount of words that I've written over the past 1 year. That is the power of time--or how small things accumulate over time. I wrote post about it 15 years(!) ago.

We like to say how time flies. Yes it does and that's it's beauty: it literally has the power of flight. What do I mean by that?

If we are smart, we'll know how to harness this 'free' energy that time possesses. Time is like a punctual airline that will fly every second whether there's anything in its cargo hold or not. So why not make use of this free 'freight' service?

What can the Time Airlines carry? Anything! By loading these words that I'm typing on the flight of time, it becomes a blog. A lot of things do not need a massive effort to take off. You just commit to do small tasks regularly, and lo and behold, you'll be amazed at the results that will materialize.

The best way to accomplish anything is by keeping things simple--like small packages. Load it up up the cargo hold of Time, and let it fly. It will carry them to the correct destination if you put the correct address on your package. And remember, this is a free service that works round the clock--24 hours a day, year round!

We tend to see Time as our enemy. Time ages us and make everything we love and possess fade away. It need not be so. Time is also our greatest friend because it is the only thing that's constantly moving. Time is the most powerful engine in the universe. This universal energy can be put to good use--or we'll end up being used by it.

Do not let the seconds fly with an empty cargo. Nature is very devious in using time against us. Just look around you. How easy is it for your car to get dirty? How did you manage to gain so much weight? How did all that old stuff start collecting dust in your house? Time deposits dust, dirt and fat on us, bit by bit, every single second. Nature never lets time get a moment's rest. One molecule at a time, it does it work. You don't even see it happening!

So use that enormous power to your advantage. I have a tendency to collect too many unnecessary things. That's the bane of modern life--we accumulate to many material possessions. What I do nowadays is to be constantly eliminating things that I do not need anymore. I have a corollary to Marie Kondo's famous 'spark joy' rule: throw away things that you do not need anymore to 'spark joy'! By throwing away things, you are de-cluttering your life and that can only mean that life is becoming simpler and cleaner--just like good computer code.

What I'm doing is reversing what nature and modern life has been doing to me--making my life complicated, cluttered and complex. Every time I chuck something into the garbage bin, I'm done with the karma associated with it. It is the most efficient way to work out karma.

Time flies and make sure you let it carry your garbage away. Once gone, they'll never ever bother you again. I can think of nothing that sparks greater joy than that!

The Magic of Football and the Mind

It's the start of another week and I just had my simple dinner at O'Brien's. I will blog about something light for a change. As a matter of fact I'll just ramble on about nothing in particular.

The English Premier League just ended yesterday with Manchester City pipping Liverpool to the title. Both teams have been great all season. I'm particularly proud of this Liverpool team as I've been an ardent supporter ever since I was a scrawny teenager who was crazy about football. I played quite a lot during those days, as a left-winger and striker.

I was quite good at scoring goals then as I had a pretty accurate shot. The thing that gave me an edge over other boys my age was that I learned to play football correctly through books! During those days, all of us did not have the benefit of any kind of coaching in school. The PE teachers would just throw us a ball, and we'll be happy to kick about in the field. Not many knew the proper techniques of shooting, passing, volleying and heading. I learned all that properly because I bothered to read a book by George Best, who illustrated very clearly all the various basic techniques of playing football.

I particularly remember his advice on shooting: there are 3 spots to aim for, just inside the goal posts. I practiced a lot on my shooting. I often aim for the inside of the posts--goals that sneak-in after rebounding off the posts gave me the most satisfaction. I was so obsessed with playing football that I even practiced shooting in my mind, every time I see any doorway, or gap between two objects that resembled goalposts! I would imagine how I would shape my foot to strike the ball in front of me if I happened to be in that position relative to the 'goal'.

That mental training prove to be very effective. I developed good instincts in front of the goal: I was often quicker than my opponents in the penalty area. My shots usually hit the target as my shooting instincts were very well-honed through these mental practice sessions.

I later found out that many professional sportsmen use these mental visualization techniques too to perfect their skills. A lot of what happens in our minds determine the quality of our work in the physical world. Which is why the mystery of the human mind is one of my favourite topics of study.

During my university days, I bought a few academic books on the philosophy of the mind. I didn't manage to read them then as the technical topics discussed were too difficult for me to comprehend. But the books sat on my library shelves all these years and the other day, I happened to browse through them again. Suddenly I found that I could now follow the discussions in those pages. It took me so long to reach this stage but I'm glad that I am closer now towards understanding some of the mysteries of the human mind than when I was a sophomore in college.

I did not progress much as a footballer after I went to the university but at least I know feel that I've made progress in my understanding of the philosophy of the mind. This is an area that I think even after centuries of scholarship, we are still no closer towards resolving some of the age old debates like the mind-body problem or the nature of consciousness. The advent of the digital computer and advances in neuro-biology have in the recent decade contributed a lot to our understanding of the mind. But we are still far from getting any absolute answers towards these great mysteries.

The mind pondering the mind is perhaps the biggest conundrum of all. But I think this is where the answers to some of our deepest questions on life, religion and ultimate meaning would lie. And so I continue pursue them with as much obsession as I had, when I was a football-crazy teenager, dreaming of scoring goals during those slow and dull late-afternoon geography lessons in the classroom.

Life Vectors and their Architectures

I'm blogging earlier than usual this week, on a Sunday before the start of the week. Right now I'm comfortably seated at Starbucks, 1 Utama Shopping Mall, sipping my Americano with my laptop and a good internet connection. I've already done some amount of work-related stuff. Looks like it is a good time to take a break by offloading my thoughts onto a blog post.

We live as thinking and feeling creatures. Thoughts and emotions: these are the two main activities of the human mind and body. We act based on what we think is rational and what we feel is right. Thinking and feeling animates us and that is reflected in our actions. Action is a vector with two dependencies: thought and feelings. Thought gives us the direction or purpose, feeling gives us the magnitude or strength. It is completely analogous to a mathematical vector, which is defined by direction and magnitude.

Thought gives us a direction and when a thought is energized by passion, action results. Every moment of our lives are defined by these 'life vectors'. When our life vectors are well aligned, our lives are purposeful and meaningful. Achieving the defined purpose of our lives make us 'happy'.

But what determines the direction and purpose of our lives? How should our life vectors be aligned? Do we even have control over them?

Let's examine the two parameters of the life vector closely. Thoughts seem to randomly appear in our minds. Feelings arises, based on what triggered them. We feel sad, happy, angry, inspired or motivated based on what we see, hear, taste and smell and also the thoughts that we either deliberately or accidentally introduce in our head. Sometimes, when we have a mission--like a job that needs to be done, we introduce specific thoughts--an action plan--that needs to be executed and we pursue them with deliberate action, driven by feelings of different qualities, depending on the situation. If the plan is important--perhaps even a matter of life and death, then the feelings that accompany our actions could be fear and stress. If the action involves doing something that we have a clear liking for, then there's motivation, joy and excitement.

How successful we are in aligning our life vectors to our overall goal in life, determines how happy, successful and meaningful our life is. But what determines this overall goal or purpose that we want to direct our lives toward? We feel very uncomfortable and even unhappy when we are aimless. When we do not know where our lives are heading. When there's no clear idea of the path that lies ahead of us. We try our best to define this Purpose, for without it, life vectors become very random. Thoughts and feelings arise driving us hither and thither. We feel tired because energy is dissipated everywhere. This wastefulness of energy makes us feel weak and dispirited.

Like a machine of which every part has a purpose and function, life needs a well designed architecture. An architecture provides 3 important qualities: predictability, efficiency and coherence. Let's examine all three of them.

We want to be clear what to do in life. That's what I mean by predictability. I need a daily ritual: wake up, shower, pray maybe, go to work. When encountered with certain situations in life, I know exactly what to do because I have clear guidelines or rules--a code of ethic for my conduct. This code will also help me to make decisions in life. I know exactly what to do because I have this algorithm with all the rules embedded. I do not need to a lot of deep thinking to figure it out.

As a result of this ease of action, I never need to waste time groping around for the right solution. I charge ahead in life with purpose and confidence. I feel strong and vigorous because all my actions are clearly aligned and precise. No energy is wasted in deliberating, exploring, experimenting through a process of trial and error. I achieve optimum efficiency.

There's coherence in my life because every aspect of my existence, social, moral, intellectual and emotional support each other and are part of a harmonious whole. That is what an architecture provides. Coherence is what gives us a sense of meaning and beauty. Life is beautiful when we see all the components of its machinery working in harmony, each an equally vital cog in the overall scheme of things. Isn't such a life ecstatically beautiful?

Now that we understand the need for a Life Architecture, let me give you the most common candidate for it: Religion.

It is our unconscious yearning for architecture that make us susceptible to religion, or any other ideology for that matter. Religion is a collective, organic architecture that is easily available and widely adopted by many of us to give us the predictability, efficiency and coherence that we yearn for so much. Is it the best solution for humanity and are there alternative architectures that are better suited for us?

I shall leave that question open for now--a life vector that I am injecting into the mix, to stir up you existing architecture, whatever it may be. Sometimes architectures morph into new ones when internal and external changes are introduced.

The Battle Against Biases

The biggest difficulty in navigating our everyday deluge of information is avoiding the trap of cognitive biases. It disturbs me that people fall into these traps easily, most notably confirmation bias.

Confirmation bias rears its ugly head every time we notice a 'confirmation' or 'prove' of an unsubstantiated belief. Say, you happen to drink a lot of beer after work with your friends one day. On reaching home you felt some stomach discomfort and had to relief yourself in the toilet. The next day, you had a late night whiskey session with another group of friends after dinner. You went home and had a nice sleep that day. A couple of days later, you again go out for beers with your office mates. This time, you go home to the some stomach discomfort.

What can you conclude from this experience? Drinking whiskey is better because beer gives us diarrhea? I have a friend who believes just that. He had a few bad experiences drinking beer after work and he arrives at the theory that his body cannot take beer anymore. Nowadays, he only goes for whiskey.

But I've been drinking beer with this friend of mine for many years and never had I heard him complain about it. What changed? It so happened that another friend told him that he got diarrhea after drinking beer, which made him recall that he himself experienced the same thing before. There you have your confirmation: drinking beer causes diarrhea. Did they consider the possibility that perhaps on those occasions that they were drinking beer, they were doing it with an empty stomach? Perhaps that is the cause of their stomach discomfort? No, the beer theory is more sexy.

We like to come to easy 'truths' like that. Once we have latched on to our favourite theory, we only notice incidences that support it and ignore cases which don't. A lot of superstitions take hold that way. They discount the role that chance plays every time a 'confirmation' of a theory occurs.

More often than not, people only needs one or two data points to form an opinion. How often have you heard people say the food at a particular restaurant sucks after only sampling one particular meal?

In a way, we can't help it. The human mind likes to simply the world around us so that it is easier for us to make decisions. We like to box and pigeonhole things after one or two experiences, so that when we encounter the same situation again, we can make a quick judgement. We don't like uncertainty and nuances. We like binary decisions. Yes or no. Good or bad. This or that. Tye make the world so much simpler for us.

I try to notice these mental biases in my everyday life. The mind simply loves to latch on to biased opinions because it feels good to be certain. You feel decisive, even authoritative. Everything fits in nicely into boxes. But unfortunately the world is not like that. It is continuous, messy and full of nuances. To see that world clearly, one has to battle against these natural mental biases. Believing this could be another biased opinion of mine. But the difference is that: I am totally aware of it.

Truth or Taste?

I've not written about religion for a while but the Easter bombings in Sri Lanka made me ponder about the subject again. What more is there to be said about religion? Are we as human beings better off without religion?

I've suggested before that religion should be treated as a hobby. I might have sounded like I made the statement in jest, but over the many years that I have deliberated on this matter, I seriously believe that is this paradigm shift that we all need to adopt.

No one would kill me if I insist on listening to Barry Manilow love songs as my preferred choice of music. When it comes to music, people understand that this is a matter of individual taste and preference. Even if I insist on blasting Mandy loudly on my stereo at home, my neighbours might sneer at my choice of music but they will never say that I am offending their aesthetic sensitivities. And no one in the right frame of mind will hope that one day everyone listens to only Jazz or Keroncong. Of course not. Music is a matter of taste, not truth.

That is the problem with religion. People think that religion represents the truth. When they think it is the Truth, they want to shove it down everyone's throat--because it is supposedly good for you.

Why are we so certain that the religion of our birth or the religion which we happen to adopt is the Truth? What makes you think that your epiphany is truer than mine?

If my friend tells me that his wife is the most beautiful woman in the world. I would understand why he said that. And I wouldn't be wrong to say that my friend did not mean what he said literally. Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. To my friend, who loves his wife so much and appreciates her many good points, she is the most beautiful woman in the world.

Why can't we have the same attitude towards religion? Isn't it silly to kill and commit atrocities in the name of religion?

We are reluctant to relegate religion to simply a matter of personal taste because it is supposed to answer the most important questions of our existence: Why are we here? Where do we go after death? Why do we die? What do we have to do in this life? How can we be assured of safety and happiness? How can we be protected from pain and death?

These are all very serious matters, which religion claims to provide answers. Music, like good food, is merely for our enjoyment. Religion on the other hand, is a matter of life and death.

That is the crux of the matter. We want to be sure that the religion we adopt actually answers all those questions. And whatever, they are, it had better be right for we can never know the answer with absolute certainty. If I do not have the right religion when I die, I might suffer eternal damnation in hell.

But can you be really sure you have the right answers? Does killing people and obliterating other people's beliefs guarantees the truth of your religion? What makes you think your religion is right and others wrong?

You have the right to insist that you are in possession of the absolute truth. You feel it inside. You have been divinely inspired. Your life has been transformed even since you follow your god. Your religious leader gives inspiring talks on the glory of your beliefs. You feel a oneness with the divine, and you feel you are part of something bigger than yourself.

What makes you think others have not experienced what you experience? What makes you think you are right and they are wrong?

We have every right to firmly insist that we are right and others are wrong. I only have one small wish: grant the same right to others. There's enough truth to go around. It is not a zero sum game. There are enough gods for every human out there to worship and praise. Let a thousand flowers bloom.

And let me listen to my Barry Manilow in peace.