Another day, another afternoon at the Dempsey’s Dome. Today, I’m equipped with Nancy Aronie’s Writing From The Heart. I just read an inspiring paragraph. It was from the chapter Schmooze with the Muse.

“Write as an act of giving - giving your authenticity, your integrity, your one-of-a-kind originality. It is your willingness to begin again and again and again that becomes an act of giving. Write as a practice. Write as meditation. Write as a gift to yourself. What muse would refuse?”

I have a pot of earl grey and 3 biscotti slices set out now for the muse. It’s a tribute to the muse. To inspiration.

To write is a gift. I’m educated and had the opportunity to study English literature and linguistics even through a science curriculum. I was surprised that I aced the class. Not by rote regurgitation of Hans Christian Andersen tales, but rather, from a genuine interest in what was going through his head when he created those fairy tales. I had the benefit of a bilingual language processing system and a diversified Asian background. The richness and color of my memories helped me looked at the subject in interesting angles that compelled the midwestern professors to ace my finals.

There is a challenge though. I am very concerned with what is right for the audience. That is, I am, unfortunately, trained in marketing. There is too much of market research and 5 P’s in me to make every new idea die an early death.

Nancy’s quote reminded me of the kind of people muses would want to work with - authentic, grounded and giving. It doesn’t really matter if my ideas are relevant to the ‘readers’, it’s more about putting out those ideas succinctly and engagingly.

As worried as I am about what to write about, I am also very concerned with how well I write. It’s really an issue of confidence. English, after all, is not my mother tongue. For a long time, I also suspected that I think in Chinese. To top that off, I have a vocabulary that barely matches that of a high school student now. For some reason, I know the words but they just don’t come up when I write. I blame this on possibility a limited storage capacity for words and the thousands of chinese words I have permanently etched into my brain.

It’s a discouraging line of thought. Potentially devastating for a budding writer, I think.

Does it really matter that I have to check the dictionary every time I watch a Woody Allen movie? Not to mention having to turn on the subtitles to being with? Agog, hebetudinous, vainglory?

I guess the right thing to do is to leave that alone. And just write. I believe it is impossible to remember a word just by looking it up. One has to wield it.

I need a new system - describe something and find words that match. I wonder if Google does that? If not, it could be an interesting project they pick up. I mean, all they have to do is to get normal people to write out explanations instead of using the muted dictionary styled ones.

There’s one more thing, originality. I am, and I think most of the educated world too, too tainted with American pop culture. I have to be originally Singaporean. Yet, my friends tell me I’m one of the rare ones. I have very little interaction with the locals. It’s me being judgmental again. I feel that the local mentality is too programmed. Most of us talk about the same things - food, chill-out, money. There’s a disconnect between the current generation (25-50 years old) with the earlier ones.

The current generation, my generation, had started out in life on the laurels of the foundation that the previous one has toiled and accomplished. The ‘elder’ in my government emphasizes on this a lot and I believe there is some truth to that.

If I can put it succinctly: whereas the earlier generation can be described as hardworking, family-oriented and tenacious, my lot is, at best, opportunistic, worldly and meek.

Of course, we didn’t had the same trials and tribulations to transform us into men of steel. But, the gap is so big one cannot help but suspect that we simply had it too easy.

My struggle with originality, simply put, it that I don’t think there’s anything worth writing about in my own experiences. I can look really hard and dig really deep and on most occasions, all I’ll find would be something superficial. I cannot write about it because I don’t value it. Perhaps I’m too jaded, or haven’t met the right people, or perhaps, the elders are really good storytellers.

But it’s something I cannot change in this life.

Perhaps, I am lost, and so is my generation. We’re lost and we’re still looking. The bigger houses and cars don’t really fill that emptiness from the fruitless search for self. We are a generation looking to be tested but instead, we fed.

Perhaps, I can write about that quest. But first, I got to smoke out the dragons and get them to hold our fair maidens in high towers first.

I have been going to bed at 3 in the morning for weeks now. I don’t think it’s insomnia - I have none of the undesirable side effects. I am, however, suspicious of the purpose of these extended hours.

Last night I did something different from my usual nocturnal ritual of reading, the PS3 and the occasional smoke. I found this song “Miss You” by Miki Imai and thought I could listen it in song-repeat mode. So, headphones on, ipod set, lights out.

The intro mesmerized me and relaxed my mind. Thoughts are muted out soon. It’s a befitting melody to usher in Miki’s double-chocolatey sweetness. Like a gentle cloud, she lifted me into a motherly cradle. The song is like a lullaby, one sang by Mother Earth herself, reassuring her unwavering love for me. Cuddled, I faintly hear her tell me that it is ok to surrender and release. Images followed. Of someone whom I cared for. We lead separate lives now, but I know I’ll always be there for her. Like a guardian angel. Unfortunately, one that’s mortal and on the same dimension. We can be together but it is not time yet. The distance has to be maintained. While the tidbits of conversations are good and enough for now, the sweetness of the night and Mother’s comforting embrace made my heart dared to yearn for more. I don’t think it will be an unrequited quest. I know that all good things, as all good things should be, will come in good time. But for an hour in the darkness of night, my heart broke free and felt the full ache of missing someone, missing you.

I hosted a Japanese oden steamboat dinner tonight. There was music, food, great company and some smack-your-forehead conversations. I live alone now and do everything on my own now. It’s puzzling. I thought I would be very bored. But I found out tonight that there are profound benefits being on your own totally. For one, I learn a lot about myself in one night than possibly a year’s worth of therapy.

I was preparing the oden cutting up the daikon, cabbage and fishcakes and I observed that I did it with meticulous accuracy. It wasn’t done up in a rush and I took the time to do one thing at a time. I was also mindful about how I wanted it to look. It was a particularly soulful time for me - I just cut, pondered and created a beautiful dinner.

When the night ended, I had to, naturally, look at the kitchen sink full of dishes. I wouldn’t let my guests do any washing, it’s not befitting a host. I have a maid coming tomorrow but then I realized I don’t like to leave the kitchen uncouth through the night. A meal is done and the kitchen shouldn’t have to sleep with the debris for the night. I don’t used to like washing, it gives me a backache. But tonight was different. There’s a cool draft blowing though the apartment and I thought, what the heck. So, I played the same Japanese jazz and started washing.

It was different. I used to want to get over with the washing even before I start. But tonight was different. I simply washed. Not because I had to, but that I wanted to. And when I did that, the washing came to an end all too soon. The kitchen was totally clean, no pans uncleaned, trash taken out, table clothes rinsed, leftovers stored. There was no stone unturned. It was good to leave a cleaned kitchen.

As I pondered about the night, I thought about a couple of friends who have been wanting to leave their folks and live on their own. Somehow, they just couldn’t convinced their parents to let go.

I’m thinking, isn’t important for parents to allow that freedom for their children to discover their own life. Even if it’s learning about how they liked their kitchens cleaned, it’s really different when you live with someone else and had to adhere to their house rules. Even if it is the same rules, it’s different if you discover that it is what you like. You have to make your own rules. You owe it to yourself to discover your own true self.

I’m really shocked - I thought people only download music, movies and tv shows. Not books!

Friends who know me cannot figure out why I always buy original. A friend gasped at my collection when he visited for a X’mas party, “Shoop, I’m amazed at your collection, how much did you spent?” Come to think of it, was he amazed why I spent so much on a collection that would have easily cost anyone else a-tenth to nothing?

Amongst my circle of acquaintainces, piracy is already socially accepted. Tips on how to different the better copies are freely exchanged. When you visited, bring along an external hard-disk in case you see sometime you want.

Now, I understand where everyone is coming from - copies are a lot cheaper (or free), they’re digitally identical, eveyone’s doing it and times are bad so I have to save. Those are very valid reasons.

I think the problem is that we, as consumers, no longer create anything anymore. If there’s two bakers, would one take another’s recipe and starts selling the same cakes? No he won’t. Because he knows the value of creating the recipe as a baker himself. There is the matter of pride involved, too.

But as consumers, everything to us is valued at its price. It’s the only sensible way to live a good life, stretch the dollar, so to speak. The offer with the best price always wins.

So, the ball is out of bounds now. Creators cannot create for nothing. And consumers cannot become creators. The way I see it, less of us will want to be creators. Hence, more bad movies, crap tv shows and shallow books. It’s inevitable.

Photo by Martin Kingsley

Something happened in Singapore a couple of weeks back and it affected me greatly.

What I knew I read vaguely almost a week later from the evening papers and a discussion on a local forum:

A 15 year old boy was begging in a neighbourhood food centre when a patron called the police on him. Allegedly, he was asking for $2 to buy lunch for his ill mother. The police came and probably took him back to the police post and filed the incident. After that, they escorted him back to the void deck of his HDB (public housing in Singapore). From there, he went up another building and jumped. The boy died.

The story stuck with me for days, and nights. It wasn’t publicized much in the local papers and most of my friends hadn’t even heard about it.

I had been wondering why the story of the ‘begger boy’ (coined by the local paper) had affected me so much.

I came up with many responses to it: I talked to my friends about it, complained about the state of charity organizations in Singapore, and even thought about a startup for it.

In final analysis, I believe the story of the ‘boy’ is really trying to teach me something, something personal, something about how to give.

I am categorically a ‘jaded giver’. Over the years, my personal contribution to charitable causes have declined.

I’ve convinced myself, in the light of the recent mega scams in Singapore’s charitable front, that you’re not giving when you give via these multi-million dollar charity setups. Unfortunately, these organizations have monopolized the attention of the general public through star-studded fundraisers and professionally orchestrated PR.

So, when the biggest of them fell, there was a domino effect on the trust I had on the rest of them. Soon enough, the next in size fell too.

For some time, I gloated. Because I saw it coming and stopped giving when the first fell. Now, I know I shouldn’t gloat.

Rather, I should be thinking about whether my actions (or lack of) had indirectly caused the incident with the boy. You see, I could easily have been at the food centre and refused to give to the boy when he came by my table to ask for that fated $2. It would’ve been so automatic - that looking away and waving of an uncaring hand.

I’m wondering what it would have meant to the boy if there was someone there who willingly gave him $2.

You see, that’s the whole point about the story. Two dollars would’ve solved his problem for the day. A more generous four dollars might have ease a relief from him. A red ten could have make him see that there’s still hope in his lot.

Damn.

So, how should I give?

I tell you, I still wouldn’t trust big charities. Big money corrupts. And frankly, having the who’s-who on the board or stricter regulations doesn’t really convince me at all. It’s simple - big money corrupts. That said, there’s one thing that’ll change my mind - when big charities publish their detailed financials transparently for all to see.

In the meantime, I know I have to continue to give.

My idea is to give directly to the needy.

It’s my money and hence my benchmark. If I see someone whom I think needs a couple of bucks (or ten, or fifty), I’d give it to him/her there and then.

On top of this, I’m going to encourage others to do the same. The more people ‘give direct’, the more beneficiaries will be. It’s a new meme. A new attitude.

I’m thinking hard about how to propagating the meme beyond my network of friends now.

I’ll come up with something and post an update here when it’s ready.

In the meantime, if you agree with me, please go all out and give your monies to those you deem in need. You’ll never know if another ‘boy’ might walk up to you for $2.

Postscript

A reader commented and doubted the story. While I didn’t witness it with my eyes, I did catch the news first off the local Shinmin evening newspapers (I believe its 31 Jul 2008).

I also happen to know that he jumped from Blk 646, Ang Mo Kio Street 61 (but also that he doesn’t live there) and his funeral was held at Singapore Thong Teck Sian Tong Lian Sin Sia at 91 Geylang East Ave 2.

Think I’ll go to the latter to see if I can verify this further.

Most of us in relationships play all sorts of mind games. No matter how great the beginnings of the relationship might be, most of us end up in a power struggle with the one we claim to love.

Many of us fall into this trap - and events in the past couple of weeks has led me to believe that I have too.

But unlike most modern (’cool’) metropolitan types, I did not choose the path to exit the relationship gracefully.

It is apparent to me that something critical is missing from the relationship. And today, I happen to chance on Tom Kenyon’s article “Alchemy of Relationships” that has provided me a hint to the missing puzzle piece.

Before I get into the answer, let’s talk about how we forge our individual personalities.

Your Hardened Personalities

If you think about everything new that you do - say a new roller-coaster ride or the first time you visit Tokyo - the entire experience seem to be covered in a new light. Your senses are heightened and we become ultra receptive to the new environment.

This then forms the basis of our experience. Thereafter, the same encounter will simply add slight modifications to the original. That’s why people stress on the importance of ‘first impressions’.

Now, imagine your childhood - where most encounters are the first. How did we learn how to react to all kinds of situations? Remember the first time you got back a test paper and you didn’t like the score? The first time someone challenge you to a basketball game? The first time an older boy bullied you?

Tom Kenyon used the analogy of the heat and pressure of a furnace used to forge steel to describe the same intensity of our childhood experiences that forged our personalities.

The other interesting quality of steel is its tendency to retain its form, unless you subject it to another furnace.

Back to the relationships

While most or all relationships start out with a bang, the months and years that follow on will push us against our hardened personalities.

I’m a neat freak and my partner the opposite - I’ve observed the over the years, the mean time before my going crazy with messiness starts to get shorter and shorter.

And if you’ve been in a relationship long enough, I bet you can easily come up with 10 things where both of you exist on different ends of the stick.

Numbing Yourself Doesn’t Work

I’ve often heard this phrase “you take the entire package” from well-meaning friends who advises me I should accept my partner for the entirety of who she is.

Buried in this message is “why don’t you just ignore everything that you don’t want.” I think to achieve this, I will have to numb my perception to these things.

The problem with numbing is that you cannot compartmentalize it - other ‘good’ things will have to go.

Take the above example of a messy apartment, while I can train myself to ignore the eyesore, I can never hope to meditate properly in the room again.

Reforge Your Relationship

This is why you want to reforge a relationship - a red-hot binding experience to reset your stubborn selves to better complement each other.

That’s it - partners should grow to complement each other, not cringe to each other’s idiosyncrasies.

Tom frames this as an alchemical process:

1. Knowing that the form in the relationship that needs to be changed is the form of habitual interactions between two partners;
2. Provide a container of absolute safety, honesty and appreciation for the transformation;
3. Energy to drive the change.

I believe I am only scratching the surface of Tom Kenyon’s wisdom here. Paulo Coelho mentioned that Wisdom = Knowledge + Transformation. The obvious next steps for me is to take action and change. Only then, I guess, will I be able to share this better with you.

There’s an old Chinese saying, “how much you eat and how much you clothe is fixed in this lifetime.” Older chinese folks believe that everyone of us can only ‘hold’ so much wealth in our lives. For example, if you can hold $100,000 and then win a million bucks in a lottery, chances are, you’d lose 90% of it in good time.

The older I get, the more evidence I see, in myself and people around me, that this is the way things work.

So, should we just give up and accept what is?

Hell no!

Like any computer programming bug, there’s a couple of ways that you can ‘beat the system’ and get more from life. This post talks about one of them - going on a vibrational spending spree.

The Essence of Spending

Have you notice lately how spending doesn’t seem to work anymore?

I’m not talking about spending money to buy food or daily staple needs. I’m talking about spending money to get yourself something special.

This could have something to do with age. As the years pass, it becomes harder and harder to think of something I really really want. There’s fewer things that I want and when I get them, the excitement of acquisition barely last a couple of days.

And the fact is, I don’t really need these things! They are really just a ‘new and improved’ item over something else I already own!

This got me thinking about spending - why spend? There’s really no good reason for it. When I pare it down, I can only conclude that I spend because it makes me feel good. That is, the final act of paying the cashier for that 12th t-shirt is so that I feel something good. (Am I addicted to spending?)

Can you recall that feeling? That tingle of joy when you buy that new-new thing? The blood rushing to your hands when you unwrap the item from the packaging? The pictures that you play in your mind how you’d be enjoying the product?

I believe these are the real reasons why anybody buy anything today.

The essence of spending is emotional.

The More You Make, The More Your Spend

Have you known friends for at least a decade and see them advance in their careers? And over the years, the more income they make, the more they spend. It’s not like they can eat double or triple the average human intake of food; it’s that they eat more expensive stuff, wear more branded clothing, and drive bigger cars.

In the end, they will still be the same people that grumble about how little they have and how tight the money is.

Fortunately, the next promotion or pay increment is always around the corner. And when it arrives, our dear friends will once again upgrade their lifestyles.

The point I’m making is this: life provides. If you have the capacity for it, it will come, no more, no less.

What is Vibrational Spending?

I learn about vibrational spending from one of Esther Hicks’ Abraham CDs. There are two versions of the exercise.

Version 1

• Put $100 cash in your wallet.
• Throughout the day, spend that same $100 over and over again in your mind.

Version 2

• On day 1, put $1,000 in your vibrational wallet and spend it.
• On day 2, put $2,000 in there and spend it.
• On day 3, $3,000.
• Personally, I write a short entry in a journal about the ’spending’ part.

In both exercises, the notion of spending vibrationally can be achieved by 1) visualizing your buying, unwrapping, wearing and using the new item; and 2) emoting the same feelings of anticipation, excitement and satisfaction when you buy something.

Both are simple mind exercises that will produce the same results: attracting more wealth into your life.

Why does it work?

I’ve tried the second exercise and it worked. I’m in my second week of vibrational spending and have witness more wealth (OK, money) flowing in my direction.

I think this is how it works - when I emote feelings of spending money, vibrational dollars flow out of me. This creates a gap, or vacuum in my state of being (the state of not enough moola?) and causes life to draw some more of it to me. Since there isn’t an emotion associated with counting money, real dollars have to come into being to fill that void.

Sounds weird? The theory is still work-in-progress. In the meanwhile, why don’t you give the exercises a shot and tell me if it works for you too?

Every so often you’d find yourself dishearten with the state of the world around you.

If you’ve been reading this blog, I believe I’ve brought to your attention a few more dreads such as inflation and the growing weakness of our financial institutions.

My only intention in writing ‘dreadful’ posts is for them to serve as a ‘watch out!’ sign so you might take the necessary precautions. My intention is that you understand what’s going on and take relevant action. I do not want you to be dishearten and throw in the towel.

So, there will always be tough issues. You know them and you know how to go about dealing with them. Day in, day out, you go about your game plan. Then one fine morning while sipping coffee, you say to yourself, “life’s too tough.”

This is where simple pleasures come in.

Simple pleasures turn my attention from worldly problems. They turn my focus to the people in my life, to the food I am enjoying, the music, the chatter, to the humidity in the air and the earth I’m stepping on.

Leverage these simple pleasures and they can put in the right positive mood. That’s it isn’t it? It’s all about how you feel. The stock markets can crash today but a beer session with good friends can put you back to fighting spirits. Your boss can announce a retrenchment exercise but a good excursion with your kids can show you more important things in life.

I’m compelled to share with you the simple pleasures I’m enjoying right now:

• A 3-dish-1-soup home cooked meal
• Writing a good blog entry
• A grande mug of the daily brew at Starbucks
• A chatty mahjong game
• Taking pictures on my lomo-cam
• A walk along beach with my love
• Taking my kids and their cousins out for a movie
• Visualizing my dreams
• Reading a good book
• Go on a shopping spree with my vibrational wallet (more about this in a future post)
• Take a bus ride

Make your own list of simple pleasures today. Have some fun!

We have been on a quest for happiness for too long.

The adult version of happiness: I will be happy when I get that promotion, make a million bucks, marry that girl, buy that car, live there, etc.

The child’s version: I will be happy now, hahahahahaha.

Right this minute, I am seated comfortably at a cafe along Orchard Road, sipping a chocolatey mocha spin and finishing one of the best apple crumbles I’ve ever tasted. The wind is weaving through the greenery around me. The hustle of traffic ring in a distance. I stretch out my legs and took a deep breathe of the best air this city can give. I like to loiter the crowded stretch of Singapore’s shopping street because I think it’s the happiest place in the country.

No matter where you are and what you do, you can decide to be happy too, like the child.