Posts made in April, 2010

Hong Kong, Part I: Taste

Posted by Arthur on Apr 13, 2010 in SpiritSentient.com | 1 comment

A few days ago, for the first time in 18 years, I visited the place where I was born. A place with so many memories… so vivid up to this day still.

Even though I was only 8 at the time, I remember how my Gwu Ma/Aunt, had made me her signature Won Ton soup, freshly made using the soup base from the shells of some really quality shrimp. There was so much love in that now historic bowl that it restarted a great relationship, and even though I could not visually recognize her at first, our meeting was words-failing-meat-right-off-the-bone-good. It was poetry.

Here’s a pic of her taking me to a historic Chinese restaurant where everybody gets their own teapot… more like a tea-bowl, and have to risk burning your hands from the hot tea if you’re not careful with the special teacup bowls. Super fun times though, and on top of that, the restaurant was mind-blowingly good.

Hong Kong is a bustling city, with millions upon millions of people everywhere. It’s a place where one would think people generally have their defenses up, so I found it pretty funny how I could still easily, at will, get random awesome people to take pictures for and even with me. I’ve even had people offer to get a picture with me for my own personal shots, just for me I find friendly people pretty much everywhere and I have found the locals to be generous with sharing directions and tips to good restaurants and all sorts of goodness.

Here are a few of those people

Canadians, and even Canadian-Chinese like myself may find themselves with a bit of culture shock in a city filled with so many people, many with an attitude of “rushing you when speaking to you” and it took me a while to get used to it.

Ever since I was born, I simply spoke my mind. It’s something that nowadays when I do it, which is still quite often, I prefer to grow by doing it in an ever more tasteful fashion. Directness as a conversational style is a tricky tool to use. And I feel that for someone who uses and improves how one uses this tool as often as I choose to, I’ve developed a strong sensitivity to when I need to “grow in my taste”, and once I realize I need to, I change how I communicate right away. I’d like to share some snippets of what I’ve found rather interesting to me, and maybe it will be of some pleasantness or usefulness to you as well.

Without further adieu,

Growing in Taste

What is taste first of all? Taste depends on the goal. If your goal is to find something to alleviate a cough you have in hot, humid and sweaty Hong Kong while with a friend, you have many options.

In fact, here’s a list:

*There are Swiss herbal lemon mints called Ricola at every convenience store (it’s so good)

*You are at any point of time 3 meters from at least some kind of restaurant that serves a refreshing unique drink that usually includes water

*One may travel to an area with more greenery where the air is more purified and fresh

*One can go into a mall where the air is again cleaner

*There are an abundance of tea and soup shops almost designed to counter this problem

*One could even purchase a respiratory mask

*One could simply strengthen ones mental feelings and thoughts towards using the benefit of the cough

*(i.e) Used as a tool to get away from unpleasant company or to take a breather from their presence

*Same but for an unpleasant topic

Which option feels the most tasteful to you?

The answer, and there is no clear “most appropriate one”, as you may have already imagined, would depend.

When talking to and making friends, how should one behave? Of course, again, there is no one right way. At the same time, there really is.

How is this possible?

Imagine this scenario:

You and a girlfriend are chatting about the topic of the benefits of buying clothes from H&M. You simply like H&M clothes and for you it’s as simple as that. She on the other hand, likes how H&M uses it’s mannequins to display the way a set of clothes is put together, but would rather end up buying from some other clothing store, because she feels that H&M clothes are not made with the best quality. You don’t care much for the idea, and you decide to convince her of why that’s not her best choice.

If you’re not really that open minded, and have a mindset of limited thinking in terms of abundance and time, you might choose to complain loudly about how that would take far too long… that it’s a waste of time, and that she probably wouldn’t (or even shouldn’t, if you really wanted to be an ass) be wearing that particular set of clothes for more than a few weeks anyways. And so you would suggest strongly that she should simply abandon the whole idea because you would rather spend more time enjoying the ambiance and food of a well-chosen new restaurant that neither of you have been to, instead.

Or take some pictures of some birds, because apparently birds in Hong Kong love you so much they will let you go literally 2 inches before them to take pictures of them.

These ideas are a fantastic alternative to another few hours of clothes shopping, and can be communicated in a completely different way by simply adding some subtle adjustments.

As one of my favorite dance teachers once said “it’s subtle, but you gotta do it”.

…hmm dance. Gotta love all the free basketball centers all over HK

Back to subtlety. One could suggest to the girlfriend, if she would mind going to a restaurant first, as you are hungry, and while finding this awesome new restaurant, keep an eye out for pieces of this awesome clothing set that she’s just dying to get her hands on.

In this example, it’s a lot more smooth, and is super encouraging which results in getting both parties to achieve their goals. Basically, do your own versions of the above example; simply by communicating in a tasteful way, you and your partner will have an awesome night.

So if you ever have it in your right mind to enjoy growing in your level of taste, you may consider being super-mutually-encouraging.

I highly recommend it, it’s very fun!!

And that concludes the first part of my Hong Kong series. Depending on the response I get from this, I’ll decide whether to do more, adjust or scrap the next parts

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How to Tastefully Judge and Label Others

Posted by Arthur on Apr 5, 2010 in Abundance, Awareness, Confidence, Life Coaching, Life Purpose, Play | 1 comment

Amusing. That’s what I find my title. Is it ever tasteful to judge and label others? Let’s find out by reading further.

The words one often uses in one’s daily life often shows an interesting side of one’s character. When someone reads what I write, as in this article, they get a glimpse of how my mind thinks. People who have read my words and give comment, some with genuine sincerity, others by some praise simply to be social, have had fun calling the words that flow through my hands: articulate, thoughtful, intelligent, emotional and all sorts of things based on what I write. I often reply to this, aren’t we all?

What does articulate even mean? What about thoughtful? …Intelligent? Emotional!? It’s subjective depending on the kinds of people one has met throughout one’s life and what one’s values are. And different people can use the same words and mean completely different things, depending on where they are at in life and who they are as a person.

For someone who is disproportionately logical to their emotional side, and a very fast thinker, they may find my way of writing as not concise enough or not useful enough to be worth reading (if their values are solely based on return of investment, increasing money, immediate social status, material goods).

For someone who is disproportionately emotional to their logical side, and takes more of their time to make decisions, they may only connect with some random aspect of a post that relates to them personally. If merely as a point, I wrote about family, one could state my “cheeky monkey” article as that “article on family”, and in the same article, another would congratulate or dismiss me on how much they liked/disliked the article on “smoking”.

People who are overly picky about word play in what they read may hold their appreciation back or quickly put an inordinate amount of focus on how one thing can be improved or changed. I appreciation all kinds of feedback, as it gives me a sense of what kinds of readers I have, and I get a feel from those who actually say something, their level of understanding of what I write… but this is besides the point.

This article’s focus isn’t about the types of people who read my articles, or how people criticize or appreciate them or whatever, it’s main focus is to detract people from using labeling and judging as a be-all tool in life, done in a wrong way.

Someone who goes through this article for example, and while reading the “disproportionately logical to their emotional side” phrase in an earlier part of the article and says “that’s me” or another who reads the “For someone who is disproportionately emotional to their logical side” phrase and says, “that’s me” may find that they often judge other people rather quickly, and to their own loss, creating a barrier to appreciating either the emotional side lurking just under the surface of what seems to be a logical person, or vice versa.

There are many, many different kinds of people that I have met and so far I feel I can safely say that there’s no one I’ve connected to that doesn’t have the potential to access a high level of all of the above mentioned traits, at any given point in their lives. That being said, I will use 2 rather extreme examples to clearly demonstrate the pointlessness of comparing and judging, when done poorly. And by “done poorly”, I mean with an agenda, not out of friendliness, in a manner that can be considered bad taste.

EMOTIONAL PERSON EXAMPLE:

As there existed a time when I was far more emotional than anything else… I recall often limiting my own thinking about myself, as a rather emotional person I often felt that I could not grow past my own history (perhaps a string of failures in one particular area of skill) and with this limited type of belief would not grow to overcome say, creating a piece of art elegantly, accomplishing a lot within a day, getting from point A to point B in any unknown and new given task effectively and so on and so forth.

The label that I as an emotional person may likely use would be “I’m just not that kind of person to do things quickly, or I’m not a logical person or I don’t like using logic” when confronted with a problem that obviously requires logic and some problem solving. There were many life experiences that I struggled with whereas if I was not constantly judging myself I would have sailed through and in fact enjoyed immensely.

For example, as a child I would go to these summer camps where there were these puzzles we had to solve for our crafts workshops. Making those little cars made me freeze up, as unlike playing LEGO, where I could freely create my own version of whatever struck my inspiration, I had to make a very specific object. My mind would just freeze up and I wouldn’t be able to put any passion or energy into making a quality little car.

LOGICAL PERSON EXAMPLE:

I can actually use myself again in this example, as there was a time where I completely forgone my emotional side and did everything super logically. I certainly was able to do certain tasks better than I did before, and could argue up a storm with my constant comparisons and labeling…

For a logical person, one may argue with others and oneself that one is simply choosing not to use emotion as a tool because of it`s ineffectiveness. You will often see these types of people with loveless relationships, introverted in such a way that they are comfortable with their misery, and living their life without much passion. Personally, as I was playing around with this mindset, I found myself manically depressed, bored to tears and felt that I was whittling down my own spirit, moving away from what I was truly meant to do in life.

In observing others, I find that people who choose to be logical to the point of secluding their emotional side pervert their own intelligence by not accessing the full potential of their own human organism, what nature has given them by way of intuition and do not connect with what they deep down know as best. These people often miss a deeper level of life, which they are often fine with, and many will live their entire life forgoing the opportunity to make the greatest difference in other people’s lives and their own. Joy gives way to a consistent yet accepted feeling of apathy. At the same time, some of these super logical people that I`ve met are extremely productive and in fact are successful at what they do. They simply hate their lives and don’t know what to do about it or have basically given up in trying to really change.

At a high degree of effectiveness, even a little subtle change of growth (which can be defined as having a more accurate feel of life and it’s many paradoxical truths, experiencing ones true desires and moving past one’s previous self in creating that which one used to feel impossible) may push one to move in such a way that has immediate and long term waves of benefit, which adds up in unknown goodness throughout all of one’s areas of life: social, financial, spiritual, mental.

Personally, after much growth, I actually compare and judge, people, places and things all the time. In fact, you will find this very article littered with them. I simply love to do it and pride myself in doing it well  At the same time, it took me forever to learn how to do it in an awesome way. I know that when I’m doing these things with an air of playfulness, one of which I don’t really care at all and know that I’m only using these comparisons and judgments as a tool, and not as something I’m overly identified with, they can be appreciated by not only me but also everybody I use them with around me.

And there you have it, that’s how you judge and label others well, you simply do it for fun, without an agenda, in a friendly way; I guarantee that it will result in a manner that those around you will consider your words to be of good taste if not at the very least, much better.

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