My Foundation

my father passed away from liver cancer on april 14th this year. by the time the cancer was discovered in december, it was already quite advanced. it's the nature of this particular cancer that by the time you have symptoms, it's already far along. the doctors we took him to knew the prognosis was dim and there wasn't a whole lot that could be done. i knew in my gut that he didn't have more than a few months to live. i was with him and my mom with the liver specialist when the initial diagnosis was given. it was a sobering experience that i had dreaded my whole life.

my father was a rock. i've always proudly said to my friends that i had only seen my father raise his voice twice my entire life. he was solid, built to last, and, without exception, well-liked by everyone he came into contact with. his disarming humility and lack of self-consciousness was both endearing and frustrating to his kids, and especially his frequently embarrassed wife. he would wander into the kitchen at a restaurant and start chatting with the cooks. everyone loved him. he'd get freebies constantly. a scone here. a free drink there. even a "liberated" magazine from a doctor's waiting room. and because of his uncanny resemblance to the late actor pat morita, he became "mr. miyagi" to everyone.

i admired my father greatly growing up. i admired his steadiness and laze faire attitude towards life. so, like a lot of boys, without knowing it, i emulated him. i saw that he never got mad or upset, so i just figured i should be the same. his stoicism and steadiness became the foundation of the way i handled the world.

growing up, our family was poor and barely scraped by. we lived in one of the worst parts of town and i went to some rough schools. being the only asian kid, i was picked on a lot. this was my first challenge in life, back in elementary school. so, i did what i thought my father would do... just blow it off, don't worry about it. push down the anger and the fear. don't get mad. this attitude kept me out of a lot of fights growing up. it was a survival mechanism.

when i entered my early adulthood however, this way of dealing with my negative emotions started backfiring. repressing my feelings and emotions became more difficult. it just didn't work any more. i couldn't figure out what was wrong. it seemed to work so well for my dad. everyone loved him and he was genuinely one of the most chilled out, happy guys i ever met.

it wasn't until much later, actually pretty recently, that i came to realization that i had it all wrong. the difference was, my father WASN'T "repressing" nor was he in denial. his attitude came from real emotional growth, forged in the fires of the war he had fought and the life he had lead up to then. i had unknowingly made a fundamental error in thinking and living. it wasn't just an act. it was real for him. i was just acting. i was acting like things didn't bother me, but they did. i was acting like things were OK but sometimes they just weren't.

you push enough pain and hurt down and it'll come back to bite you every time. and you repeat this process over and over for 30 years and it become the way you live. i just didn't know any differently. so i ran. ran from any pain or bad feeling. and ran towards the good ones. but always with the dread that the good ones just wouldn't last.

eventually, i came to a split in my life. the path i was on forked. one way was to keep running. the other, was the much more difficult job of starting to face things. starting to face the moment, even if it hurts. and working through those emotions and feelings. good or bad. a process that continues to this day and will likely continue until the day i exhale my last breath.

now that my father has passed away, i am left with the reality that i have to be my own foundation. i have to do the sometimes unpleasant work of growing up.

but even though he's not around physically, his ideal will always be with me in my heart and memories.

Expressing What's Really Going On

often times i have a hard time expressing my feelings and/or opinions. this is especially true with people i'm close to, such as an intimite partner or family member. i've known this about myself for a long time now, and i think i know why i am this way. knowing why we do something doesn't mean we know how to change it right away.

i think it all boils down to FEAR. i think i live my life defined by fear a lot more than i would like to admit. i'm not talking about outright, obvious fear, like a fear of fire or spiders or something. i mean a deep-seated, core fear that i'm not who i think i am, and i'm afraid you'll find that out. i'm afraid that if i really let you know what's going on inside, my hopes, dreams, opinions, ambitions, wants, desires, needs... then you're going to react negatively to them. and you're going to judge me, and cast me out.

so i find it "easier" sometimes to stay quiet and not rock the boat.

a perfect example. the woman i'm dating, J, and i were supposed to hang out yesterday night after i got off of work. i was supposed to go home, change, stop by my mom's house for dinner, then head over to her house to stay the night. well, at 5pm when i got off of work, i was in a FOUL mood and pretty tired from the workweek. i really didn't feel like coming over to her house and wanted to just stay at my place and go to bed early and sleep in late.

well, of course, i could've easily just said "oh, i'm tired, i won't be coming over tonite." easy, right? well, things, in my own sometimes warped mind, are more complicated than that. i'm weighing all kinds of factors... what if she thinks i'm rejecting her? is it fair for her to always come over to my house? is it fair to pull out at the last second like that, because what if she had something planned? what if i'm DISAPPOINTING her?

but the core of this issue is FEAR. fear of confrontation. fear of losing something, whether that'd be the relationship, good feelings, or even the thought of being a "good guy." it's crazy! when we were kids, if we didn't want to do something, we just said it. and that was that. but i think when we "grow up," layers upon layers of sometimes conflicting values, emotions, and responsibilites pile up and complicate matters. so a simple "oh, i'm tired," even though it's right on the tip of my tongue, just doesn't seem to come out.

so, if this is a situation that i see myself in more times than i would like, what exactly do i do about it? i KNOW it's happening the moment i'm doing it, or shortly thereafter. that's good. i can see the process taking place. so how do i change it, if that's what i want to do?

the way i see it, i've been doing this my whole life. just making a conscious decision is nice, but it's going to be SMALL, DISCREET steps and using REPETITION to make real, permanent, long-term changes. i'll start with making my feelings felt more often in the small stuff, like "oh i don't like that" or "i don't wanna do that" or "boy i'm tired today." doing this over and over and over again.

the hope is that by making small steps, i'm changing things on a behavioural, subconcious level. rather than a concious level.

so, you ask, what happened with my night with J?? well, she called back and basically gave me an out. she knew i was tired without me having to say it. call it woman's intuition. so we talked about it and i made a conscious commitment to start expressing my feelings and opinions more often with her, as practice.

just another small baby step.

Maybe So, Maybe Not

there's a zen parable about a chinese farmer. he was just your average farmer in china a few hundred years ago, but he developed a reputation for being the wisest man in his village. one day, his prized water buffalo ran away. his friends and neighbors said to him "oh, that's terrible, such bad luck!" to this he calmly replied, "maybe so, maybe not." a few days later, the water buffalo came back, and with it, was a female water buffalo. his friends said "wow, such good luck!" again, he replied "maybe so, maybe not." they were puzzled. a few days later, his son was riding the new female water buffalo in the rice fields and fell off and broke his leg. his friends came calling again "oh, that's such a terrible thing to happen." he calmly spoke again, "maybe so, maybe not." the next day, the local milita chief came by and rounded up all teenage boys to recruit for a war, but because his son had a broken leg, they let him stay. "hurray, such good luck!" the townspeople said.

"maybe so, maybe not," said the farmer.

when life happens, as it does to us all, i sometimes say to myself "oh, this is BAD" and want to run away from it. or i'll say "this is GREAT" and want to either prolong it or pile more good stuff on top of it. but both of these attitudes prevent me from living in the moment. according to buddhist philosophy, they form the root of suffering... attatchment. my instinct is to run away from pain and seek more pleasure and comfort. surely, this is a natural desire. we all want happiness and don't want pain. but by categorizing the events and things and people in my life, i'm assuming i know what's best for me and that i how the world works. and if i know anything, it's that i don't.

i've realized that i see the world through a very clouded, selfish lens. my "natural" instinct of self-preservation and self-seeking is productive to an extent. but when it causes me to miss out on what is real, then i'm in trouble.

my father passed away 7 weeks ago today. a few months before he died, he had given me a necklace of the buddha of compassion which was given to him from his own father. i've worn it almost every day since then. well, today, as i was getting dressed, i realized that i hadn't worn it in a few days (i don't wear it to work usually). but when i tried to find it, it wasn't in it's usual spot.

i started getting frantic and feeling a panic build in my chest. then i remembered the story of the zen farmer and his attitude towards life. i began to calm. with a more purposeful and steady state of mind, i systematically began looking for my father's necklace and after a little while, i found it, at the bottem of a napsack that i had used just a few days prior on a trip.

finding the necklace certainly was important to me. but i know in my heart that, even if i hadn't found that necklace, it was only a symbol. that not finding it would not have meant that i cared for my father any less. nor would it have been "bad." finding the necklace wasn't inherantly "good" either. it simply "was."

so i stayed in the present, neither running away nor towards. just doing what was in front of me. just doing and being. one breath and motion at a time.