Assorted Notes

THURSDAY 14 MARCH 2019

01:19

Tuesday evening I was waiting at a busy intersection in the city. As people rushed past me on their scooters and motorcycles, I thought how each and every one of these people had a story – something you could find out if you spent a minute or two with them.

Little did I know how I would have the opportunity the next evening to find out just how true that was.

11:24

So it came that my wife and I walked from the restaurant last night where we had dinner, to an ENT specialist in our neighbourhood where my wife wanted to go for her flu symptoms. As we walked past a series of businesses on the walkway, I saw from the corner of my eye a woman stepping out from a psychiatrist’s consulting room. (I noticed her because she looked for a moment like someone who was in a class of mine for a while.)

A few businesses further, we came to the doctor’s. I said goodbye to my wife, and continued on the same walkway.

Not thirty seconds later, I heard a voice calling out, “Hey!” Seeing that little English is heard in the streets of Taiwan, I immediately suspected that I was the target of the call. Looking back, I saw a woman approaching, who looked very much like the woman who had exited the psychiatrist’s practice.

“Where are you from?” she immediately demanded.

Here I have to explain that after twenty years in Taiwan, I have a policy about this question. If you approach me politely, and say, “Excuse me, may I ask, where are you from?” I will respond. If you shout at me from a distance, and then without any introduction demand information from me, I’m not going to answer you. Or, I’m not going to proceed the way the person might have assumed. “Where are you from?” I asked her back.

No answer, just a repetition of her question.

“Why do you want to know?” I asked her with a hint of a smile on my face. “Are you from the police?”

The next hour and a half would make it clear that this was the wrong question.

She then became aggressive. “Why you don’t want to talk to me?” And then, a few seconds later, a more bizarre question: “Why you and you wife so poor?” This mention of my wife confirmed that she had seen us together before she approached me; most likely, as I suspected, when we had walked past her at the psychiatrist’s. I ignored her, and as I rounded the corner of the building, I quickened my pace, now just about a minute away from our apartment.

At this point she had moved away from me, but continued to scream in my direction from the other side of the street. “Why you look down on me?” (Interesting twist, I thought: First we were “poor”, and now she felt I looked down on her.) A series of words I couldn’t make out followed the English.

Ten meters further, I heard her running towards me.

What does a man do when he is in public, he is aggressively confronted by a woman he does not know – whom he happened to have seen at a psychiatrist’s office, and the woman shortly afterwards charges at him? Not only did I not want to be attacked, I didn’t want to be in a position where I would have had to defend myself with possible force.

The by now well-known advice, “Run, Forest, run!” had been floating in my subconscious the past few days. And so I started running, in my plastic sandals, with the woman following in furious pursuit. In the haze of the moment I also heard something like a plastic bottle being thrown in my direction. For some reason I didn’t go straight up the street to our alley, but down the street behind our apartment building. I heard her scream, “I’m going to call the police!” As I ran, my mind translated her further utterances in Chinese: Stop him! Stop him! He …

Almost at the other side of the street I noticed a man observing the whole affair. He first looked at her, then at me, and then he grabbed my arm. I pulled away, and told him in English, “She’s crazy! Call the police!” He seemed to be unsure of what to do, and I took the opportunity to run past the woman in the direction from where I came, around the corner, past another few shops, around another corner, into our alley; unlocked the door to our apartment building, rushed up four sets of stairs, and called my wife as I arrived at our apartment door.

Out of breath I told her: “There’s a crazy woman who just attacked me in the street! I think she may be on her way to you!” My wife was naturally unsure of what was going on, but I could hear the woman screaming in the background. “She’s already there!” I said.

In the apartment I put my wife’s soup and dumplings and her bottle of Coke on the coffee table (“Forest” even had to run with a plastic bag with food in his hand), got myself some socks and put on my sneakers – to be better able to run away, and called the police as I was leaving the apartment to go and save my wife. I gave the officer on the other end our address, and told him about the unstable one who had attacked me. I also informed him of my concern that my wife might be her next target.

Not more than a minute later, I was back in the walkway to the doctor’s office. As I had expected, the woman who chased me was standing outside, now surrounded by four police officers. “That’s him! That’s him!” she shouted in Chinese, with a fierce finger pointing in my direction. I calmly walked past the police, into the consulting room, and told my wife: That’s the woman I was talking about.

For the next few minutes, I explained to the police – one had already taken hold of my arm – my side of the story. Seeing that my liberty – in the truest sense possible – was at stake, I reckoned it was pertinent to inform them that her narrative, wrong as I knew it to be, may not have been a malicious lie, but the figment of a mind that may not be one hundred percent healthy. I prompted them to follow me. We proceeded down the walkway in the direction of the psychiatrist’s consulting room. There, I told them, in somewhat incorrect Chinese, that I was 99 percent sure I had seen her leave the room no more than one minute before she had confronted me.

Certainly essential to mention at this point that I fully understand that there are people with mental disorders, and people suffering from chemical imbalances. I don’t look down on people with health problems – physically or otherwise. The fact that I referred to her as crazy was not a medical diagnosis, but a simple remark based on her bizarre behaviour at my expense in public. I also don’t hold it against anyone if they want to or need to see a psychiatrist. Why would I? Do I look down on my wife who wants to see a doctor for her cough and sore throat? However, if a person acts aggressively towards me in public, and threatens my wife’s well-being, and calls the police and fabricates a story that I attacked her or something (it later came out that I had supposedly stolen money from her while she was speaking to me, which explains the “Why are you so poor?” comment), I am definitely not going to keep it to myself that I reckon she might be capable of believing figments of her imagination, based on the fact that I had seen her at a psychiatrist.

The police officers – three of them had accompanied me, probably in case I decided to start running again, then asked the receptionist at the psychiatrist if there had been a woman with them a few minutes ago. The receptionist came out on the walkway, looked down in the direction where the loud one was still waiting with the other officer, and slowly nodded her head.

I could see how the officers’ attitude towards me changed. I again explained in Chinese (for which I would at least have gotten a C+) what had happened, how she had tried to talk to me, how she had been rude and that I didn’t want to talk to her, how she had shouted at me from the other side of the road and threw a bottle at me, how she had charged at me and I how I felt compelled to run-Forest-run!, how a man grabbed me in the street (did she grab you, the officer enquired in Chinese), and how I first called my wife at home and then the police. The one officer pointed to the CCTV cameras in the area, with the implication that it would surely confirm whose version of events were accurate.

We then went back to the other doctor’s office. The other patients who were waiting with my wife in the small room looked more sympathetically at us, gesturing that we should calm down and sit – that everything would be all right.

Because I had also called the police, they wanted me to go with them to their station to make a statement. Because my wife would remain to see the doctor, I wanted assurance that the Chinese woman would not be in the area. They assured us that she had already left with a female officer.

I climbed in the back of the police car and drove the kilometre or so to their station. After arriving there, one lead me to what was clearly the back of the building, through a door into what looked like a basement, past a barking dog in a cage, and into a long, narrow office with padded walls, a few desks, and a TV high on a shelf with a blue screen and two Chinese characters gliding across the screen. The one officer then explained that everything was okay and I just had to make a statement. I gave him my Taiwan ID card, and he asked me to relate the whole story again. Which I proceeded to do, in my best Chinese. After a few more questions, he read back what he had written, with me asking for clarification here and there.

Along with my ID card, I also saw the woman’s ID card, and I surmised why I was in the basement: The woman was also in the building and they probably didn’t want her to flare up again.

A policeman in civilian clothes had since brought my wife, and after I shook hands with the officer who had taken my statement, we walked the few blocks home.

All in all, the incident probably ended not too badly. Four things counted in my favour, and I think the woman didn’t expect one of them. I was back at the scene within a few minutes, despite the presence of the police, and in spite of the fact that she was pointing at me as the person who had done X, Y or Z; I had called the police myself and told them I was concerned about my wife’s safety because of this person’s behaviour; I could tell my side of the story in Chinese; I could share with them that I suspected she had a health problem that could have influenced her narrative.

One somewhat unpleasant consequence is that quite a few people in the neighbourhood where we have been living for almost five years saw me bolting down the street with a bag of food in my hand, with a woman following anxiously behind me, all the while screaming that she was going to call the police and that I had done something to her. I have to face the other residents in this neighbourhood again, walk down the same streets and alleys, and walk past the same businesses where I had climbed into the back of a police car.

One should probably just have a thick skin, I encouraged myself, and keep your head high. What other choice do you have after all?

Oh yes, and I may have to think twice before talking to strangers in the street again.

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SATURDAY, 9 MARCH 2019

Like probably most thinkers outside the mainstream, developmental biologist Bruce Lipton has his critics. Nevertheless, everything I’ve listened to and have read over the last few years from Lipton gives me the closest I’ve come to an integrated worldview since my earliest programming as an Evangelical Christian: An explanation connecting the physical world to the non-physical world, the where-you-come-from with the where-you-are-going – or where you could go if you do the right things.

* * *

One of the most appealing aspects of Lipton’s explanation of how things work, especially as described in his book, Biology of Belief, is that it empowers the individual. You are responsible for your own life – much more than you ever could have imagined.

I understand that the thought can be extremely unpleasant for some people, who already feel that they aren’t good enough, or that they are not doing well enough. And now they have to hear they themselves might be responsible for their own misery!

Of course, it’s complicated. After all, human beings are complex organisms. The world is complex. Numerous factors play a role in how good or how bad you do in your life, including health-wise.

Belief in your own abilities to positively affect your life, and recognition that you are largely responsible for your own life, does, however, have practical value. If people already have disagreement with this point, there is a good chance they will undermine their own abilities to positively affect their lives.

Some people might point out other factors that also play a role in your physical well-being – things like toxins in the environment or genetic mutations that affect how cells function. Of course there are other factors! This is not a black-and-white issue. Even if toxins in the environment affect your health, or if genetic mutations lead to disease, belief in your own abilities to positively affect your quality of life and health will continue to make a difference.

* * *

It’s like a completed circle. You look at biology, physics, chemistry, math, and so on, and finally at quantum physics – protons, electrons, and neutrons that act in all sorts of unexpected ways; energy that is the basic element of everything that exists, and perception that affects how cells function. You move away from religion and the “spiritual” world you can’t touch but that is supposed to affect your life, and you end up with wonderful things that scientists sometimes find difficult to explain, and that, if you look at it carefully and think about it, are not too far from the meaning of the word, “magic”.

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FRIDAY, 15 FEBRUARY 2019

15:55

Over the last few years, I have become intensely aware of the difference it makes in your life how you think about yourself, even how you talk – with yourself, and about yourself.

No one can make statements about what types of challenges other people could face. There will always be people whose condition is such that “positive thinking” may not make much of a difference. But is that reason enough to underestimate the exceptional ability that people do have to make a difference in their lives? Specific people have specific problems, but to dismiss as insignificant good advice that can make an astronomical difference to many people’s lives because it won’t (in your opinion) make a difference to a specific person’s life, does not do anyone favours in my opinion.

I would rather encourage someone to try something than to give them an excuse not to try it. Maybe something doesn’t work. Then you try something else – and you don’t have to feel embarrassed because something doesn’t or didn’t work for you.

I reckon the whole story of positive psychology is more than just a bumper sticker or the straw man some people make of it which they then criticise. I don’t think I am exaggerating when I say that in many cases positive psychology is the difference between life and death, or the difference between a miserable life and an exceptional one.

Of course, it does matter how you share this type of opinion or advice with people.

* * *

I can’t say I’ve had a Damascus Road experience and now know what the truth is and everything is hunky-dory. It is simply a case of looking at what works for me and looking at what works for other people. And if the results turn out to be positive, I’ll throw more of it in the pot and continue brewing. That’s certainly what most people do, isn’t it? And for the record, I even throw bumper stickers and posters in the pot, and if the bubbling brew doesn’t explode, I add it to the recipe.

* * *

The idea isn’t to restore your health overnight or regain the use of your limbs (as good as that would be). The idea is to do the best you can with the situation you are in, or with the condition you are suffering from. Thinking of yourself as a victim will bring about a dramatically different result from thinking of yourself as a powerful agent of ability and personal transformation.

People like to argue about the accuracy of words or phrases (“Does X really mean Y?”) when they should rather focus on the practical value of an approach or outlook. “How valuable will it be for me on a daily basis?” is the question you should rather ask yourself.

19:55

You shouldn’t get involved at all in an argument about the simplicity or not of positive psychology as a factor in one’s life. It’s a bit like someone saying vegetables are healthy for you, with someone else responding with, “But not all vegetables are purple.” To respond with, “But I didn’t say all vegetables are purple. I only said vegetables are healthy for you,” would be a waste of time. It will be to move away from the real point, in the case of positive psychology, the value of positive self-perception, and an acceptance of the astronomical abilities that (most) people have to influence their own well-being.

The whole argument of the simplicity or not of a factor is in any case absurd – not because it is absurd that X can be simple, but about the meaning of the words. After all, what does it mean to say, “It’s not that simple”? First of all, what does Person A mean by simple, and what does Person B mean by that? Second, how sure is Person A that he is not just making a straw man of Person B’s argument, and then attacking the straw man?

Wednesday, 17 April 2019

I would rather overestimate the value of positive thinking, than underestimate it because I define myself or identify myself to others as someone who doesn’t have time for “New Age mumbo jumbo”, and rob myself in the process of the potentially enormous effect positive thoughts can have on my behaviour, on my experience of reality, and on the results I produce every day.

Thursday, 18 April 2019

A reader of the book, Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life by Martin E.P. Seligman, makes the following comment in their review of the book on Amazon.com:

“‘Learned optimism’ is based on the idea of ‘learned helplessness,’ or the theory that if a person believes that he/she has no control over the bad things that happen to him/her – that bad things just occur randomly and for no reason – then the person gives up trying to find ways to make his/her life better and as a result he/she becomes depressed. ‘Learned optimism’ is designed to teach a person with ‘learned helplessness’ that while he/she might not have control over life’s events, what he/she does have control of is his/her own thinking about those events.”

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SATURDAY, 19 JANUARY 2019

When people criticise something they know very little about – or something they have never critically considered or investigated, they are like ventriloquist dolls. Their mouths are moving, but they are not really the ones talking. They are simply playing back other people’s opinions that they have “recorded” and that they had considered authoritative at that moment.

TUESDAY, 12 FEBRUARY 2019

A series of statements made by a student in a documentary about Evergreen University comes down to the following:

1. There is a problem in society.

2. We expect people to say the problem is not as serious as we say it is.

3. If you claim the problem is not as serious as we say it is, you are part of the problem.

4. The problem, and all who do not actively oppose it, must be combatted with all necessary might.

Checkmate?

1. You are guilty of Offense X.

2. We expect you to say you’re not guilty.

3. Your efforts to deny your guilt prove that we are right about you.

4. Guilty people must be punished.

WEDNESDAY, 13 FEBRUARY 2019

For a long time I was careful about what I wrote. It was my habit to anticipate how people would respond to something that I had written, to anticipate what counter-argument they would make. I would then usually interrupt myself in the process of writing to pre-empt such an argument.

I would also have applied what can only be described as self-censorship. If I thought of something I wanted to put on paper, I would consider labels that people might attach to me because of the statement or opinion. If I didn’t like the label, or I didn’t think I could launch an effective defence – even if the label would be false, I would rather not write what I had wanted to write, or I wouldn’t publish what I had already written.

However, over the past two years, I have become aware of the fact that people are being destroyed on social media on an almost daily basis for something they said or wrote, sometimes years ago, and which is now in conflict with the accepted doctrines of the day. Even if you didn’t mean something like they claim, or even if you’ve come to different insights, or if you want to argue that that one opinion or statement does not represent you as a person, or that it should be seen as part of a broader discussion or series of statements, you soon realise you’re wasting your time. Defending yourself is futile – the mob has already found you guilty.

This brought me to the conclusion that one should just say what you want to say, and forget what other people might think. If you are publicly chastised, at least you gave your honest opinion. Isn’t that better than living in trembling fear of a mob that is becoming more intolerant as we speak?

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SUNDAY, 13 JANUARY 2019

Primary objective, still: To make my life worth living.

This comes down to living my life the way I like it, because I have confidence in myself that I will do a good job.

Bonus: I don’t presume I can teach anyone anything, but if I have the opportunity to share one or two useful insights or snippets of advice with someone else, that will also be good.

TUESDAY, 22 JANUARY 2019

21:17

With a new perspective, and a handful of new insights, it seems in retrospect that I had some highly eccentric ideas over the years.

One was my view on being happy. I always believed that one should be careful about it, because just as you find yourself in a condition that can be described as happiness, something happens and … how silly wouldn’t you feel then?

The other silly idea was about money, for which one had to necessarily do tricks, jump through burning hoops, and spend some of the best hours of your weekdays in soul-crushing tedium. It had to be that way, I always thought, because money is not your friend.

22:08

For a long time I cited the terms “struggle” and “creation” as words of special significance. The idea was to struggle against things, and eventually reach a stage of your life where you could focus more on creative endeavours.

However, it is important to point out that I was always careful about translating into Afrikaans the word “struggle”. It did not necessarily mean struggling, but rather wrestling with something, and overcoming it. This obstacle that one had to overcome could be a disability, a toxic relationship, or a situation from which you had to escape. The essence of the idea was positive, and creative (even before you came to the creation part). It was about looking at the cards you were dealt, and then working out the best game plan. And when you achieved a breakthrough and you no longer had to spend so much energy and time on this wrestling with an issue, you could apply your time and energy to creating something – literature or any other art form, or creating in any other way a good, fulfilling, productive life.

TUESDAY, 23 JANUARY 2019

Wednesday, 12 December 2018: “Eventually, I would be able to say that the process of becoming financially independent has been enjoyable, stimulating, fulfilling, and extremely interesting, as virtually everything I have read and applied came down to improving myself.”

I just thought I’d underline this point: If you want to make more money, improve yourself.

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