Finding one's passion, and the nature of relationships

Shucks! I remember so little of what I heard last night from Wan. Ok, I should go review our extant Skype conversation. And it was very little. Soon after we started the conversation on Skype, she had to go offline – the downside of living in the 佛教學係dorms. So I called her…and so those words went unrecorded. Slowly, though, they come back to me.

One very important point – I repeated this to my 何老師today – concerns the right to give up. I was asking Wan, initially only half-interested in the answer, as to how one can find one’s direction in life. The answer in brief is to find what one enjoys doing BUT there’s a qualifier – one must fully try something before one has the RIGHT TO DECIDE. To Wan this means, once one decides to attempt something, there should be some concrete and measureable goal to achieve, as a waypoint of sorts. And, to her, despite all the possible pains and tribulations one might have to go through in pursuit of that goal, one cannot give up. To bear the difficulties is a requisite to deciding whether something works for one. The way to decide? Amidst the difficulties and tribulations, one deeply enjoys the activity, and derives satisfaction from it. So she felt my desire to learn translation by setting my eyes upon the completion of a book is a good start, for there is a visible end.

I never quite thought of things this way. As in, I’ve thought about the “right” to give up, but never thought about the need to immerse oneself in an activity to a certain extent decided upon beforehand to qualify to have that “right”. But it seems to make sense. I mean…I have for these many years not tried hard to achieve anything. Like I said, I ask very little of life. No…I ask for much but I do nothing to make sure I deserve it. Commitment to a cause is necessary payment to receive, even though such receiving continues to be a miraculous one, and not, in big part, caused by one’s efforts. So for the first time in my life, yesterday I called up the Gwyneth, organizer of the current round of BIA, and told her I wanted to 「爭取」the opportunity to join the team on the trip - on the grounds that the team could benefit from my suggestions and that I could rethink and re-understand what I learnt during BIA2009. Anyway, an update to that, I can go with them but I need to finance my involvement on my own.

Wan also shared this with me: for two to depend「依靠」on each other, they must firstbe firmly established on their own. Their lives must, individually, have strong foundations. Otherwise, any sort of dependence will only cause both to stumble and falter. In a very deep sense, a relationship is always about oneself. So to love “others” one must first love oneself. To project one’s dependence on others, one must first be able to rely on oneself. It’s counterintuitive, but deep in my guts, that makes so much sense. To not give others what one does not first desire, is, in this sense, really about treating yourself right.

Anyway, the thing that is left to do now is to determine how I should spend my two months in Taiwan, in December 2011 and January 2012. And after I decide, I should stand by it, and complete whatever it is that I want to do.