Category: Essays

When cycling yesterday I came up with this thought experiment.

Whenever in a crowd, try to imagine the relationships between people you see and draw imaginary bubbles surrounding those who seem to love or care about each other.

Parents walking with their kids. Friends sharing a motorcycle ride. A random youth helping a grandmother cross the road.

Being in a crowd makes me feel uncomfortable. And living in Java, the most populated island in the world, there are crowds almost everywhere.

But as I notice and look around, I can see those bubbles wherever I go.

As it turns out, love is also everywhere.

My car vibrates less and the road feels smooth all of a sudden. I see fresh line of asphalt, looking at the same time darker and shinier than the older surface on the other side. The holes I was preparing to avoid are no longer there.

Covid has subsided, and now every morning I drive my daughter to school. It is not a long drive, maybe twenty minutes one-way. However, the way to go is through a stretch of road that was clearly not designed for the capacity it has to sustain every morning and afternoon nowadays. It is narrow, and packed with hundreds of motorcycles.

In general, motorcycles in Indonesia behave and move fluidly. It’s like water. If you give them space, they will fill it. If you fill a space, they will flow around you. It almost feels like a dance. At times, it feels meditative.

Unless it is rainy season, like it is now. On rainy season, potholes grow on our roads, like mold spreading on leftover food. And potholes add an extra dimension, extra verticality, that makes motorcycles movement harder to predict. Sometimes you think they’ll go straight, only to see them jerk left last minute, nay, last second, to avoid a hole that was unseen minutes before.

I don’t know why potholes grow during rainy season. Maybe poor drainage after a rain leaves a lot of debris on the road. Then cars press these debris through the asphalt, chipping and starting the hole. Then each day, little by little, more and more vehicles crowdsource the growth by crushing into them unknowingly.

The holes just keep going bigger. I have lost count, but there were easily fifty potholes on the way to our daughter’s school. Some are wider than our car. Because the road is narrow, I often have no choice but to hit these holes.

So I was surprised to see the new patch of asphalt. They weren’t there twenty four hours before. It’s a busy road, so it must’ve been fixed late at night. The holes had been there for weeks, maybe months. Evidently, it only took a few hours to fix. Evidently, we have the tools and technology and expertise to do so. It can’t be too expensive as well: all these cars and motorcycles are taxed highly. And the result is decent enough. It’s not to the level of Japanese people overnight fixing a road split into two by earthquake, but I have no real complains.

Yet someone, somewhere, made the decision to let the issue linger and let a lot of people suffer, even though it really doesn’t take long to get things fixed.

On the road to our daughter’s school, I often think about these people. I’m trying not to, but maybe one day when holes have stopped growing on our roads.

A common method in meditation is to focus on breathing, try to notice fleeting thoughts that show up, and let them go. My usual visualisation method is to imagine being in a wide field, watching my thoughts show up as clouds in the sky, and letting them drift away from where I sit. My initial assumption was that the more I meditate, the emptier my mind becomes, the less fleeting thoughts would appear, and eventually that makes me a calmer person.

But maybe that’s not right. Maybe the most important task during meditation is the noticing. Once I notice a thought, it’s already a win. It means I’m building the skill and mental muscles that are needed to notice thoughts. So in a counter-intuitive way, more fleeting thoughts are better, as it gives more opportunity to improve the noticing skill.

A lot of problems in my mind seem to come from instant reactions to an external stimulation. It’s the “lizard brain” at work. It’s flight-or-flight, it’s fast, and often it’s not the most appropriate reaction to something. A better way is to notice and intercept those reactions as they come, and take the time to assess the situation and formulate better reactions. And that’s where the noticing skill comes in. It’s the prerequisite. The starting point for any change. As the skill gets stronger, hopefully the intercepting becomes easier and easier.

A few days ago, I woke up with one thought in my mind: “You know what? I’m going to not worry about anything today. I’m very good at worrying anyway, so I can always do it again tomorrow if things don’t work out today.”

I used to be a carefree person. Then I became a parent. Slowly, I developed an obsession to read the future, to catch problems before they happen, to see further ahead, all in the name of making life as safe as possible for our children. Slowly, my brain became more and more focused on thinking about worst case scenarios, to make sure that I could handle them properly. I started to worry about a lot of things, things that eventually never happened, but would nevertheless cost a lot of my mental energy.

The worrying became so frequent and strong that it’s affecting my physical health. And life continues being unpredictable, as unforeseen problems keep happening. So it was quite a different day, the day I woke up and decided not to worry for one day.

I felt lighter. I realised something new, that my worrying and problems that arise are entirely separate. Problems will show up anyway whether I worried about them or not beforehand. Worrying does nothing to problems that actually show up. And the amount of energy I have to use to fix a problem is likely the same, whether I worried about it or not beforehand.

Or, in other words, worrying is an extra work that’s not particularly efficient or useful.

That day I did not live completely worry-free. Some worries still crept into my mind. We had to do some errands outside, and during a pandemic, that’s a good enough reason to worry. I noticed those worries, and tried my best to talk to them and let them go. It didn’t work that well, but I suppose that’s understandable. I’ve never done any of this before! But overall, I felt pretty good about it.

In a weird meta sort of way, I’m also worried that not worrying at all is not the perfect solution. I still need to be able to foresee some problems and prevent them from happening, if I could. But I think I should be able to dial down the intensity. I should be able to trust myself more, that if something unpredictable happens, I will have some sort of ability to handle problems that arise.

Personally, I think a powerful way to change myself is the fact that I love to experiment. I enter a lot of new hobbies out of curiosity. Just to see what it’s like. So it feels like a good idea to tell myself to try not worrying for a day. Just to see what would happen.

If the experiment fails, I can always go back to worrying tomorrow. Or, maybe the experiment will be successful enough to help me delay the worrying further to the future. Who knows. Why don’t I try and see?

It was about a year ago that the first case of COVID-19 was discovered in Wuhan, China. The virus has been and is still affecting the world massively, and in this post I’m going to recount how it has affected my family and me.

On February 2020, I found and bought the single remaining bottle of hand sanitizer spray, in a supermarket in a neighboring city. My own city did not seem to have them in stock anywhere, it felt at that time. We were on a vacation to celebrate our second child’s birthday. There has been no official announcements, but everyone seemed to instinctually know that something terrible was about to unfold.

Also on February I was scheduled to talk at a conference in Bangkok, Thailand. The conference was cancelled. At that time the decision to cancel was rather controversial. After a few more weeks, it would then prove to be the exact right thing to do. Anyhow, we also had to cancel our personal trip that would have happened afterward. There were no refunds, because at that time our destination had not been declared to be in emergency.

Back at home, at the beginning, an inflatable pool was our main tool to entertain children, especially since schools were closed. As it turns out, inflating the pool was easy. It was draining the water once everyone was done that’s tiring. The excess water also wasn’t great to the grass on the backyard.

I told my wife on my birthday in March that that was the worst birthday I’ve ever had. Anxiety level was high, everything was unpredictable, and our government did not seem to treat the situation with the right level of urgency. Masks and sanitizers were hard to find, local information even more so. We had to fend for ourselves by doing what we thought was best: not leaving the house, getting a lot of vitamins, and pretending to be cheerful to our kids as if nothing had happened.

I had a few scheduled work travels that had to be cancelled. Team meetings were replaced by multiple-day Zoom calls. They didn’t feel great, like having instant noodle for lunch instead of a proper meal. It felt great as an idea, but left me with regrets.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons for Nintendo Switch deserves its own paragraph here because it definitely has been the video game of the pandemic. It soothed not just our family, but seemingly the whole world. Even just the opening song was enough to give us a warm, fuzzy feeling. Our daughter played hours and hours of it. Her reading skill spiked up from reading conversations in the game. She memorized a lot of songs from it. One of the songs she turned into her nightly lullaby. She was not the best decorator, so our island in the game was an ocean of trash, but at least she’s happy.

Other games that get a lot of play time: Goat Simulator, Lego World.

Oh, Eid was cancelled. If there is a single holiday that’s uncancellable in Indonesia, it’s Eid. Yet it was, indeed, cancelled. Instead of visiting families, we had Zoom calls in the early morning.

We found that my wife was pregnant some time at the end of last year. I was so anxious I wasn’t able to sleep or eat for a whole day, something that never happened to me before.

Pregnancy during pandemic required many changes from what we’ve known from previous experiences. We had to avoid our usual hospital for doing regular check-ups, because the hospital was used to treat COVID-19 patients. We found another doctor who was good, had a practice at her own house, and the place had proper health measures in place. Masks required, outdoors waiting area, good airflow.

A few days ago I heard the news that the doctor and her husband got the virus, despite all that. I suppose it’s inevitable if you’re a doctor and meeting a lot of different people every single day. When we were there sometimes we’d see patients who were clearly coughing but still brought themselves there.

When it was time for my wife to give birth, we had to pick a different hospital also. It was a place that’s not familiar to us. We were asked to arrive the night before the operation, and the hospital was eerily quiet. Visitors were generally not allowed, but still it felt very unusual to be in an almost empty place. That night it felt like we were the only persons in there.

At the beginning of the year, I had thought that by the pregnancy’s due date on August, the virus situation would have already died down. I was so, so wrong.

Anyway we picked a room and stayed. Right away the level of service did not seem to reach the previous hospital that helped us with our two previous children. But overall it was comfortable.

The operation went smoothly, and we stayed for a few days after. It was the three of us there for those few days, with pretty much no visitors, which is something completely unusual if you’re a family with newborn in Java. The culture here dictates that pretty much everyone goes to visit a new baby at the hospital. The stark quietness gave us a great opportunity to relax and recover. During lulls I was able to play quite a bit of video games, watch Netflix, and rediscover the joy of Starbucks’s cafe latte. We also particularly enjoyed the hot tea that the hospital provided. It was the perfect amount of sweetness and warmth to help counter our stress.

Overall, our kids have been doing relatively fine, thankfully. Our youngest are growing healthily. For our first two it’s been a lot more games and videos than I’m comfortable with, but those are also important moments of rest for us parents. It’s a tricky thing to balance.

Online school has been particularly difficult for our first child. Even at the beginning it was obvious to us that the kindergarten we picked for her wasn’t particularly tech-savvy, but we thought it won’t be a big problem since our main goal was for her to gain new friends and socialize at the school. Who would have thought that school would suddenly move to Zoom? The hardest part for us has been to figure out what’s essential for her to learn during these lost school months, and what’s okay to let go. I don’t think we have it completely right. We’re trying.

And finally here we are, a year later. Like the constant hum of air conditioners, the presence of the virus and the uncertainty it brings keep on playing in the back of my head. It remains a factor to consider on top of all the things happening in our live. I see that things are getting worse in many parts of the world, especially those entering winter season. In my part of the world people have relaxed by a lot, even though testing is still low and there’s a lot of unknowns.

At the beginning I tried to keep myself updated with news, hoping that one day a glimmer of hope will appear. It was very tiring emotionally, and eventually I had to tune them out. Recently there were news about two vaccines, of Pfizer and of Moderna, that have over 90% success rate. These are actual, backed-by-science, glimmer of hope. Especially since there are also other promising vaccines in development with a timeline to share their findings in the near future.

A year from now, there’s a good chance things will be back to relative normalcy. Before that, with vaccinations, things will get easier and easier. Hopefully this writing will be it, and there will be no “Year Two” post. Hopefully, soon it will be a comfortable and relieving descent after this whole year of exhausting, foggy climb.

As I grow older, the more I find that a lot of my life’s balance and sanity depend on how I consume:

It’s how I consume oxygen.

It’s how I consume food.

It’s how I consume time.

It’s how I consume other people’s thoughts and updates.

It’s how I consume my own thoughts.

It’s how I consume news.

It’s how I consume what I need and what I want.

What goes in, reshapes me.

The root of my unhappiness seems to be unfulfillment of my wants.

The unfulfillment is sometimes something that I can’t control. There are external factors that can cause it.

The wants, however, definitely come from within me. They are something I can control. The less I want things, the less I face unhappiness.

This gets confusing because it feels to me that what brings happiness is fulfillment of my wants. So if I reduce my wants to avoid unhappiness, I have fewer source of happiness as well.

So perhaps the clue is to decouple wants and happiness. I read in a book once that it is efforts toward mastery that brings true happiness. Maybe that is the key. Maybe I should spend more time there, instead of giving too much time to wants.

Lastly, perhaps another true source of happiness is being grateful for what I already have. If I can do this, I feel it can naturally reduce wants as well.

So, going forward, this is what I want to focus on:
– Reducing my wants, by
– Getting happiness from mastering things, and
– Getting happiness from being grateful.

A few days ago, on July 29th, 2018, we happened to be around the city of Macau. By chance, a new Apple Store was to be opened right next door to our hotel.

The doors were opened by 6 PM, and it was quite surprising to see the long queue and the huge crowds at the entrance. I had visited a different Apple Store about 30 minutes of walk from this one the previous day, and the difference in vibe and noise were glaring.

Fortunately, it didn’t take long before the queue shortened, and we eagerly joined. Here’s my video of the event:

The store features a 1 mm thick marble layer on the outside of the second floor, as well as bamboo plants outside and outside.

In all honesty the event feels kind of awkward to me, with all the cheering and excitement even during the queue before entering. It feels a bit funny to see people getting excited about all the products here in such a crowded place, while there’s a better option just 30 minutes away. Still, it is a one-of-a-kind event and I’m happy to be able to experience it.

The video was taken with an iPhone 8 with the DJI Osmo Mobile 2 gimbal.