Stepping out

I haven’t written for a few days, busy traveling to the other side of the world. I am now attending an ice-skating event in Boston where my daughter is competing. The event takes place in five rinks under one roof, in the New England Sports Center in Marlborough, a pleasant centuries-old town in a clean green landscape. The event brings together competitors, parents, friends, spectators, coaches, judges, organizers and sales people. The skaters are pushing their limits on the ice, making new friends, trading pins, and having fun.

It is a great experience for the competitors, to find out where they can do well, sometimes better than hoped, other times less than expected, or just different. Coming out onto the ice, where the entire rink is waiting just for you, is an exhilarating experience, and I see it over and over here, albeit through my own eyes of a spectator.

My own experience is of stepping out on a stage to perform with my sax. Every time it is a great moment, with both potential, expectation and vulnerability throbbing through my system. Until I let the music take over and lead its own life.

Competitive events and performances help me see myself in a different way. A close friend has discovered new dimensions in art expression by submitting art work for weekly collage and poetry challenges. I believe there is more for me to discover as well, and for everyone else too. The youngest competitor here is 3 and the oldest 81. Watching both, I saw a similar spark in their eyes. The opportunity to demonstrate their skills. The promise of reaching out to a new experience. The courage to step out and glide to stardom of the moment.

Embracing risk

My writing period is now. I need writing periods, wherever I am and whatever I do. Not writing would be my biggest mistake. Writing is a big mistake too, in a way, because it makes me do what I fear most. Is that a mistake? I call it so, because the safe road of correct action will not bring out my potential. I read that Ralph Waldo Emerson’s aunt Mary advised him to “always do what you are afraid to do”. I take that advice too. Change is natural, and change is needed to grow. But it is easy for me to be afraid of making changes. Gail Sher wrote that the risks of not making changes are even greater. I risk missing my life. I will not take that risk. So I write and keep writing. I change and I keep changing. I embrace these.

Whose team?

It is marvelous to become part of a sports team representing a country.

It is even more special if the team is not from your country. My daughter and I happily joined the Philippine SM MegaMall team at the ISI Recreational Worlds Recreational Team Championship for ice skating in Boston. She as skater, and I as driver.

Being in the company of Filipinos is very enjoyable. I find them warm, kind, polite, energetic, creative, humorous and more. I have enjoyed living there for 14 years now. It seems like only yesterday that I arrived… :-)

Happy now

This is the third of my triplet on happiness.

I found that there is only one time I can be happy, and that is the present moment, Now.

It is so much easier to be happy now. Now is open, and fairly simple.

I experience no pressure in the Now, no trouble. My future and past hold many things, memories, expectations, pleasure, guilt, and more.

The present is wide open to my choice. I can do what I want. I choose to be happy.


Photograph: Street poster, Singapore

Happy content

I experience happiness as something that affects how I feel and what I do. It warms me, and it focuses my activities. It also reduces my need for things, external things and people. It helps me share.

When I don’t feel like “doing” a lot, I can experience happiness at a deeper, quiet level as contentment. It’s purely at the level of Being, without action. It’s almost like feeling boneless, of pure relaxation, in the words of a friend. It’s like the first and the last Great Place.

For me, happiness is inward and outward. It rises from inside, connects to others and to what I do, and I find my need for “having” becomes less.

Contentment for me is purely at the level of Being. There is no action, there is the absence of action. There is great presence, and no need.

I found that happiness and contentment are always there, I can “go there” anytime I want.

Photograph: Singapore Art Museum Fiction@Love

Happy smile

Being happy is a decision. Everyone looks for happiness, and the harder I look, the more difficult it is to find. For me, being happy has everything to do with myself, with what I want and decide.

I also know how to get help, by smiling! People think that smiling is the result of being happy. I found that smiling is also my trigger to happiness. It unlocks the happiness that is already inside me. In Dao, smiling unblocks my inner pathways, connects my own dots better. And then I find that I don’t need those external dots so much. I have enough within myself.

My experience of happiness is deeper when my smile is connected to my heart. Smiling from face to heart, it becomes an inner smile. Here is what I do when I have a few minutes:

I think of a person or situation I love, really like
I focus on that experience, and hold the image in front of my closed eyes
I smile, it’s easy, I just let the corners of my mouth rise
Then I let the image move down to my heart
I let my heart glow with the pleasure of the experience
I feel my heart grow bigger, and bright red in color, smiling
My smiling heart is now connected to my smiling face
I feel warm, contented, happy
I wish to share the happiness, from inside out
…


Photograph: Singapore Art Museum Fiction@Love

Inside out

Most of my writing on this blog has been focused on spiritual growing. I wondered last night if I should continue to write that way. You see, I don’t plan what to write. I create space and time to write, a session to look forward to. Once in front of the keyboard, I write what comes to me… I like it that way. No intention, I want to be like a bamboo, catching the breeze. Who knows from what side it blows today. Surely, I will find out.

My writing is inside out. I think it is a phase I am in, it is what confronts me, what grows in me at the moment. I can’t help it. I read other people’s blogs and many are colorful and fascinating tales of the world around them. There is more focus on the outside. For me, the best things in life now come to me from the inside. Or it is inner awareness that helps me be more open, to connect better.

I see beauty and significance in new things. The past few days my faithful partner, my new Fujifilm FinePix F30 camera helped me to capture images of art. Hotel lobbies are nice places to find interesting artwork. Even elevator walls, go look at those in the Intercontinental Hotel in Bangkok!

I often noticed that technology has quirks, but the advance in digital photography is amazing. This week I forgot to take all my cables to charge and transfer pictures from my camera. But the battery is so powerful, it can shoot more than 500 shots on a single charge. So my only constraint is that I cannot upload the pictures yet, have to wait until I get home later today. Anyway, I write my posts in my notebook, and transfer them later to Blogger.


Sunday afternoon 9 July, Bangkok airport

Angels show

I’m sitting in the stylish and modern Thai airways lounge in Bangkok, waiting for my flight. I thought I would be on the morning flight to Manila, but it turned out that I was booked on the afternoon flight. I didn’t look carefully, and the flight was full.

I had the chance to observe the goings on at the standby counter today, and see polite and agitated people gather to try and make their connections work. A particularly agitated man from China who was bumped off a flight because of overbooking said that money was not the problem, but his wife and kids would be waiting at the airport. We are so connected these days. Actually he could get them on the phone and explain the situation. Problem solved. Other people patiently waited for their arrangements to fly out of the City of Angels. Some were resting on the floor. Golfers wheeled their trolleys laden with golf bags. Saffron-clad monks stood quietly observing the whirling froth of humanity.

Points of departure and arrival are always interesting to observe, and today I have the time. Arrivals are of course different, and generally joyful, as the film Love Actually showed us. The departure area has a rushed atmosphere of urgency. People in front of me were arguing with airport staff to use the Thai Airways’ convenient fast-track channel, for which they didn’t have the right ticket to do so. I also get in a rush sometimes, and today I was looking in a mirror of humanity. Calm and smiling is best. Isn’t that what Angels show us?

Sunday morning 9 July, Bangkok airport