The Game of LIfe

Those who advise me tell me that the world is an unplanned and spontaneous place, where event can overtake their cause, ends flow into beginnings with infinite variability and possessing the virtue of predictability only in the cryptic assurance that they are predictably unpredictable. That the ebb and flow of events can be such that we must sometimes, if we are to keep our head above the crest of events, commit ourselves instinctively, in the full course of events to causes and end products that we might not understand, appreciate, or desire.

They counsel this to make it clear that what I cannot have is one of the things I want most, for the world to be knowable and understandable. For me to always make conscious choices, not forced by the press of events and the tumult of time, but careful, slow, considered and yet capable of creating an ending that is both desired and appropriate. To have a measure, some control over pace, to find life not a slide, forced around twists at increasing speed, loops coming faster and the background blurred in the mist – this is not for me. I am and always have been a slow and rather patient person, a person who believes more in evolution then revolution, that steps are always taken slowly and firmly in a direction rather then randomly and exuberantly stepping over rubicons and into the unknown. The unknown is an anathema, something to be explored slowly methodically mindfully. Not to be charged down into recklessly and boldly, pretending that bravery can substitute for skill.

I understand though now that this preference, this predicament, leaves me vulnerable to those, who understanding my psyche, wish to pressure me. All it requires is to control the flow of events, to make me feel the pinch of the invincible hand of time, to know that I can only take two alternatives: either to yield or to abdicate my decision. I will either give in, coerced by the power wielded against me or I will exercise my right to not play the game. Perhaps this amounts to some sort of strange yield or flight response to stress, not the famous fight or flight, but then perhaps I have been tempered in environments sufficiently different from the primeval to develop a different range of responses.

I have to live in the modern world, of bewildering complexity and infinite variety, where the options and choices of a minute can change the possibilities of a lifetime, where the sheer variety of people can make choices unknown to me, that may through Adam Smith’s hand make choices for me, and where the fluidity of the human condition might make hundreds of choices equally possible or impossible. In this world, I who desires certainty perhaps over many other things, who values stability and fully accepts the role of the dynamic at the same time, who will espouse the mantra that “the only thing that doesn’t change is change” and not accept it except intellectually have to fashion out a niche and to find a way to thrive.

Somehow I survive, perhaps underestimating my own ability to react to forced circumstances, or because of my one single victory – to understand the game of life is a game – with rules, winners and losers but that the rule set does not define the possibilities. That there are options outside the box that I can have recourse to and that the ability to be dictated to is created by the game, and the game can be stopped at any time. Small nuggets of hope perhaps, in this catalogue of despair.

A Frank Conversation

The clock strikes midnight, and although no bells now echo with Westminster chimes, I don’t need them to let me feel the lateness of the hour. The tiredness of being beyond my routine weighs me down, though I do have the compensation of not being required to play squash and I already anticipate sleeping just a little while longer. It suffices as consolation, as does the reason I wait.

I’m awake at the ringing in of the witching hour because I made a promise to a friend that I would be online on skype to pick up our conversation where it was interrupted. I’ve had good occasion to understand the value of frank conversation and how wonderful an experience it can be. Being naturally careful and cautious in my friendships, it takes exceptional trust and faith in the other person on my part to talk openly.

I admire, can only admire not imitate, the likes of James and Gareth who talk so openly and frankly even to total strangers, and I see the beautiful benefits that their frankness brings them: people respond to them in the most amazing ways – and in hindsight I realize that I responded to them for the same reasons. It was their patience and perseverance through my initial defensiveness that found friendship’s rich pastures on the other side. Other friendships of mine have followed similar patterns, and I can only admire the certainty of my friends in persevering where I would have given up.

I recently drew up for a list of those I felt like I could talk frankly too, and the list was surprising and revealing- I hadn’t put the thought into that topic in a long time. I don’t intend to reproduce that list here, to do so would be to reveal too much of my secrets to my reader, and my timid defensiveness is reasserting itself . Interestingly enough, if you want to know you can always ask the question, but the only way you’ll get the same response is if you’re on the list as well. A bit of a Catch-22.

I want to talk about these people collectively. About the magic inherent in merely talking to them.

Conversation is refreshing in a way conversation with others isn’t. I don’t feel boundaries, I don’t feel limits. I don’t feel any pressure to conform, no pressure to censor the inappropriate parts of me. I don’t need to come up with topics. I don’t need to drive the conversation. Part of the charm is the loving mockery that I pointed out not so long ago, but only as an aspect, an aside. The conversation can span such territory; can go from the sublime to the heights of philosophy and theory to the depths of the worst humour that would never be repeatable in even the least polite society and then ascend to be silly and ridiculous – sublime again in its own way.

But that is the shell, the orange peel, the bark of the experience. The real feeling, that strong feeling that endures, that triumphs, and whose recollection will keep you alive in many dark nights and days, just by its recollection, is that feeling of connection. I lose the feeling of being alone. I can’t stress how amazing that is.

Perhaps you think I exaggerate, so I will expand with a simple example. I will use Hunaid, because our bond is well known. There are many days that I draw strength from the knowledge, just the simple knowledge, that Hunaid is out there. I don’t have to talk to him, I don’t need to see him, just the knowledge that on this world, he’s there too, has become a support. That is a bond I can feel, that I can depend on, that I do depend on, thorugh just the strength of friendship and franknes that binds us together. This is just one example from one of the people.

I want to expand this, to justify, to explain. To plead my insanity through its full course as if words would suffice to transcode what I want to say into something sensible. I understand now that they won’t suffice. All I count on then is that you, my estranged reader, understand. That you feel what I feel or have, at least once, felt. If you do, I am explained.

My Days and My Nights

What a topsy turvy week it has been. I am a man of simple prejudices and even simpler notions. One such basic idea that I harbour can be summed up as days are for doing things and nights are for sleeping. A simple notion, an elegant if rather prosaic division of the day into two parts and a formula that would be rather easy for even an idiot like me to adhere to. So you would imagine.

If there has been a week in which that notion failed profoundly this has been it.

On Monday with the start of the new school term, I journeyed off to HKU for my first class in a series of eleven on Securities Regulation in the HKSAR. Similar travels occupied my Tuesday (International Trade Law) and Wednesday (Competition Law) as is the case when you are required, by your desire to graduate this year, to do three classes in a semester. Thursday saw me out and about again in the evening, first to Soho, that trendy paradise of the fashionista before wandering from one end of Hong Kong to its midpoint and then back again to the end. My feet have the blisters to testify how unused I am to walking such epic distances. Friday night saw me fulfill my duties to both parents and God, first of to the markaz to watch movies I’ve already seen, although I did occupy myself by playing games on my phone, which was probably some sort of sacrilege before venturing into the unknowable despair of Kowloon. And finally came today evening, off bowling and then eating with friends once again, bringing this set of days to a close. The only consolation is that tomorrow I don’t have anything planned as far as I know. A small concession to my principles.

Now in contrast if I were to list the way I filled my days, I could not compile a longer list of the dire and desperate than that account, and for that very reason I will refrain from doing so. Suffice it to say that my main accomplishment of the week was to send 3 emails in sequence which may have the end result of getting my dissertation up to speed and finally more concrete than shadowy it its likelihood of becoming a writeable document. I suppose it’s not a trivial accomplishment, but really it’s not a lot of work to be proud of to sum my achievements in a week.

My upturned timetable, my wrong sided life, to me still does not appeal. Others have advocated the seductive world view that the day is for work and the night is for nightlife, but I cannot find in me the commitment of intellect, energy and will to take this suggestion up to be the truth, for I find that I cannot indulge in both and give both the quality and the clarity that I know they deserve from me to maximize their value. I don’t suggest that I can do one or the other, but rather that it takes too long a day for me to triumph over.

I still have as a ground rule the notion that things are done in the day and it is one of the ideas that I am most keen to hang on to. I see it as a way of structuring my day so as to take advantage of the time that I now I’m most capable of doing my best work which is the mornings. I am that rare bird termed a morning person, who prefers to start the day at the earliest instance viable when there is sufficient reason to do so, and to then declare my day at a close around 6 pm regardless of the circumstances. I can begin things before that time and then keep going with them until they are finished, but I do not permit myself to begin new projects once this hour has passed.

And I mean all things in this – and in my ideal world I would include social events in this category. I would love to not have to begin anything social after that time, but it really does seem for the majority of the worlds this is a most unreasonable and unendurable position, and so out of a notion of flexibility and my basic nature as a political animal. It seems that I am discovering the difficulty of being a day person in a world of the night, and it will take some mental strength that I find difficult to dredge up to resolve this.

Unedited Opacity

It is the strangest of motives that drive me now to write. I have nothing to say, no thesis to argue no path to suggest no words, perfectly crafted in my mind, that compel me to put them to paper and develop some sort of rationalization or organization. Yet I cannot avoid the compulsion to put words to paper, to meander across the page looking for solace in the comfort of words.

I don’t normally do this, stream of conscious, meandering, writing, and even now I hesitate to commit my unedited splurge to the world and perhaps I shall have to review this before I do, but I could of course take the first bold step of doing without. My first inclination as usual is to cover my ass rather then commit anything inept to posterity, and as the wise before us have said you don’t regret the things you didn’t say. This actually might not be true because, sometimes, you do regret the things you don’t say because the right word at the right time in the right moment might have made all the difference. I’ve reached a decision by the by, to edit only for clarity and I will not in substance remove any content that I now expel into the ether, finding solace in the nature of these words.

I’ve just re-read Manc Sean’s comment to my last post, the one on Leaving FMGamer, and I’m taking a bit of solace in the mutability of things at the moment, finding strength in the idea that this too shall pass, but at the same time finding the reassurance of prospective mutability, that the sun shall set and rise again, to know that things will not stay the way they are as neither solace nor comfort but rather a cryptic harbinger of doom and an implacable enemy to my desire to understand. At my core I am a person who seeks to understand intellectually the world that I pass through. While I can intellectually appreciate the role of emotion, irrationality and intuition in the action of people, I find it when I have to deal with sudden bursts of these without any clear understanding or knowledge of where these things are coming from or where they are heading. A maelstrom of action surrounds me, me who's nature is not of action.

Naturally I feel the response to action, however caused, is action, yet I cannot find within me the motivation to respond with action. I feel a strange listless exhaustion, as if life has overwhelmed and conquered, my ship is run ashore and now I wait for wind and tide to turn before again setting out into the maelstrom. It is abundantly clear that at the current moment to sail out again would be perilous, I lack the will to see the right course and the right action will be maintained. Partially my mental state is to blame but I’m also aware that I was awoken rather early today by the recovery of my niece to better health as well as the strange twinges in my leg that I seem to have damaged playing squash yesterday which gives of the sensation almost that if I were to lean too hard on my leg it would buckle under me and I would collapse, and at any rate I have no desire to press my leg into service to find out how faithful it would be in the circumstances. But the lack of a will to force iron into action is perhaps a greater disability then anything physical could ever be.

I don’t feel satisfied with the meager words that have been placed here, and perhaps now I understand even with the slightest, and then only empathetic, participation, why James does not write. These words seem inadequate and incomplete, vague and illusive, transient and concealing yet too revealing and inept. They are partial yet complete and disturbing while neither aiding me nor hindering my thoughts. They are like the shroud that covers the mysteries in the Ancient Temple of the Jews – barrier and substance and immaterial all at the same time. What a strange simile my mind has darted to; what a difficult one to grasp as well for those uninitiated in the odd habits of the Judaic Temple that once was of Solomon.

I think I shall stop here, I have produced words but they have provided precious little solace and perhaps too much complication and too little opacity for any real purpose, they are words though, and perhaps as I advocated long ago just placing a few of them in order might help to clarify. Just not now.