Keep A Peek

一张双人床

容不下一个人的悲伤

Why do we feel the way we do? How is feeling related to conscious? What is the origin of our conscious mind? Is reality merely a perception? Where does consciousness reside? Do we have a soul? Do you see red the way I do? How are cognitive experience linked to our construction of what is real and what is not, and how do we ever prove this? Do we reincarnate? Is reality compounded? Do we really live in multiple universes? Does dualism imply an inherent constraint in our understanding of our mind? Is our conscious an evolutionary product or do we just have better hardware to express it? Does God exist? Are you a zombie? Why do we love? Why do we question?

The truth is, sometimes when I think of you, I still feel sadness. It’s not the bawl-your-eyes out kind of sad, but more of a tugging pain, or numb melancholy. The other day I chanced upon (how these things manifest themselves in the sneakiest way, I will never know) the song that I wrote for you. And it made me cry. What do they all mean now? The big words look so pitifully small and hauntingly deceitful. They only remind me of the bitter inevitability of change, and the helplessness that entails. Will I ever be able to love the same way again? Courteous concern and careful verses written upon sympathy cards and sealed with hollow hopes, why the hell do we even bother? When these things, these mutilating little emotions are all inextricably enmeshed in my body and my mind and I cannot breath, I go back to that place. That place where optimism is laced with bullet-proof vest and broken spirit reincarnates, and I turn into this bright eye nitwitted girl again. Because that’s the only way these things will work. Because we really are this foolish. And because I need you to be.

Sometimes while crawling the web I stumble upon a piece of article that tugs on my heartstring or makes me ponder. And I notice one thing they often have in common is this - they use simple words. I seldom need to pause in the middle of my reading to google anything in the article. This brings about a fluidity in my comprehension and in turn my appreciation for the author’s thoughts. I often mistake the feature of a well crafted article as one which is laden with abstruse, sophisticated phrases. But I remember someone once told me this about physics -  if you can’t explain something simply, you haven’t fully understood it. Drawing on the same principle, writing and physics are the same thing. Simplicity implies clarity. You do not need the thesaurus to touch hearts. What does you enliven the opaque hollow in my soul convey that you make me happy can’t? Writing is perhaps one of the few skills where less is more and simple is ample.

And you sat there. The cliff overlooking a sea of could-be’s and would-be’s, and you ponder in bewilderment the scarcity of the choices you are confronted with. Kuhn would call this a paradigm shift, something revolutionary should be in sight. But what is soul rattling to you is the improbability of narrowing it down to two. It is either this or that. I guess it is fair to say that your year has been characterized by this tedious and relentless filtering. You were constantly (and perhaps unconsciously) seeking out the unnecessaries and ruthlessly tossing them away, which on hindsight, could have been an instinctive response to your innate need to unclutter. But are you happier now than you were one year ago? Perhaps some parts of you are, and I’m not saying this is bad. Actually I don’t have anything profoundly smashing to say to you, and even if I do, you’d just laugh it off, won’t you? You are inquisitive, strong, beautiful, obstinate and unsettlingly but unapologetically unconventional. Now that is a killer combo for doing something extraordinary in the world. And here comes the million dollar question - what are you waiting for? You’re damn right I’m demanding, but I figure you could use a little pushing here and there. Oh and while I’m at it, watch your spending and remember you are what you eat. But don’t forget to live. You’re at your best when you have goals which are just slightly out of reach. It drives you mad but you’re also at your best when you’re mad. Your family and your friends are your rock - learn to lean on them. Use your brain but listen to your heart, celebrate simplicity but beware of mediocrity, embrace affinity but avoid hypocrisy, be ambitious but remember your roots, live with him but not for him. And always, always remember this - it’s harder to be kind than clever. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Revive your hunger and your chutzpah, it is such a quintessential part of you.  Knock on doors, push on windows, explore the unknown, chase the storm, leave a trail and tell a tale. And for everything else, there’s music. Now go play.

Happy birthday.

2011 Resolution #4: At least 2 blogposts a week.

There are two kinds of fatigue. The first one, the one that you feel in your muscle, is fairly simple and has an almost fool-proof remedy - you sleep it off. But the second kind, the one that invades your conscious, drills into your mind and scampers around inflicting tears and dodging fixes… this kind, I’m utterly helpless against. Someone once told me that the only reason I never get an answer that satisfies me is because I ask the wrong questions. I think I am just at this point in life where I am done settling. Strip away all the bootcamp-y talks and slogans, I just can’t be arsed anymore to fake it. If I juggle well enough, someday I will be a clown. And even if not, those colorful balls are still pretty damn pretty. However coincidental they might have started out to be. Happiness by happenstance, what could be better?

She’s what we call “see-worthy.” S-E-E. See with your eyes. I feel like my transport should be an extension of my personality. Voila. And this? This is like my little window to the world, and every minute it’s a different show. Now, I may not understand it. I may not even necessarily agree with it. But I’ll tell you what, I accept it and just sort of glide along. You want to keep things on an even keel I guess is what I’m saying. You want to go with the flow. The sea refuses no river. The idea is to remain in a state of constant departure while always arriving. Saves on introductions and good-byes. The ride does not require an explanation. Just occupants.

- Waking Life

I’ve always find Italy enchanting. Rome was no exception. It is a city built around history, literally and metaphorically. The colloseum is built right smack in the middle of a busy street. There are no barricades, no mountains, no ocean nor 354 security checks separating this magnificent piece of art from its people. Art. Everything is a piece of art in Rome. The people and its fashion, the food and its presentation, the language and its color, the trees and their birds, they are all artful in different but complementing way, each placing its firm footprint on a building brick of this city which was once the capital of the largest empire in the world.

I like the yellow lights that illuminate the city when night falls. It reminds me of romance in different hues. The city is begging for people to fall in love. And in love I fell.

Note: This piece was initially published on the CERN Student Club’s Creative Voices in 2009. The website is now under major revamp, thus I am re-publishing it here.

One year ago before I came to CERN I had no idea what the Higgs boson was, I thought a wormhole is where birds are sent to when they die and Quark is a kind of food I like. I thought life is the biggest concoction of coincidental and wicked confusion, until one day someone tried to explain the string theory to me.

I had no expectations, no worthy predictions of what this place had in store for me and I was living in an apartment with a kitten that chases her tail and thinks she is a dog. I had never lived with an animal under the same roof before, at least not with one that snarls at me when I accidentally step on her imaginary turf.

Unfamiliarity can be a bitch, and in my case this bitch comes in the form of a hypothetical particle and a purring creature. They’re both unpredictable, volatile and I can’t decipher them with my engineer-geared mind where “hypothetical” is a shunned word and used only when you have no idea what you are talking about, and a string is really just that – a string. I felt like someone just threw me into a whirlpool akin to the infinite improbability drive and asked me to engineer my way out of this whimsical maze. The Higgs and the cat suddenly seemed like two monsters disguised as science, waving their “hypothetical” paws at me and I couldn’t decide if they are really as harmless as they seem to be. And it drove me crazy.

But just like how all adventure tales end, over time I realized that even the scariest monster can be tamed if you are determined enough (or in some cases, if you are a whiny teen with a scar on your forehead and your enemy dies by committing suicide). I didn’t have my crystal ball with me when I arrived, but even without it I knew that I could only survive if I opened myself up to find out as much as possible about my enemies.

Armed with the age-old wisdom of ‘Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer’, I set out on a mission to acquire as much knowledge as I could about the unpredictable Higgs and kitten. They were the symbolic representations of everything that was mysterious, incomprehensible and unfamiliar to me, and I couldn’t wait to reveal their darkest secrets. Unfortunately for me, I am not a scientist, nor an animal trainer. And the most interesting experiment on the topic of mind reading I have ever done involved me and my 6 year old brother, some poker cards and a mirror.

So even if the Higgs and the kitten are, metaphorically speaking of course, unfamiliar territory, I knew that I would have no choice but to face it head on. And that is where the beauty of CERN lies.

This is a place where finding out about the unknown is the heart of all research, and wandering into unfamiliar territory is the way to go. The buildings are scattered and numbered without any logical coherence but opportunities are abundant. People are different and unpredictable but they are also kind, inquisitive and creative. You walk into a big hall not knowing what to expect and are suddenly greeted with a grand piano. Some guy does yoga and stands on his head right in the middle of the field in full view of everyone having lunch. You have some of the brightest brains in the world gathered in one place, and yet nobody hesitates to applaud and cheer if you decide to run the annual marathon wearing just a hat. This is a place where every possible differences you can think of come together, fight, kiss, make up, compromise and advance together.

I set out to conquer the Higgs and the kitten, but we ended up becoming friends. When one is immersed in an environment so receptive to foreign things and occurrence, you can’t help but to slowly shake off that protective color and evolve. When in search of some worldly pursuit, we are often held back by our own perspectives and become slaves of our mind. But in the one year course of living with the Higgs and the Kitten, I learned that when something doesn’t fit into my pre-conceptions, I can widen my perspectives to accommodate them. Even for something as flighty as say, a kitten.

And that is the story of the Higgs and the kitten.

The world changes every day. Every day you discover something new about the people around you or yourself. So one day if you find yourself stuck in a pickle with some strange object with a name you have never heard of, or an unknown creature with sharp claws, remember one thing – the best way to tame a bull is by grabbing it by its horns. And of course, have your friends back you up while you do that.

And then celebrate with a beer.