Assorted Notes

SATURDAY, 20 APRIL 2019

South Africa is the country of my birth, my childhood, my youth, and my early adulthood. Asia, and more specifically Taiwan, is where I have spent the rest of my life so far.

South Africa has given me language and all the other building blocks of identity – culture; association with the history of a particular group of people; initial preferences in food and drink; ideas about who and what I am and/or who or what I was supposed to be, and an assumption of what I was going to do as an adult, or an idea of the options considered reasonable and acceptable for an adult to do with his or her life. Taiwan gave me the confidence to look at other options, including a language I could master for daily use that I never thought I would ever learn in the first two decades of my life; aspects of culture that I could observe and experience first-hand and could consider incorporating into my own life; other types of dishes and methods of food preparation to the ones with which I grew up, and more freedom to pursue ideas about who and what I am, and to consider a wider spectrum of options that are reasonable and acceptable for an adult to do with his or her life.

Am I getting alienated from the country of my birth?

I’ve been living in Taiwan for over 20 years, and in Asia more than 22 years. Will people look at me and think for a moment that I am Asian? Not likely. Not even if I live in Taiwan or elsewhere in Asia for another 20 years. I do nourish myself with Taiwanese food on a daily basis. I don’t even think twice about taking off my shoes before I enter someone’s residence. I don’t mind if people stand close to me in the queue at the supermarket, and I follow the same custom by standing closer to other people than what most Westerners regard as acceptable given Western ideas about personal space. I still don’t understand most of what TV news readers rattle off in Chinese, but I can read enough Chinese to understand the subtitles. And I can tell a Taiwanese police officer my version of an incident in Chinese to such an extent that he understands that I am not the one that has to be arrested.

Will I be able to return to South Africa right now and without missing a beat converse with other citizens about South African affairs of the day? No. The cultural shock to be back in the country of my birth, of my youth and my early adulthood will also likely be worse than the shock I experienced when I arrived in Asia 23 years ago. The sense of personal safety one has in Taiwan will leave me vulnerable and paranoid in South Africa. The gap between rich and poor in South Africa is also dramatically different from Taiwan. The rich variety of languages and cultural practices in South Africa is something else I am no longer accustomed to. What I as a white South African am allowed to say to whom, and how I am supposed to say it, is another area where I will initially commit some errors. (In Taiwan, I’m not seen as a member of a previously privileged group, so I don’t have to be careful about how I talk to people to avoid offending someone.) [In case you don’t follow the link, I am referring to some white people who think white South Africans should speak differently to black South Africans than how they would usually speak to people, to ensure they avoid offending black people.]

I also find nowadays that I enjoy movies that play off in Northeast Asia, about Taiwanese or Japanese or Korean or Chinese people, in a way that may only be possible if you have personal experience with Taiwanese people, or Japanese or Korean or Chinese people and with the dominant cultures of these countries. And I realised again recently, especially after we saw parts of Taiwan that we had never seen before, that I was comfortable with the idea of spending the rest of my life on this mountainous island.

I was born in South Africa, and it was there that I received the building blocks for the person I still am almost five decades later. My parents and my two sisters and their families still live there. I still have a strong interest in South African history. And although I have definitely developed a preference for especially Taiwanese vegetable dishes that are healthier than the vegetables with butter and sugar and cream prepared in South African kitchens, I still plan to enjoy a healthy portion of pudding and other desserts when I visit my family again in a few months.

I am still a South African born and raised, but there is no doubt that Taiwan is the place I want to go back to whenever I go away for more than a few days. And it’s not just because my wife and life partner also calls this place home, or because our two cats know no other home than the one we have provided to them.

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SATURDAY, 30 MARCH 2019

Thought about it again last night: the impression and accompanying programming I had received in my youth, and until recently never corrected, that making money should not just be a struggle but also that the result of my efforts would never actually be good enough. When I asked – who? my subconscious? – the hypothetical question of when I would reach a point where I’d consider that I had “made” it, the answer came promptly and clear as daylight: Never.

A terrifying insight, finally uncovered when I happened to think the right words in the right order.

Needless to mention by this time that this was all a misunderstanding. It doesn’t need to be a struggle to make money. You can, like any other person taking the right steps, get the appropriate results. After all, it works for me when I take the right steps with my health, and it worked for me when I took the right steps when I met someone I liked.

Regarding health and relationships I received reasonably good programming and exposure as a young person, and little resistance if I had wanted to go in another direction – my older sister, for example, decided for some time shortly after high school that she was a vegetarian, and I observed that there wasn’t much resistance from my parents. My programming regarding personal finances and making money was, however, a textbook fuck-up.

Okay, very little of this hasn’t been spelled out yet, so let me get to the real point: Take the right steps and get the appropriate result. Take more of the right steps and move even further in the direction you want to go. More right steps, more right actions, more appropriate results … until you reach a point that can only be described as you having broken through to the other side. As you stand on what would clearly be the opposite bank, you might still wonder when exactly “all of this” happened. But there would be no doubt: You will have made it.

And this does not only apply to making money, but also to relationships, and to health.

THURSDAY, 4 APRIL 2019

I smoked for fourteen years. Since I worked in a tobacco shop in my early twenties where I was surrounded by fragrant tobacco every day, I started with pipe smoking. Later I worked my way through a series of cigarette brands I believed would enhance my personal identity. First there was Camel Lights, then Gauloises Blondes, then Marlboro Lights and finally Craven “A”. Then, after trying hard for a few weeks in 2002 to quit, I puffed on with a better class of cigarette called Nat Sherman.

Like most habitual smokers, I knew I eventually had to overcome the habit. I knew it wouldn’t be easy. I really liked smoking. There was something about craving a cigarette, and then after a while getting an opportunity to break away … taking out a cigarette, tapping it on the packet, lighting the tobacco, and taking that first drag of smoke into your lungs. Salvation! I was also conceited enough to imagine myself a more discriminating smoker than people who smoked ordinary convenience store cigarettes – I even rolled my own smokes.

I was one hundred percent smoker; there was no doubt about that.

And then, the day after Christmas 2008, I – once again – started taking steps to shake the habit. First I threw my remaining cigarettes into an old book bag, together with all my lighters, ashtrays, tobacco, roller, rolling papers, filters, and pipes, and took it to my (then) fiancé’s apartment. After a week, as I had negotiated with myself, I smoked two cigarettes. Then two weeks nothing, then another cigarette (maybe two). I might have smoked a cigarette again at the end of January, and then six months passed before I bought another pack to enjoy some cigarettes with friends on a night out. I was, however, strict about one rule: I wouldn’t smoke any cigarettes at home. The packet would go into the fridge until another social event. So it went on – two or three cigarettes when we went out with friends every few weeks, but nothing on my own at home.

By 2013, a few months had gone by that I didn’t smoke any cigarettes. When we went out again one night, I realised I had no desire to stand outside with the smokers and suck on a tube of tobacco. The idea of the smell on my fingers, the taste in my mouth, the possible sudden rise in blood pressure, the light feeling in my head – were simply not worth the experience I had previously enjoyed so much.

It was clear that I had reached the other side. I was no longer a smoker. The other side had become my new reality. I could have wondered if I wanted to: When did this happen? Had I asked, I would have answered: Do you remember all the steps you have taken since Christmas 2008?

* * *

One more example: For many years in my twenties and early thirties I was on my own – alone, stuck with only my own company even at times when I really would have enjoyed some female companionship. It felt like it was my fate in life. I got so used to it that I couldn’t imagine myself having a female presence in my life ever again – with all the wonderful benefits that come with it. I started accepting that I was on one side of the chasm, and people who had found happiness with another person were on the other.

Then I met a woman – also from South Africa, a few months after she had arrived in Taiwan. From that very first day I knew I liked her. But I was sure she would never see me as anything more than a friend.

Over the next few months, however, I got to know her better, and to my deepest surprise, I received some signals that she might just be interested in more than just friendship.

So I started taking steps to turn the connection between us into something more. As anyone who has ever gone from “nothing” to “definitely something” with another person knows, there was a series of “negotiations”. I followed the steps and undertook the negotiations to the best of my ability.

And then, one day, there was no doubt that I was on the other side of that chasm. No doubt. Once again, I could have looked myself in the eyes in the bathroom mirror and asked: When did this happen? When did this become my new reality? Once again, I could have answered: Do you remember seeing her again after a few weeks, and afterwards giving her a call and suggesting that you meet for coffee the next day – a Sunday it was? Do you remember other appointments and dates over the next few weeks and months? Do you remember taking a series of actions with a dash of positive expectation?

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FRIDAY 29 MARCH 2019

A brief description of our Sunday to Wednesday trip through northern Taiwan

Although I’ve been in Taiwan for more than twenty years, and my wife, Natasja, nearly fifteen years, we’ve never spent more than a few hours in Taiwan’s capital, Taipei. Last year we decided to take a few days off for her birthday this month to discover Northern Taiwan for ourselves.

Our journey started early on Sunday morning with a 360-kilometer, 100-minute journey on the high-speed train to Taipei.

Our first adventure followed shortly after we arrived in Taipei: to find an exit from the tunnels below the station in less than an hour. After we finally saw sunlight again, we walked the ten minutes to our hotel to leave our luggage there. On the way, I discovered that our hotel is just about next-door to the National Taiwan Museum – which we visited after making a quick stop at the hotel.

From there we returned to the tunnels under Taipei Main Station. Twenty minutes or so later we were in Shilin, to visit the official former residence of Chiang Kai-shek and Soong Mei-ling (or Madame Chiang, as she was better known to foreigners) between roughly 1950 and 1975. The building served as the Shilin Horticultural Experimental Station during the Japanese Colonial Era, but was taken over by the Government of the Republic of China after they withdrew to Taiwan in 1949. Here, “old dictator Chiang” – as Roger Waters calls him on Amused to Death – received American president Dwight D. Eisenhower, as well as future presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.

We couldn’t take photos inside the house, but I was pleasantly surprised by the place. The rooms are more or less the same as when Chiangs lived there – 1950s style furniture, clothes, books, and some paintings by Madame Chiang. It was a chilly, rainy day in Taipei. This, the solemn atmosphere, and the fact that the house is surrounded by trees and plants, contributed to the impression that it was the type of home where a political leader could find peace for his soul at the end of another day during which his opponents and critics experienced everything but happiness and well-being.

An hour or so after we had walked through the home and gardens, we arrived in Danshui – one of the oldest districts in Taipei. The district is located where the Danshui River flows into the Taiwan Strait. This was one of the reasons why the Spaniards decided 400 years ago to build their fort there, and why first the Dutch and then the British also constructed walls in the same spot. The residence that the British had built for their consulate in 1891 is still standing. The fort next door is in the place where the Spanish built a fort in 1628, before demolishing it in 1642 to prevent the Dutch from using it. The Dutch rebuilt the fort, officials of the Qing Empire restored it in 1724, and from 1868 the British leased it. Some of the rooms in the former consulate have exhibitions, but not much to write about. The fort does have a few figures to give you an idea of the people who at one time had spent time there.

After we made a turn at the river, we walked up the hill towards Aletheia University. The narrow streets led past some interesting buildings, and eateries with traditional dishes such as “Ah-Gei” – a hollowed-out block of tofu stuffed with rice noodles, to Danshui Old Street with dozens of shops and stalls along the way.

Dinner was enjoyed at Shilin Night Market, one metro station closer to Taipei than where we had stopped for the Old Dictator’s house. The night market was definitely different from the markets we are used to in Kaohsiung. Stalls were lined up along the busy street that runs past the market, but the rest of the market is situated in alleys that stretch across the entire neighbourhood. There were a few shops with clothes, shoes, and electronic items, but most stalls and shops sold food and drinks – everything from steamed dumplings and candied fruit to ice cream mixed with peanut butter between two hot cakes, and deep-fried octopus.

The next morning, shortly after breakfast, we took the train to Ruifang – about forty minutes from Taipei. We first enjoyed some hot beverages, and by 11:00 we departed on the Pingxi Line – a 13-kilometer railway line that goes through eight former mining towns. The towns and surrounding areas are now mainly tourist attractions. Refreshments and large paper lanterns on which people write messages before sending them afloat are big business.

Shortly after we returned to Ruifang we found ourselves on a bus speeding up a mountain pass on the way to Jiufen – as if the driver wanted to get away from the impending fog that would soon hamper our view of the Pacific Ocean.

Dense fog also made it harder to find our next sleeping spot. Jiufen was once known for its gold mine. Decades after all the gold had been mined out, the sleepy village was once again stirred from its slumber when it was used as the location for an award-winning movie in the late eighties. We had booked a room on Airbnb, and to find the place, I even printed a map. In reality, the streets meander through the mist, and the building we had to find was not even on one of the streets on the map. I eventually had to pull out my computer to read the PDF with instructions on how to find the place.

At Jiufen Old Street with our luggage…

Down the narrow street full of Japanese and Korean tourists, around a few corners, until we reached a traditional wine shop. Next to the shop an exit, with a set of stairs descending into the fog …

More steps, a garden, a footpath …

… and finally, our cosy room.

For the rest of the afternoon and evening we walked through the narrow alleys, had dinner, drank tea, enjoyed sweets, and took more pictures of the people and the alleys and the fog.

The next morning I woke up shortly after six. The fog had lifted in the meantime, so I went for a walk, and took pictures of the hillsides and the Pacific Ocean just a few miles away. Got some hot coffee and bananas at the Family Mart, took a few more photos, and returned to our room.

By 08:30 we were at the bus stop to return to Ruifang, to catch a train to Yilan, a city of about half a million people on Taiwan’s east coast. The railway line runs along the coast for about fifty kilometres, and includes a view of the distant volcanic Turtle Island (which, according to one source, can only be visited with a permit, and timely arrangements with a boat owner).

Yilan is the gateway to Taipingshan Forest Recreation Area, and there are some popular hot springs in the vicinity, but since our time was limited, we only visited some of the few places of interest in the city itself. Less than two hours after stopping in Yilan, we departed again – this time for Hualien, about 100 kilometres further south. Shortly after we found our Airbnb, we hit the road to the Hualien Railway Culture Park – a restored 1932 train depot with a handy model of a large part of the city, in case you had no more than an afternoon and an evening to spend in the city. Dinner was enjoyed at the Dongdamen Night Market. (Hualien is most famous for Taroko National Park – which we visited in November 2013.)

I was up again early in the morning, this time to look for two attractions we didn’t have time for the previous day. Both places were still closed, but I could see what I was missing. The first one was an old Japanese-era military facility, where some Kamikaze pilots, according to tradition, had gulped down their last cups of rice wine before flying into the nearest American ships. The other was the Manor House, the official residence of a major military figure during the Japanese colonial era.

Back at our lodgings we made sure the room was decent, then we walked to the closest McDonald’s for breakfast. With thirty minutes to spare, we pitched up at Hualien train station for our five-hour journey back to Kaohsiung – down the east coast, and through the mountains that form the backbone of this beautiful island.

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FRIDAY, 22 MARCH 2019

YOU are both the agent who decides dozens of times a day between two or more options, and the result of your decisions, or choices. These choices may be relatively unimportant, such as deciding what colour T-shirt to buy. Other times you have to decide if you are a Democrat or Republican (in America), or Conservative or Labour (in Britain), or African National Congress or Democratic Alliance (in South Africa). Sometimes you also have to decide if you are someone who allows something to happen to you, or if you are someone who stands up for yourself and does not allow it to happen. Do you allow yourself to be intimidated by something, or do you decide that you will no longer be intimidated by it? Do you still allow something that someone did or said to you a long time ago, or the fact that someone convinced you to believe certain things, to have an effect on your point of view and on your actions and behaviour, or do you decide to go in a different direction, and believe other things about yourself? Are you someone who believes you are a victim of what was given to you at birth and in the first years of your life until you developed the ability to think and decide for yourself (nationality, culture, socio-economic status, religious beliefs), or do you believe that you are a creative agent who can to a large extent create your own identity and your own life as it pleases you?

* * *

Developmental biologist and self-improvement guru Bruce Lipton talks about programming in your psyche that is like a recording that plays back every time an incident, or a thought, or something someone says, presses the button. He also believes that we are able to change our programming – to replace a recording with one that is more supportive of who and what you want to be.

The author of You Are a Badass at Making Money, Jen Sincero, writes that you have to do things to challenge this old programming, especially if it doesn’t support what you are currently trying to do in your life – to in effect force the old programming to crawl out of its hiding place and expose itself.

And the author of Trading in the Zone, Mark Douglas, writes about beliefs that they are forms of structured energy. (Must be, he argues, because beliefs, like dreams and memories and other thoughts, do not consist of atoms and molecules.) He further believes that we do not change beliefs as much as we transfer energy from one concept to another – one that we will find more valuable in the process of fulfilling our desires and goals.

So it happened that I was thinking of things I spent money on this morning – a piece of clothing, and some items for breakfast that weren’t absolutely essential. I also enjoyed a light lunch in IKEA’s cafeteria. On the way home, I thought about the unusual quality of my Friday morning, and that I don’t usually spend that much money if I didn’t explicitly plan to do it.

I could almost hear my internal cassette player turning on. A decades-old recording started to roll – about someone who considers himself inherently poor and who believes it must be so.

That’s when I thought of Bruce Lipton, Jen Sincero, and Mark Douglas, and what they say about how one thinks and acts. I can confront such a negative thought, or I can replace the recording with something more useful.

Mark Douglas is very specific on this. That type of thought will most likely always get stuck somewhere in the hallways of my brain, and every now and then it will make an effort to be heard. What I can and should do is to formulate a more positive, more useful belief; deactivate, or undermine, the old belief, and then to energize the new belief. When I occasionally again hear the old recording, it doesn’t have to provoke much reaction: It will be like the barking of an old teethless dog.

* * *

Seeing that many readers are probably unfamiliar with Mark Douglas, a short quote from a section of Trading in the Zone, entitled, “The Primary Characteristics Of A Belief”:

“Beliefs seem to be composed of a type of energy or force that naturally resists any other force that would cause them to exist in any form other than their present form. Does this mean that they can’t be altered? Absolutely not! It just means that we have to understand how to work with them. Beliefs can be altered, but not in the way that most people may think. I believe that once a belief has been formed, it cannot be destroyed. In other words, there is nothing we can do that would cause one or more of our beliefs to cease to exist or to evaporate as if they never existed at all. This assertion is founded in a basic law of physics. According to Albert Einstein and others in the scientific community, energy can neither be created nor destroyed; it can only be transformed.

If beliefs are energy – structured, conscious energy that is aware of its existence – then this same principle of physics can be applied to beliefs, meaning, if we try to eradicate them, it’s not going to work. If you knew someone or something was trying to destroy you, how would you respond? You would defend yourself, fight back, and possibly become even stronger than you were before you knew of the threat. Each individual belief is a component of what we consider to be our identity.

Isn’t it reasonable to expect that, if threatened, each individual belief would respond in a way that was consistent with how all the parts respond collectively? The same principle holds true if we try to act as if a particularly troublesome belief doesn’t exist. If you woke up one morning and everyone you knew ignored you and acted as if you didn’t exist, how would you respond? It probably wouldn’t be long before you grabbed someone and got right in their face to try to force them to acknowledge you. Again, if purposely ignored, each individual belief will act in the very same way. It will find a way to force its presence into our conscious thought process or behavior. The easiest and most effective way to work with our beliefs is to gently render them inactive or nonfunctional by drawing the energy out of them. I call this process de-activation. After de-activation, the original structure of the belief remains intact, so technically it hasn’t changed. The difference is that the belief no longer has any energy. Without energy, it doesn’t have the potential to act as a force on our perception of information or on our behavior.” [my italics]

Douglas then provides an example of past beliefs in Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy that are now inactive, non-functional beliefs. These beliefs, he explains, still exist in his brain as concepts without energy. (According to him, beliefs are a combination of sensory experience and words that form an energetic concept.) Without energy, the concept no longer has the potential to put pressure on the perception of information or on the person’s behaviour. So if someone now tells the adult that Father Christmas is at the front door, he or she will dismiss it as a joke. Say it to a five-year-old child, and the words will immediately connect the child to a reservoir of positively-charged energy that would force him or her to jump up and run to the door, with no obstacle too great to overcome.

As an adult, therefore, the person has two conflicting beliefs about the world in his head: One is that Father Christmas exists, and the other is that Father Christmas does not exist. The difference between the two beliefs is that the first one has virtually no energy, while the second belief is charged with energy. There is therefore no functional conflict or contradiction.

Douglas believes that if one belief can be deactivated, any belief can be deactivated. The secret to successful belief change is the notion that you are not really changing your beliefs, but only transferring energy from one concept to another that is more valuable in your efforts to fulfil your desires or achieve your goals.

Active beliefs are therefore positively charged with sufficient energy to be able to put pressure on your perception of information, on your behaviour, and on how you express yourself.

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