Hong Kong, China.
I haven’t been very disciplined with my writing since I have been in Hong Kong. Why is that? What comes up is that I feel that I have not been going through very interesting things myself. This is followed by the fear of being boring and the fear of coming across as somebody with an uninteresting life. But there is more. It is not the fear of writing what is true but the fear of deconstructing the unfolding image of an adventurous life. And it is the fear of having to sit behind my laptop and having to deal with the fact that nothing is coming up. But it is not true: something always comes up. And by just taking this peek I immediately feel happiness arising: I have seen something!
What I am seeing is this: how I create expectations and put them on myself. Countries like Israel, Lebanon, Iraq and India appeal to the imagination. Here in Hong Kong I have been mostly working and resting and I am exposed to hard working Dutch expats and their wives. Even though Hong Kong is exotic too my life didn’t feel exotic for a while. It felt professional. Inside I feel guilt and shame about not raising the bar and living up to the expectations of an adventurer. But what I am tempted to do here is to mold myself into the figure I think that others see in me. Molding ourselves into something acceptable is of course one of our most successful recipes for unfreedom.
It is not even about what others really expect from me, it is what I think that they expect from me what wants to influence my behavior. The ‘others’ might not even give a shit. Actually, the few who really take the time to judge me are those who took on the exhausting task of continuously dividing their world in right and wrong.
I feel fortunate to have seen this and what I realize over and over again is the importance of discipline. To create a nice day for myself, a day with few struggles, I should just get up, meditate and write. Or I could write in the evening just as long as I sit down and do it. I would feel so much better if I would stop resisting my need for discipline.
Now I will go out and create a little adventure for myself. 🙂
EDIT: I did go on an adventure! I saw something strange when I was in the bus to town. I jumped out and went to check it out. turned out to be a cemetery. there were graves but there was no soil, just concrete. So I don’t know what happens to the bodies. Will they deteriorate (it is very humid here) or mummify (because the grave might be air tight)? I don’t know. I noticed that in the beginning of the 20th century the Chinese didn’t get very old. Many died in their 40’s.
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