Hello to all of my summertime reading enthusiasts. I am going to begin this blog with an excerpt from the book I have been writing regarding living abroad through my personal experiences.
Understanding “Truth”
Most people in particular are drawn to understanding greater meaning in life. I have always been captivated with discovering truth. Throughout my life my concept of truth has changed with time. Truth is something that I feel great meaning in and has been on my mind as I have been writing, running, reading, and living in China. When I was young I believed in a positivist model of truth. There must be one great truth and that was going to set me free. Being from a Christian background I found that truth to natural be in God and Jesus Christ. As time went on I wavered in my philosophical and religious views and entered into a great gap of thought which opened up my mind to many alternatives. As I grew to learn truth is veiled in religious, secular, peace, death, sadness, and most certainly in people. Throughout the accumulation of one’s lifetime truth takes on many different forms at different times in a person’s life. My truth is different than your truth will be. This change in philosophy has meant the death of positivism for me now as I realize that there is no one great “meaning”, “way”, or “peace” in life. We all have those gifts in life which are special to us only. Some people will never even know the extent of the magic of another person. Even more will live without truly recognizing their own gifts. I believe in experience. Through different experiences a person will accumulate a much greater deal of truth than they previously had before that experience.
In rejecting the positivist model I still find my greatest meaning in God and Jesus Christ. As I previously stated in the paragraph above I believe that all people create their own realities through experience, perspective, education, family, expectations. Therefore, I choose to believe in God and Jesus Christ just as another person will choose to believe in whatever they find the greatest meaning in. I find the greatest meaning in this religion because I believe in the legacy of forgiveness, compassion, and most importantly hope. Regardless of everything else I feel that if a person focuses on these three things they too will find a connection at some level with Christianity. I have discovered that my changing philosophies regarding truth and religion only became clear to me while thinking, reading, and writing in China. Here is where the key of experiences comes to be so important in the world today. Looking into an area such as religion which has a history of hostility between people is a good way to make the example of why experience is so important.
Can a person be truly reasonable?
Our realities in life are greatly influenced by forces a person has no control over. For example, family wealth, where you are from, what job your parents hold, social expectations, restrictions, family, education, culture, mores, religion, etc all play central roles in deciding how a person’s unique “truths” will be created in their own lives. Learning and experiences are hard to come by for most people in the world today. Living in the information technology age allows people incredible access to things which only a century ago would be limited to the highly educated and privileged. The greatest achievement of the internet is the equal dissemination of access to ideas today. Unfortunately not all information is reliable, trustworthy, or correct. Bias and prejudice will and have always riddled the print of ideas from the beginning of written language. Media sources throw ideas at people at a rate which makes the brain become apathetic to what it reads and hears today. The brain is the highest level of consumer and needs to be able to make the best judgment when it comes time to be a reasoned person in the world today.
The desire to be a “reasoned” person has even made me come to debate the validity of such a claim while in China. Taking a topic such as philosophy for example bears some fruit on why being a truly “reasoned” person is impossible. The reality is that most of the world’s great philosophies have never existed in written form. That is because I believe that people who survive on less than a dollar a day, living without any of life’s great modern technologies, who would give everything to make sure that their family has food to eat, and make sure that they do not starve would have to be some of the best philosophers the world has ever read. To read about a person suffering merely to survive is something that is profoundly human and would touch the hearts of people. I often see a vast amount of people searching for food, sleeping on roadsides, and wearing tattered rags for clothes. Their bodies are so emaciated that I am able to see every bone in their body through their meager covering rags.
The fact that we do not live in a reasoned world has frustrated, haunted, and even made me feel hopeless at times in my life. I was so sure that we lived in a rational and reasoned world when I was a child. After all I had never seen anything that would have made me believe to the contrary during my wonderful up-bringing free from fear. I also felt that because human’s where supposed to think and reason knowledge that we most live in reasoned world. My view also had a religious feel as well as so much in my life has and does today. I believed that God made humans to be the greatest of all species, the care-takers of the Earth, the “thinkers” of the world, and creatures who were primarily good. These feelings created a realization that the world in which I lived in must be inherently good in my mind. I still had not fathomed the many difficulties that I would struggle with in life, the bad things I would see, and the world’s sadness I would know as I grew wiser.
My wisdom only has shown through my experiences in China. The greatest gift I have had in life has been able to see the world from a whole new perspective. I would do things which I realized people in China thought were completely wrong for reasons which I might have held being in their same situation. Was I wrong? Where they right? Let’s take a sample situation to use for guiding principle.
Most days I go running in China. During the summer time my running has changed a great deal to the changing environment. With temperatures usually in the nineties with great humidity I still was resolved to run through the weather. On most days I would run along the track of Rongchang’s campus which is near to my apartment. My running would begin sometime around 11:00 a.m. and it would not take long for me to have visitors. Passing by Chinese of all ages would watch in astonishment at the sight before them as a six-foot-four giant was running in summer’s afternoon heat! This was a normal routine for me. Around 11:30 a.m. elementary - high school aged students taking summer courses start flowing out to go for lunch. Many of these students I taught that summer at one of my teaching jobs so the students were pretty familiar with me. They always like to ask me, “nice to meet you”, “hello”, or “have a nice day” while I would be running by on the track. I have become quite use to this type of attention and tend to merely wave at students instead of actually responding back. In order to continue my running routine during the summer I made some calculated training changes. First, I limited my runs to an hour at the most; which is about half as long as I was running at my peak of distance training in the spring. Secondly, I keep myself hydrated to the point of almost being too hydrated. I drink about twenty liters of water in two days and have a copious amount of Gatorades to replace electrolytes, sodium, and sugar during runs. Third, I always bring my cell phone with in case of emergencies. With these reasoned responses to the situation it does not seem like too great of a risk that I am taking.
My reasoning does not make the same mark on the logic of my Chinese friends’ though. I know that they think that running in the middle of the day is wrong because it is simply too hot. Both realities are correct and there is no right answer. It becomes merely shaped by the realities of the people at the place, in the time, reading the experience through the lens of their own “truths”. Reaching such a conclusion is only reached by having an experience such as living abroad. No one can come to understand so thoroughly the similarities and differences of people until a person lives through it every day. My emotion response to running makes it something that I find great value and hence meaning in. I find running in the early afternoon to be a necessity to the fact that I am a habitual night owl who does not wake up some time until 10:30 a.m. As I continued to get closer to the date of my marathon I was training my running changed in its value. I find running to be a moment of peace from reality which allows me to put my thoughts in order away from a busy world filled with technology and constant media.
Seeing reason as a “value” or innate human characteristic?
Some people value reason which is good in my opinion; nonetheless, they will still make irrational decisions quite often it seems. Until I borrowed a little psychology I was unable to comprehend why reasoning seemed gone from the world. Studies showing a direct correlation to human responses and reasoned thought hold a great deal of validity in their application. Strong emotional response from the amygdala sent to the brain creates emotional sensation. The pre-frontal lobe is responsible for abstract thinking and sends reasoned responses to the mind as it ceaselessly reads the changing environment. In all situations these two factors have nearly the exact same timing in their inception to the mind; however, when the body receives certain impulses which create a “fight or flight” response the brain tends to disregard the reasoned thought reaction the pre frontal lobe may have sent. Natural human fluids sent to create the sensation in the body make the person feel things which the mind cannot truly describe. Tearing my Achilles heel is the one time in my life where I can say that I went through some pretty intense adrenaline which makes describing the situation almost impossible. Often soldiers have similar trouble trying to describe how combat made them feel as they are rehabilitated back into society.
With this knowledge I have been able to come up with a greater discovery about why I was wrong about the reasoning of humans today. It drove me to realize that the human realities of each life, the creative nature of each person’s responses to each situation, and the complexity of the human existence together makes a reasoned world impossible. I feel that this truth can be traced to many human realities around the world today and in the past. As far as some things I can think of off the top of my head here are some of the more telling. First, smart and rich people do not make the best leaders lack a workable vision for a changing society. Second, people cannot agree on the simplest of things. Third, many feel lost to the greater “meaning” of the world. Fourth, some great souls are lost in an existential vacuum of thoughts about how we can or should make the world a better place. Fifth, the great amount of people today who would rather stay connected to cell phones, computers, mp3’s, etc than take time to think about the world today. Sixth, people who are afraid that they will wake up old and feeling that they did not accomplishing anything of value in life. I can relate with many of the above realities because I too have struggled with them at different times in my life.
The reality is that no one truth is correct; experience is the key to gaining greater perspectives, and that life does not have one “central” meaning which results in a reasoned society. Even if I did believe that all people thought with reason I do not know if they would be able to come up with great “reasoned” societies because of the unique nature of the human beings lust for power, wealth, possessions, etc. Even if we all had someone who was the most “reasoned”, “knowledgeable”, and “honest”, person in the world I would not throw my allegiance to them without first questioning their real intentions. So many societies across the space of human written existence have become hooked onto leaders who professed to have all the reasoned “answers” for their people. The results of the great reasoned despotic leaders of history are mixed, but many people found a greater appreciation for the horrors of death, famine, and war in their experiences than in achievement of a truly better world.
Why I believe that reasoned thought is important in the world today
Reasoned thought is still an important value to me as a person, but I am also able to understand why people might not agree with me as well. I would only ask that anyone who does disagree with a person has an original idea as to why. I will always respect something thought out and reasoned to fit that person’s unique “truths” they have discovered in life. I only ask that a person is very careful in assuming what they believe is correct. Remember to question the sources, bias, and prejudices of the authors at all times. Please do not think that I am trying to be arrogant in my plea. I really wish that more people would spend the time, care, and just give a damn about the world today. That is mostly why I sometimes feel hopeless, depressed, and without motivation to overcome the challenges of the world today. I know that I am unique, but I am trying to find ways that I am able to grab the attention of people looking for meaning in their life. If a person feels that they are without meaning in their life and want to do something admirable they need simply to think about the world today. Think about the rich. Feel for the poor. Write Congress. Join a local Church and go on a mission trip. Learn about the uniqueness of the rainforest. Become a member of a gym. Drive to the beach and collect trash. Spend time with friends and loved ones; a person never knows when their time is next. Whatever that thing is that makes you feel alive with meaning in life make time to do it. Take calculated chances and you will find greater meaning than you ever could have imagined. Live life connected to the world and still dream. Never give up dreaming and you will discover the greatest of all truths. All people who live with meaning inherently altruistic in nature will find peace in death. Many people who live their lives in search of ephemeral things, easy solutions, money, power, etc will discover the sad truth that all of these things are not going to make the trip with you to the next life or death.
This second piece of the blog entry entails a bit of my weekend fun in Chongqing with some of my good friends from China.
My weekend in Chongqing was a well-timed break from my Rongchang routine. I travelled with my good friend Maggie (Zhu shuai). Maggie lived her first twenty-four years in Chongqing before she moved to work studying animals at one of Rongchang’s veterinarian research centers. Together we meet up with my good friend Jack Yang. Jack has been my guest at my apartment in Rongchang and our friendship goes back to my first trip to Chongqing in March. As a big group we enjoyed a healthy pizza at Chongqing’s best (and only?) traditional Italian pizza restaurant. I cannot really call it a restaurant because the pizza is made in an apartment which has been changed into a very quaint nook for foreigners and Chinese alike to enjoy real pizza. I am emphasizing the essence of the pizza because China has quite a few interpretations of pizza which are sold at their own “pizza huts” across the country. I feel much greater affinity to what I have learned to be traditional Italian pizza over my lifetime. Thus, I wanted to show my friends out to the only traditional pizza restaurants I knew of in Chongqing. Afterwards we all enjoyed an evening of dancing and singing at one of Chongqing trendiest bar / clubs.
The next day Maggie and I enjoyed the movie Transformers III together. All in all an interesting interpretation by Michael Bay, (I do not know if I would side with humans, an alien race, and condemn the rebirth of our planet only to save some human lives and freedom?), but that is something that I have come sadly accustomed to seeing in most “blockbusters” today. I did enjoy the application of hope used by Bay and the characters to add a real human element to the movie. I imagine that doing so is difficult when you are dealing with robots and as always the special effects were enjoyable. Following the movie Maggie and I went shopping to pick up some food which we cannot buy in Rongchang, (butter, spaghetti, cereal, bagels, bread rolls, Hershey’s chocolate, etc). Afterwards I meet up with Jack and worked together tutoring a twelve year old Chinese student practice their English. I really enjoyed working with Jack’s unique knowledge of the challenges of sometimes being able to learn two quite different languages. Afterwards Jack and I enjoyed watching T.V. with his mother.
The next day I said goodbye to Jack and meet up again with Maggie for our return bus ride back to Rongchang! All together I had a great weekend catching up with old friends.
I am learning a lot of what it means to be a good teacher in China this summer as well by challenging myself by working with all ages of students. In my experiences I have had to use some alternative methods to fit my audience’s unique abilities. Reaching out to students of all ages and trying to teach them things of relevance really can be a challenge. The challenges are exacerbated by the lack of modern technology at one of my teaching jobs. By not having a monitor, computer, or even air conditioning I feel literally burning for teaching material at times. I have found that classical-conditioning, rewards, psychology, personality, candy, pictures, writing words on the boards, etc seem to keep my students from drifting off into mental imagination lands. I know for a fact that I drifted early and often to such lands as a child and want to do my best to make learning more than memorization for these young minds.
I finished reading the wonderful biography on Dietrich Bonheoffer and was greatly moved by his incredible will. He truly was someone who welcomed death rather than live complacently in Nazi Germany. He had ample opportunity to do so as he was from a very distinguished family and could easily have just given in to protect his image. He chose isolation and eventually his work for Abwher’s secret service resulted in his capture by the Gestapo and execution less than two weeks before Americans liberated the camp. Abwher was ostensibly a Nazi secret service agency; however, the Canaris was able to keep secret his explicit involvement in one of the plots to overthrow Hitler only through his connection with the agency which Bonheoffer was to join in 1941.
I recently started reading H.G. Well’s, “The World Set Free” and have taken to it from the onset. I look forward to upcoming weeks of relative quite before I head off to Beijing to join my parents on a two week vacation in China as a family!
Best wishes to friends and family
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