The Alchemist

My brother's birthday gift to me; he wrote:

As I read this book I could not think of anyone else I know whose life's journey resembled that of Santiago, than yours.

It's always complex to read a book that comes with that prologue: did he actually read it? (it doesn't look like his kind of book - I didn't know he read novels - of course this based on something he said to me about 10 years ago!!!); was it this part that he thought resembled my life or was it another...

But soon these thoughts were gone away - the simple allegorical story was in some sense perfect for this time of my life - a window to the things I once loved and maybe not any more and the things that I have grown to love and the call to make a decision, to make room for the dreams, the new ones.

So this was the book that gave the infamous,

when you want something all the universe conspires to help you achieve it

I loved the writing style - short, simple sentences. And very interestingly the first line of the book states "the boy's name was Santiago", which is the only time he is named - he is referred to as 'the boy' throughout the book. I also loved the way he wrote 'Personal Legend', capitalizing the first letters, like it was a proper noun.

Interestingly, the epilogue for the book talked about how Coelho found inspiration for his first novel, The Pilgrimage, after doing the camina the Santiago de Compostela. I had never heard of this, until a friend who I have great respect for, talked about this in Tokyo about a month ago. The next day, taking the flight from Narita to Vancouver, I read in the UA magazine, an interview with Martin Sheen on his movie, The Way, again about this camina (terrible story, but I watched this for the scenes of the camina, and I was not disappointed). So I go from never hearing about this to hearing about this from three independant sources within the course of a month - speaking of omens, the recurring theme of the book!

But here are some quotes that really spoke to my heart:

But this was the present moment and he wanted to live it as he did the lessons of his past and his dreams of the future. Although the vision of the date palms would someday be just a memory, right now it signified shade, water, and a refuge from the war.

You must love the desert, but never trust it completely. Because the desert tests all men: it challenges every step, and kills those who become distracted.

And if you didn't fall hopelessly and romantically in love with the desserts of the Giza pyramids after reading this book, well then you must not be a hopeless romantic!! :)

Day before yesterday my bosses said they wanted to talk to me today; they are probably getting concerned about the less than stellar performance promised by my previous bosses. I was able to talk myself through it and they seemed happy at the end. But today, well actually yesterday, after lots of crying that physically shook me like it hasn't for a long long time, I decided I will become happy again.

It was also a time I felt gratitude for the constants of my life, for the love, for the witness to my life. Even at times that my mind strays, I have found comfort in the constants. And for the first time in a long time, I said a clear 'no' to temptation, so I will be comforted in the constants.

And tonight I came home and huddled on my couch under the throw with a hot chocolate and finished reading The Alchemist and it calmed me in so many ways. Paranoia and psychosis are gone tonight and a strong determination to keep them at bay is now within me.

It also made me think of new beginnings; I have been for a while, but this time it felt stronger: my yoga teacher said last week (I know, I don't believe it either - that I am quoting a yogi):

Something's have been in your life and served you well and now they have earned the right to die. Offer them up to the fire, to agni, to make room for new beginnings. Let them die with dignity.

and the Alchemist quote that really, really talked to my heart at this time,

“There is only one thing that makes a dream impossible to achieve: the fear of failure.”

If I were to go by the book's theme of 'recognizing omens' so I would realize my 'Personal Legend', this would be it!

"Well, then, why should I listen to my heart?"

"Because you will never again be able to keep it quiet. Even if you pretend not to have heard what it tells you, it will always be there inside you, repeating to you what you're thinking about life and about the world."

- The Alchemist, by Paulo Coelho

Dental Cleaning with a view

my first dental cleaning in Vancouver - about time you'd say, but there was like a 3-month wait period after making the appointment - perhaps, because I looked up ratemyMD and found one of the top 5 dentists. So the X-ray revealed one bad tooth that needed a filling and perhaps even a root-canal (!!!!??) - this made me throw a huge fit of denial, which surprised the doctor and so he opened his mouth to reveal like 10 crowns!!! I didn't tell him I intended to get to 50 without a single filling and also wondered if I made the right choice - I mean the man has obviously not taken care of his own teeth. A week or so later they would do a filling, and it seemed I was just short of a root canal, and they put a white crown (that cost me $50 out of pocket!!!! - they didn't even ask if they could put the silver one, that was in fact covered by my insurance... I might have opted for the silver, since it was an upper tooth and since I am a bit shorter than average people, the chances are no one would actually see the color of my crown... oh well). Anyway, it was also the first time I was anesthetized, which freaked me out since I didn't know how less is normal, to feel once you are been anesthetized - so it was this big drama of me asking for more anaesthesia and wanting the dentist to hold the mirror to my mouth every 2 minutes so I see what he was doing - so of course now there is a small roughness, that I will have to wait for a month or two before I get smoothed out.

This is the view from the dentists office - looking directly down my street - somewhere at the end of this picture is my apartment, eclipsed by the giant high-rises in the horizon.

Anyway, this all made me think of one of my friends from MN, who shuffles back and forth between there and Van and he is this former Soviet Union person so he is all-glory-to-socialism and is so enamoured by the Canadian health care system, compared to the US one, and he specifically talked about getting a dental cleaning appointment in Vancouver within a week of calling... so either he is lying, or he lives in some God-foresaken suburb - I am going to go with the latter... a lot of people tend to refer to suburbs of big cities as the big cities themselves... I beg to disagree, and disagree very much...

Anyway, I like universal health care because it allows affordable health care to everyone - so go universal health care, yes! But, I must admit, as a poor grad student at UMN, I had way better health care than I ever had in Montréal (maybe Vancouver might be different, I haven't been to the hospital yet) - in the UMN hospital there was a sign that said 'speak to us if you have been waiting here for more than 15mins.' and in Montréal, even when I went to the supposedly faster clinics, I had to wait for 1hr and 20mins, with a killing stomach-ulcer pain, before I got seen! But that was regular hospital; ok, so in UMN, you had to make a dental hygiene appointment 6months ahead, but you have to remember that was in the dental school - I tried to get in to the UBC dental school, they wouldn't even consider me unless I had some dental problem (makes sense - they are after all a teaching hospital for dentists where cleaning is not that important I guess)... So, yes I agree, I was one of the lucky few who got to go to a large enough school with good enough health insurance in the US - but it is indeed a little disconcerting that one had better health care when one was earning less than 1/3rd of the current income... I am not saying, "Canada c'mon get with the US program" - I imagine the Canadian system is better on the overall, but it is not as spotless as people like to think...

Autumn, as they call it...

Autumn - that is what the "British" Columbians call it - is here... If it were up to me, I would leave all those fallen leaves on the streets; they look quite pretty. Here in the west coast, we don't do the spectacular Fall colors, but Vancouver has introduced all these deciduous trees, so we have some colors in our city-streets (it follows then, if you go in to nature for hiking/camping etc) you won't see these colors. I am not a big fan of plant life being introduced: I am more with the movement that say grow only the native plants, get rid of your lawns (lawn grass is not native to North America) and help prevent soil erosion and excessive chemical usage etc.

But as you can see, it is not up to me... blow blow blow (the leaves, get you heads out of the gutter) and then wash wash wash (the sap...). On my way to the library, on a glorious Autumn Sunday afternoon.

yoga O.O

It's now been exactly a week since I began yoga!!! I am on a two week trial for unlimited classes for $35 at this fancy yoga studio. When I planned to take this trial one of my friends said that I could probably find cheaper at a community center, because, she said "let's face it; how many times will you actually go in this 2 week period?". I said to her "fourteen times!" and reminded her that if this surprises her she clearly does not know me; I am known to go to greater lengths for less amounts of money.

Anyway, so thus I have become what I vehemently made fun of: lululemon pants wearing, yoga mat carrying yuppie hippie. I am yet to go grocery shopping in my lulu's or walk around town with my yoga mat (they provide mats for free during the trial), but these days might numbered.

About 5-10ish years ago one of my friends suggested I take up meditation (probably because he thought I was going through some hard periods in life) and I remember saying that I really wasn't a meditative type and politely declining. Once when he was visiting me, I walked in to him sitting cross legged on my living room floor, meditating - I barely covered my laughter, but this incident made for many jokes with my other friends later on. Couple other friends have encouraged me to take yoga, more as a way to calm my mind (why people think I need mind-calming, I wouldn't know, but this they do) and I have time and again declined, sometimes not so politely even. The only reason I would have taken up yoga was for the physical exercise, and yoga seemed like a lame way to get in shape; my Mom had brought a yoga book and I remember trying out those poses back when I was a kid and finding them beneath my level.

Now I don't know if I just didn't do those poses quite right back then or if I was a more flexible person back then, but man is yoga hard or what! I usually come out of the class sweating like a pig (I know they don't sweat much, but you get the idea)... And I went in there thinking 'pfffttt how can these yoga hippies have more strength than I do' and man was I wrong. I wasn't able to hold quite a few of the poses, sometimes at all, sometimes not as long.

Some teachers like to talk and chant in Sanskrit and all that stuff and I am sitting there thinking, 'ok ok, cut the fluff and let's get burning'. This one teacher who spoke for about 10 minutes about 'santhosha' was really making me think that's the last time I am taking her class - but as it so happened she turned out to be the best teacher in the studio, making us bust move after move, but also paying attention to our forms - oh-ho I even got my neck massaged a bit when I was in downward dog! And one thing that she said stuck with me: as she talked about contentment she said 'acceptance is letting go of a past that you wish was different' and I thought back about my own life and the times I had felt content was when I did exactly that. Some things that happened in the past are not ok things to have happened. If they happened again now they still would not be acceptable. But at some point you have to let it go and look more towards the forward...

I haven't worked out for about 3 months at all now - not even running. So it feels good to be stretching and burning those muscles. Somehow it is also giving me more clarity of mind; strength training does this for me - it is probably the endorphins.

Today I got myself a yoga mat so I can practice at home - it wasn't as bad as last week when I bought my lululemon pants and was walking around town with one of their bags, when more conscious minded citizens were doing the Occupy Vancouver!

Now I do the Om with the class without cracking a giggle. It almost soothes me to listen to some teachers chant in Sanskrit. I love the Hindi classical music the teachers play over their ipods. I love the focus on the breath. All these, I would have laughed at 10 years ago - so feel free to laugh as you read this. There is a time for everything in life - right now in my life, it looks like it is a good time for yoga!

One big thing in yoga is to let yourself be content, not to push yourself to your limits: 'you are whole, you are missing nothing' one of my teachers always says. I understand it is nice to have a bit of this sort of thinking, but whenever she says that I can not help but think that the human species would be no where near where it is now if we all thought this way! My philosophy is more in line with:

Yeah, if we were all just satisfied with what we had what a beautiful world it would be. We'd all slowly starve to death in our own filth, but at least we'd be happy. Listen. I need your self-worth to hand on this job. For kicking ass here to be all that lets you rise above miserable If waking up in the morning is enough, I don't need you.

Greg House, in House MD

I am still a sucker for hippies - I still like the calm flowiness of the Owen-Wilson-in-Darjeeling-Express look alike (more in mannerisms than in the bandages) teacher who has the word 'vegan' tattooed in to his wrists; I will still give a lot to watch his sandy hair fall over his face as he rocks back and forth in the turtle pose! And I still laugh when I have to 'fluff my armpits so I can let go off the day's stress'.

Psychiatry

"P$YCHIATRY is a Fraud" says her sweater... Oh please, ignorant hippy... Do you get out of your incense-stick-smoke infested voodoo world and read books that talk about chemical imbalances in the human body?? Not to say a lot of psychiatrists might not be qualified/patient enough to prescribe proper treatment for such problems, but to sport a sweater that discourages psychiatric help and treatment, is not only ignorant, but also dangerous... We have come a long way from the times of the likes of 'One flew over the cuckoo's nest' of psychological problems only being in the head of the beholder, and I for one would like to keep moving forward, and not backward!

This reminds me of my first roommate in Vancouver; yep, the voodoo one. He actually once suggested that I should actually not wear glasses, that 'near-sightedness' is only in my head and optometrists are running this scam to make a living!!!!

Occupy Vancouver

maybe a lot of people with a sense of entitlement... but I like this idea of people mobilizing to keep the powers be in check...

Steve Jobs

this is the Apple store at the Pacific Center - Vancouverites - never too happy, never too sad, always business as usual and always, of course, driving me nuts (for this emotionlessness), but this time I welcomed the taking-a-step-back-from-profound-sadness.

Don't get me wrong - Steve Jobs is a personality that I admire a lot. There is something in me that really likes self-made people, maybe because I am one myself. And, while I don't want to join any cult, even an Apple cult, I am also in general against the new-age hippy mentality of 'I want blood - of all successful people', that most of the time is connected to an illogical sense of entitlement...

There were a few of Jobs's saying that were made in to touching eulogies, but none that really stood out for me... except for maybe iSad.

RIP Steve Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) what a birthday eve present - iSad that the world lost such an innovative personality. But if there's one way I would like to go, it is this way, while I am still at the helm of my life.

Don't let 'em keep taking it away from me. Don't let me lie here 'till I can't hear those people chanting (my name) no more.
- Maggie Fitzgerald, in Million Dollar Baby