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Connecting the dots

Connecting the dots,这件事一直是backwards的。
后知后觉的。

昨天,我不知道哪里来的勇气,独自一人去做了ct scan。
从去年4月发现高出平常的ca 19.9至今,医生一开始就建议作的扫瞄,我花了一年多的时间去害怕、担心、抗拒
终于我去进行了。

一个人面对扫瞄,是很孤单的。
一个人面对扫瞄之后的自己,也是很孤单的。
一个人等着拿成绩、听医生的宣读,那是有点可怜的。

但,这是我的选择。

我好像长大了一些。想尝试承担,独自一人去承担。虽然我还是有害怕,但我告诉自己,watch this new experience。
的确,我像是孩子一样的眼光,去看待那台大机器。

最后听到医生说,你可以继续你的生命。

那个时候,一个relief经过心间,之后,我只剩下喘气的力气。

快两年了,我的心折腾自己,吓唬自己,把自己带上云霄飞车,这趟旅程是我选择的。我选择不好好地听自己,听一些人的话,选择听monkey mind

I asked myself why, why did I take so long to do this test?or why did I do this test now?or what this whole episode is for?

I sort of “wasted” 2 years as I spent 2 years in fear, anxiety, negativity, putting off travel, plans, dreams, I put my life on hold

But was it really wasted time?
想想,这趟旅程似乎是必要的。i had to learn this way, I had to.

怀疑带领我走上这段旅程,我因此见识到second guess自己,不相信自己的后果。

事实上,这两年心智的成长,是这些年最大最明显的。

我想起那些跟我说:你没事!的人。我想起自己告诉自己:你没事!的那把声音。
对于这样的声音,我得到安慰之外,不敢相信自己。

那是因为不了解自己,不常听自己,经常听别人,把自己交给别人的长期行为和习惯所造成的。那也是不愿意承担自己,为自己负责的胆怯和懦弱行为。

不相信自己的能力。

仁波切提到的所谓佛性障碍。

就像在巴黎迷路时回到原点的情景,我在脑海里清楚看到去年第一次收到验血报告的情景。我想起之前情绪上的压力。

那天听沁芝daddy说,他只要看到沁芝没有母亲在身边就容易发火,尤其因为我工作迟了或在外地工作,不在沁芝身边。

之前他不晓得原因,但最近获得启发,悟到那气和自己母亲不在身边有紧密的关联。

我听了,突然茅塞顿开,好像隧道里的堵塞立即打通。

之前总是觉得自己晚班、出国,家里气氛就怪怪的,却说不出所以然。沁芝daddy口头上说可以理解,没有想到他骨子里的坚持却是反方向的。是理解但不接受。

有一段时间,我责备自己,不是好妈妈,一味地鞭打自己,批判自己。努力做沁芝daddy心目中的妈妈。

我推掉很多很棒的出国体验,很棒的晚餐邀约,但我不曾后悔。我懊恼的是过程中,我没有把最好的自己拿出来。工作上,我开始逊色了,写得有些疲惫了,我开始不喜欢自己的作品和工作上的表现了。

那天的交谈之后,我发现自己太愚蠢。虽然心里觉得不对劲,自己却宁愿把对方的想法摆在第一位,过分地重视,然后努力想要迎合,却不曾真正坐下来勇敢面对自己心里所想所要。

stand by my inner voice

突然知道了压力在哪里。

突然记得了art teacher yen某天说的,u need space。那个时候不太明白。交谈期间,我的脑海中好像开启了多一片天。

是的。

The lack or absence of a mother in daddy’s life has translated to a v rigid set of ideas/definition of a mother
unwittingly, I have been caught in his notion.
In that space, I can’t breathe n can’t b me.

I felt distorted of sorts. I wasn’t able to migrate from a working professional to a working mother in my own frame of time.

I wasn’t able to transform naturally as an individual.

The space wasn’t there for me to explore this phase of mine, on my own.

And being free spirited, I couldn’t take this. And so there were so v often the internal struggles.

I almost also could see the reason behind these higher levels of ca19.9.

Toxic n stress were in my heart, n they had to find a way to show themselves.

Almost immediately too, I sensed a closure of sorts in my heart.

我很开心我能看得那么深入。

这次经验告诉我,必须更多的学习倾听自己。不要轻易抹杀自己的声音,长他人志气,灭自己威风。
还有相信自己。

就像steve jobs所说:
Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.

与此同时,我看到母亲在孩子心目中的重要性,不管孩子在哪里,长多大,对母亲的需要还是那么的强烈。

It’s a bond that stays or perhaps , grows with time.

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Stay foolish

一早开启facebook就看到一个很amazing的创意先锋辞世。几乎每一个留言都是在转帖他说过的话。很多人翻找出他的作品。

Apple Steve Jobs The Crazy Ones – NEVER BEFORE AIRED 1997

Steve Jobs narrates the first Think different commercial “Here’s to the Crazy Ones”. It never aired. Richard Dreyfuss did the voice for spot however Steve’s …

也有人为他做了一番的创作
.

20111007-002423.jpg

怎么都好,可想而知的是,他的疯狂和大胆,改变并启发了太多人。

他的这篇文章,我之前看过也在blog上贴过。

他说的话,是智慧的结晶。

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. ”

Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice.

And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary. – Steve Jobs

‎”…the only way to do great work is to love what you do… stay hungry, stay foolish” Steve Jobs, 1956-2011


http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html

Stanford Report, June 14, 2005
‘You’ve got to find what you love,’ Jobs says

This is a prepared text of the Commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, on June 12, 2005.

Video of the Commencement address.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope it’s the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much