Eric Tian

One of my strongest childhood memories is riding a scooter with my best friend. I’ll call him A.

I had convinced A’s mum to buy him a scooter last week, and today was his first time riding it. We went to a nearby park where I taught him how to brake, how it’s better to steer with your hips rather than with the handlebars and he learnt quickly. After some time, I suggested we go down a nearby hill.

“I’ll go first,” I said encouragingly. “If you fall, I’ll come and get you”. A reluctantly agreed.

It was a warm sunny day with a gentle breeze. With a few strong kicks, I flew down the familiar hill on my scooter, narrowly avoiding some bumps and holes in the pavement, before making it up the other side. I turned around, exhilarated, and gestured to A to go.

“It’s easy,” I called.

A reluctantly pushed off, but it was immediately clear the hill was too steep for his ability. His hands wobbled, uncertain with the speed, and halfway down he lost his balance and fell off. His scooter fell to the grass on the side, while A tumbled down the pavement to the bottom. He didn’t move, and for a moment, I feared he was dead.

Just as I was about to run down, I noticed a group of students gathering at the hill. I recognised their faces and paused – they were the local school bullies, and I was quite sure one of them didn’t like me. The thought of going down and getting jumped put me in a state of paralysis. I knew I had to help A but all I could do was watch him from the top. Nobody else had seen him except me – his best friend, who was too much of a coward to do anything. I felt a strange, disgusting emotion build up inside of me; I later identified it as shame.

“Please move,” I prayed. “Please.”

To my relief, A slowly got to his feet. He noticed his scooter lying on the grass, its handlebars all deformed, and went to recover it. As he slowly limped back up the hill, the bullies noticed his bleeding knee.

“Hey,” they called. “Better get that checked up.” He nodded, and my new emotion intensified. Even the bullies were more considerate than me.

I could not meet his eye when he made it up. I had betrayed my best friend – had I not told him I would help him if he fell? Yet when he needed help the most, all I could do was watch. I was pathetic. A coward. We didn’t speak for the rest of the day, and at school we began to avoid each other. I felt I had made an irreversible chasm in our friendship.

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There are a few miseries we must face as humans. These include thirst, starvation, jealousy, boredom; but the most tragic one of all, the one that pierces our soul most deeply, is the awareness we have committed a mistake we cannot go back and fix. Additionally, I think we do a great deal to avoid admitting these mistakes to ourselves.

But it is in the pain of our mistakes where human greatness lies. This memory of A and the hill is not a bad one, for with it came lessons on self-sacrifice and courage. The shame from that day paved the foundation for future fond memories; ones where I chose to run down the hill instead of staying at the top. More importantly, I was able to eventually make amends with A. Though we don’t ride scooters anymore, we still remain good friends to this day.

If regrets help us learn essential truths about ourselves, then those experiences will not have been wasted. I say, let our pain reveal lessons about morality, justice, and humanity. It is there where we are one step closer to greatness.

“Error is related to truth as sleep to waking. I have observed that on awakening from error a man turns again to truth as with new vigour.” – Goethe, Maxims and Reflections.

During my run this afternoon, it began to rain – gently at first, then heavily. The few people out all brought out their umbrellas and began rushing for shelter. After a while, there was no person in sight. My legs began to get cold and the lack of people gave an eerie vibe. I wondered if I should head back.

Then, in the distance, a burst of red and green hair came closer. He was a sight to behold: torn sandals, a white ACDC shirt, and sunglasses, yet running quickly. As we passed, our eyes met.

“Rock on!” he yelled, grinning.

My run felt much easier after that.

1) Good.

2) They don’t know me son.

Yesterday, a man across the street threw himself off an apartment. He shattered both his legs as he landed, with bits of thigh muscle flying across the road. The first eyewitness reported that he died on impact. A girl sucking a lollipop was only metres away from where he landed. She was unharmed, but found crying; overcome by fear, anguish, and confusion.

I didn’t know the guy, but the news made me shudder. I have lost two friends this year from suicide, and let me tell you, people do not die when they die. They live on in the stories and minds of others, and in the case of suicide, these are filled with pain and regret. It is walking into a room full of your friends, family, loved ones, and the people who witness your act, and blowing a hole to the heavens – if that is where you end up. For the rest of us, it is a living hell.

I refuse to believe that suicide is selfish, but rather ignorant. Ignorant of the love and hope around them, of the strength and courage within them, and in believing that suffering ends with the end of one’s life.

Tim Ferriss writes in Some Practical Thoughts on Suicide:

“Your death is not perfectly isolated. It can destroy a lot, whether your family (who will blame themselves), other loved ones, or simply the law enforcement officers or coroners who have to haul your death mask-wearing carcass out of an apartment or the woods. The guaranteed outcome of suicide is NOT things improving for you (or going blank), but creating a catastrophe for others. Even if your intention is to get revenge through suicide, the damage won’t be limited to your targets.

A friend once told me that killing yourself is like taking your pain, multiplying it 10x, and giving it to the ones who love you.  I agree with this, but there’s more.  Beyond any loved ones, you could include neighbors, innocent bystanders exposed to your death, and people — often kids — who commit “copycat suicides” when they read about your demise. This is the reality, not the cure-all fantasy, of suicide.

If think about killing yourself, imagine yourself wearing a suicide bomber’s vest of explosives and walking into a crowd of innocents.

That’s effectively what it is.  Even if you “feel” like no one loves you or cares about you, you are most likely loved–and most definitely lovable and worthy of love.”

A cool winter evening. Dog stretches on the front lawn. Dog watches cat cross the road. Dog hears tyres screech, then a faint bump. Dog sees humans running to cat. Dog sees cat’s ghost float up towards the sky, higher and higher, until it disappears into the stars.

Dog goes inside, thinking about his sister, how maybe she is with cat now.

Dog wags its tail.

In The Reading Life, C.S. Lewis writes:

“The modern view seems to me to involve a false conception of growth. They accuse us of arrested development because we have not lost a taste we did in childhood. But surely arrested development consists not in refusing to lose old things but in failing to add new things? I now like hock, which I am sure I should not have liked as a child. But I still like lemon-squash. I call this growth or development because I have been enriched: where I formerly had only one pleasure, I now have two. But if I had to lose the taste for lemon-squash before I acquired the taste for hock, that would not be growth but simple change.”

This passage can be extended to books as well: I now enjoy Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky as well as fairy tales for “children”. If one had to lose the fairy tales for adult books, I would not call that growth, only that one had changed. A bus doesn’t grow by leaving one station behind and moving on towards the next. Growth is more like the tree that continuously adds rings, building upon what was previously there.

The reality is more complicated than this, of course. The process of growing usually involves some loss, especially with age. But loss is not the essence of growth, and certainly not what makes it precious. If it were, we should consider taking a train or becoming senile virtues of growth. Should we be congraulated on these things?

Some people like to define growth by the cost of it, and to make that cost far greater than it needs to be.

1. Your situation isn’t life threatening. Even if you fail, you will still be alive and there will still be love and food around. Relax.

2. “Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I’m not going to make it, but you laugh inside — remembering all the times you’ve felt that way.” – Charles Bukowski.

You’ve made it this far. You can probably do it.

3. Treat it like an opportunity: you will come out more capable and resilient than before it.

4. It’s honestly not that important. Like really. Even if you make a colossal fool of yourself, 99.99999% of people will never know, and 99% people who know don’t care.

5. Maybe try getting some sleep or water or sunlight. Stress can be a response to unmet biological demands.

6. This is a natural and fulfilling part of life. The depth of this depression will fuel the euphoria of your highs.

Do you want the opposite – no stress, no challenge, a life full of cookies and comfort? That sounds like a pretty boring story.

I have been reading some gorgeous books recently. Books with phrases that flow perfectly and descriptions that transport you into another world. It is in this euphoric state where I am bitter and disappointed, for when I come back to the computer, I shudder at the mundanity of my drafts.

It is a vicious cycle: believing you are worthy -> realising you are not -> believing you are an idiot -> small improvements -> believing you are worthy. Like a phoenix being reborn, each Dunning-Kruger evolution forces you shed the previous standard of yourself. They say the rebirthing process contains the most excruciating pain known to the world.

It is the idiot phases that are the most existentially dreadful, for it is here where your whole life is exposed as a fraud. Tonight, I stand naked before literary giants, and hang my head in shame.

Little do we know that it is these moments where we are closest to perfection.

“There is a legend about a bird which sings just once in its life, more sweetly than any other creature on the face of the earth. From the moment it leaves the nest it searches for a thorn tree, and does not rest until it has found one. Then, singing among the savage branches, it impales itself upon the longest, sharpest spine. And, dying, it rises above its own agony to out-carol the lark and the nightingale. One superlative song, existence the price. But the whole world stills to listen, and God in His heaven smiles. For the best is only bought at the cost of great pain…. Or so says the legend.”

– Colleen McCulloch, The Thorn Birds

There are two options for dealing with procrastination:

1. Make the pleasure of doing it > the pleasure of not doing it.
2. Make the pain of not doing it > the pain of doing it.

The first is the carrot. This is the lazy mouse that runs because it smells cheese.

The second is the stick. This is the lazy mouse that runs because it sees a hungry cat.

If you are a carrot-minded person, tools and techniques that may help are the pomodoro technique, working with colleagues, tying rewards to completed tasks, and apps that gamify habits like Forest.

If you are a stick-minded person (like me), tools that may help are the 90-year old meditation, having accountability partners, eating the frog, and BeeMinder – an app that charges you for missing habits.

And if none of this works? Then maybe the thing you’re procrastinating on just isn’t that important.