On this Saturday morning, there is nothing more agreeable and relaxing than this small poem written by the same poet who wrote “If I were a lotus flower.” She wrote it about two years ago, before she turned 6. The poem reveals a lovely carefree child with a cheerful imagination, rendering readers a vivid picture and a feeling of immense happiness.

“Singing

I like singing.
When I am singing,
I think of a lovely bird,
Flying freely in the sky;
I think of a bright star,
Its shining eyes twinkling at night;
I think of a soft bunny,
Gently sitting by my side.
I want to loudly sing.
5/17/2007″

Don’t you want to sing with her?

A friend of mine sent me a piece of literary work done by his 8-year-old daughter. I was stricken by the beauty naturally expressed in her writing and amazed at her ability to imagine and appreciate what we adults tend to overlook or dismiss as inconsequential.

I read to my daughter yesterday. She said it sounded so beautiful. I wish we could all appreciate the simple beauty that naturally provided to us even amid the most severe cat-and-dog competition.

“If I were a lotus flower,
I would clothe myself in white,
Releasing pleasant fragnance,
Holding the hands of mom and dad,
Dancing in the wind.

I would chat with the fish for a while
Or play games with dragonflies,
Having endless fun.

Suddenly I heard a child’s loud uttering,
“Ah, how beautiful and sweet these flowers are!
Come and look at them!”
With that, a group of children come over,
They are looking and voicing their admiration at us

Hearing this, I feel so pleased.
Thus ends a happy day.”
3/2/2009

A wonderful habit! A wonderful finding on this wonderful Saturday morning.
While I was reading this article on yahoo!, I thought of my own experience and also inattentiveness problem of the 10-year-old boy at my house.

The article claims that doodling while listening actually helps you pay attention and enhance your memory. The research was carried out in the United Kingdom and published in Applied Cognitive Psychology.

“If someone is doing a boring task, like listening to a dull telephone conversation, they may start to daydream … Daydreaming distracts them from the task, resulting in poorer performance. A simple task, like doodling, may be sufficient to stop daydreaming without affecting performance on the main task,” said the researcher. A wonder pill! I was thinking of sharing this with my sister who can use this pill on her son’s hard-to-cure attention problem at school.

“In psychology, tests of memory or attention will often use a second task to selectively block a particular mental process,” said the researcher. “If that process is important for the main cognitive task, then performance will be impaired. My research shows that beneficial effects of secondary tasks, such as doodling, on concentration may offset the effects of selective blockade.”

I like doodling, in a better word, note taking, while at a meeting, a habit formed while I was at school. It might have prevented attention-deficit problem or might have helped me to write more. Up to now, I still find it hard to give constant full attention when a meeting is getting boringly long, thus starting taking notes. Old habit dies hard! It at least helps keep my eyes open and give due respect to the speaker. Now the benefit of doodling has been confirmed through research — a piece of good news to parents whose children are in need of giving attention in class.

Surviving through each day with a big smile on your face can be a challenge on some day at least. Seeing occasional clouds on people’s face, or being exposed to disrespectful behavior or hearing grumpy noises of discontent or complaints or being yelled at by a 10-year-old, feeling annoyed or irritated, or being stressed out or consumed with too much worries — don’t we once in a while have days like this? Lucky you if you don’t. I do. More than this, I have to deal with a crying boy almost on daily basis. Yes, you are right. I just had one of those days.

I have tried to think positively, trying to transform a whining cry or raucous exchanges into a beautiful serenade. Nice wish. I got it as long as the tune stay singing. I find it extremely important to stay positive for myself, my sanity, and those I care. I cannot allow myself to be bogged down mentally and physically by whatever negativities I happen to exposed.

I write this down especially for my children because I am sure they will be experiencing some degree of negative factors in the years to come, though not of the same nature. I am sure there are numerous writings and programs helping people to think positive. If self-directed mind-conditioning do not work, seek outside help. Mao Zedong once said, “Reactionaries will not go away by themselves. You have to wipe them out like you wipe away the dust.” Neither will be any negative forces. He did have some wise sayings.

Yet, it is so difficult for the sun to burst out when thick clouds amass their forces trying to block its light, so challenging for an angel staying angelic when being overwhelmed by devils or for a devil being devilish when being surrounded by angels. Your environment is very crucial in shaping you and influencing your mood. You have to stick to your goal if you cannot escape from your environment.

So far, by keeping my eyes on my goal and the big picture, I have pretty much preserved my sanity and insulated myself from negative forces surrounding me, well, most of the time at least.

The worst nightmare is to see oneself dragged down to the same level of the negative factors and chain oneself down there forever. The fear of that also motivates me to rise above and keep buoyant and cheerful. It can be an uphill battle, yet, keeping your silly smile and your humor, it is a hopeful one as long as we can fix our eyes on some positive image in our minds or the ideal self that we have for ourselves. It does work. Try it.

This should have been written before the year 2008 ended, but as I realized it ended sooner than I thought, I had to put it out on the New Year’s Day.

During the year 2008

(1) My youngest child turned 13. She taught me many lessons on parenting teenager.

(2) A conflict between another adult and a minor in our house caused the adult to take a very drastic measure — expelling the minor out of the house, which was stopped by my son. Without his intervention, the child might be living elsewhere now. I hope the minor can forget this but I can never.

(3) In July a 10-year-old nephew came to live with us. Life is no longer the same for all of us after his arrival.

(4) I went back to China in November, first time for many years that I went back by myself.

(5) My own weblog finally went public in June.

Yes, the end comes sooner than we thought. It is always this way if you don’t have the end in mind when you begin. Now looking back, you might be going through a whole spectrum of feelings –
–excitement over your achievements,
–frustration or despair over lack of it,
–sense of fulfillment for time worthily spent or
–feeling of guilt for letting another year gone by without any changes,
–a nightmare-like feeling toward an end,
–feeling like headless flies, being non-stop, non-productively busy,
–feeling of regret for not having done what you had long planned to do,
–counting your blessings for having been intact by economic downturn, or for having kept fit,…
Of course, some people might not feel anything at all, which is also excellent, because no feeling means no suffering, no experience and then no life.

Tomorrow is the beginning of another year.  To my children and to all youngsters with whatever goals they may aspire but often not strong on self-discipline to move toward them, I am going to say the same thing as I did this time last year — first and foremost, zero in on our New Year Resolutions, setting goals and new promises for the coming year.

Next, work out a detailed action plan to implement whatever you promise to accomplish. No concrete action plan often means empty promises and remain unchanged with each passing days and years until white hair sneak out, which we are all guilty of sometimes in our lives and don’t know how to be better than this.

The main reason for failure to materialize whatever we have promised is lack of self-control and self-discipline. Well, one step back, in reality, there are too many things — dreams, goals, ideal — that we failed to materialize as we grow old and sad. Hopefully, a plan and a monthly or quarterly check may work as a self-control mechanism.

My children know how nasty I could be when I am on their backs about writing their New Year’s Resolution.

So much for this joyful New Year’s Eve. Here’s my last statement for this year 2008

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Happy New Year!

Today is Thanksgiving. It’s nice and warm outside. I get up early and think of a poem I read several days ago by Karl Fuchs:

Thanksgiving Every Day

The table is brimming with good things to eat;
We’re surrounded by family and friends; what a treat.
The feelings that fill us today can’t be beat;
It’s Thanksgiving Day, and it all feels complete.

But other days, sometimes things don’t seem so fine;
Those days are not polished and don’t seem to shine.
It’s then in our minds, we forget all the good,
And think of the things we would get, if we could.

On days when our thinking causes us dread,
If we could remember, it’s all in our head,
And not let our minds take our gratitude away,
Then we’d make every day like Thanksgiving Day.

Is it hard to be thankful everyday? Happy Thanksgiving.

I have devoted too much of my posting on Condi Rice lately. Now here’s another of my favorite topic — TIME.

Last week someone was listening to a Chinese children song on time.  It describes time as a magician who can change everything — season, appearance of our face, etc. When I go back to China and see folks whom I have not seen since my last visit, we expect to see apearance changes in each other. When my son came back from Boston, he said he felt he had changed a lot but he did not see much change in his high school classmates. I think he meant changes both inside and outside.

Indeed, time does do the trick of bringing changes in everything, including the chemical part of our hearts and heads, but we are the one who control how much changes and what kind of change that we want to take place regarding our mind and soul. Therefore, the saying “Time is a big equalizer” is true in a limited way.

If you want to bring changes inside you, time won’t be the key factor.  You need to take initiative.  If you don’t make efforts to increase your knowledge and wisdom with the same increase rate of age, you remain unchanged mentally despite of your changed appearance.

But sometimes, we want to keep something unchanged in our hearts even if changes occur to us outside.  I remember a poem goes like this,
          My heart leapt up when I behold,
          A rainbow in the sky.
          So was it when I was small;
          So be it when I am a man
          So shall it be when I am old.
The poet wants to remain young at heart even if he is old. Is it that what we all want?

During the days after Hurricane Katrina, while the country was horrified over the loss of human lives and the dire situation of poor black refugees, Rice went on a shopping spree at Ferragamo on Fifth Avenue for thousands of shoes. “Theater goers in New York City’s Great White Way were shocked to see the President’s former National Security Advisor at the Monty Python farce … as the rest of the cabinet responds to Hurricane Katrina.”

Her explanation was, “I probably had not fully understood that I had also kind of gone into this category of national leader, … that people expected me to be part of the solution for Katrina. I just didn’t get it, frankly.” pp. 266-267.

I am not sure if she is enlightened enough to understand this simple truth — it is not what people expect you to do.  It is what you expect yourself to do and to help as an ordinary human being, from your heart, when you see so many of your people suffer and when you are in the position to help, that is, if you have the heart for the suffering people of yours.  Even my children know to make donations when the earthquake hit Sichuan, China. Her lack of sympathy for her people in Katrina disaster is beyond my comprehension.

It shocks me to read about her attitude toward those underprivileged.  Rice talked about welfare recipients “taking advantage of the government and that they need to pull themselves up on their own.” Rice knows most of those welfare recipients are African Americans like herself.  One of her former colleague at Stanford commented on her, “That woman has a hard streak in her.” p. 107

The hard streak in her is the defect in her education — single-minded focus on success while lacking of cultivation in humanities field, the care of soul and mind, which result in her inability of understanding and empathy to think and feel how others do.  I would think this is a lesson for all parents who want their children to be full social beings, capable of both thinking and feeling.

Continue on the topic left from yesterday.  Rice became what her parents wanted her to be — succeed no matter what. She also turned out to be the exact product of their education — single-minded pursuit of success.

Her parents saw education as being instrumental to achieve what you aimed. “… you can achieve anything, you can do whatever you want to do, if only you get an education, …” p. 23  Rice was made sure to receive the best and highest education that could be obtain, music and French from very young, started learning to read at age 3, till she got Ph.D at the end.  Her French teacher was “struck … by John Rice’s full-time focus on the betterment of Condoleezza Rice.” p. 20.  Yet her parents did not have the intellectual ability to see education as being essential in developing a full-person, heart and soul, not simply an instrument to success.

As Rice put it, “I never developed the fine art of recreational reading.” p. 17,  whatever that might mean.  I would think she was saying she has not developed a love of reading for the pure joy, wisdom, insight and the mind-cultivating that reading is supposed to offer.

The result is Rice did have Ph.D, yet she does not have the intellectual depth to think and reflect.  “She may not have been an intellectual secretary of state like Kissinger or a master strategist like Baker, but she probably had more drive than either of them. The disciplined blaze of her life — … — suggested that she would throw everything she had into trying to triumph in the twilight of the Bush presidency.  It was obvious from Rice’s many metamorphoses that her real ideology was not idealism or realism or defending the citadels of freedom, … Her real ideology was succeeding.” p. 311

“Rice was never especially self-reflective, but she was always optimistic, and in June 2007, when she was asked to assess how she had performed as national security adviser, she gave an odd answer. ‘I don’t know. I think I did okay.’”  p. 310  These words are so revealing of her character, void of higher order of philosophical thinking.

Unlike former president Clinton and many other great persons, Rice has no enduring belief, no ideal. She has single-mindedly pursued one thing — success.  And she has succeeded for the sake of succes.

I strongly feel that there is something missing in her as I was reading her biography, something at first I cannot catch. By the time I read about her response to Hurricane Katrina, I came to realize the weak link in her education.  Yes, the kind of education is what I am interested in most when I read about Rice.  Blame me for being a parent all the time.

I will talk about this tomorrow.

I have been lately reading a biography on Condoleezza Rice, secretary of state on Bush junior’s second term, written by Elizabeth Bumiller, 2007.  On the one hand, this book is like all other books, having the bias of the author; on the other hand, it presents a mixed picture and message to readers like me, a parent who is reading and trying to find enlightenment on parenting.

One of the most striking fact that I will talk about is the role of parents in the success of a child.  Her parents “poured their hearts into the project of their lives: the teaching, molding, and polishing of Condoleezza.” p. 14.  Rice’s mother was “an intense, devoted mother. ‘Condoleeza was her world.’” p. 11.  While other kids were playing, the little Rice was made to spend her time on useful activities like reading and practicing piano.

It is no exaggeration to say that Rice would not have climbed this high without the exceptional dedication and stubbornly tenacious insistence of her parents in placing the interests and the success of their child before anything else. I would imagine our country’s prisons would be nearly empty if all parents shared at least one percent of Rice’s parents’ effort in their children’s education.  I feel very much dwarfed in comparison to Rice’s mom.

Rice is the living example of the saying — you reap what you sow.  She is the exact product of the upbringing of her parents, whatever that may be, which I will dwell on later.

Lu Xun, a Chinese literary giant created in his story Ah-Q Biography a rather despicable character called Ah-Q, an extreme “the kiss-up, kick-down type” that Rob Gifford described in his book China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power. More famous than this, he can always talk himself into feeling good even after being spitted and slapped in his face by his attackers. He always comforts himself as his being spiritually superior over his conquerors and can claim victory even after being soundly defeated and ruthlessly trampled under the foot of the conqueror. You can say he lives a life of self-created illusion and self-deception.

To be sure, Lu Xun had zero good word for this type of people. Instead, he thought it so pathetically characteristic of Chinese people of his time.

For some reason, I do not find this character so distasteful, other than the “kiss-up, kick-down” part.  Ah-Q simply tries to make himself feel good when he is unable to make changes to his fate and environment.  To some extent, when we compromise and reconcile, isn’t that what we try to do everyday, to a different degree though?  Don’t we have our own illusions to live by?  Here I hear people explain any misfortune as “God’s will,” or something better than nothing — a western Ah-Q.

Psychologically, we all have the need to be Ah-Q at some point of our lives. Again, to make me feel good, I would argue I have never been “spitted and slapped in his face by others” and thus have no excuse to feel otherwise.

Oops, does it have anything to do with parenting?  You can finger it out by yourself if that’s what you are wondering.

On 3/9/2008, while watching my daughter reading at Border’s and remembering the time when she was so eager to have me read to her and I never had enough time for her then and now she seldom has time and patience to hear me talk.  I thought a lot and wrote below at Border’s:

                  Enjoy Your Turn

Read to that little ones while the ears are all yours,
Listen to what the child’s heart pours out while the heart is still open to you,
Take the little sweetie to places while the sweetie cannot drive,
Clothe the tiny body, feed the baby mouth,
Hold those child hands while the hands reach out for you.
For the moment will come, sooner than you expect, when –
The little turns big;
And the big hands are behind the wheel;
The big heart is closed to you;
And finally, you become the one reaching out for that once upon a child! 

I have shared this piece with some of my friends.  Here are their comments:
From the doctor at our clinic.  I sent this to her on her last day at our clinic, 6/12/2008
“Wow, thank you so much.  This is beautiful.  And you’re absolutely right – I feel like my daughters are growing faster every day.  Thank you for your lovely words, and best of luck to you.”

An old friend of the writer, from her teen years, 6/14/2008
“Well written.  Only when you have kids can you write sth like this. Not from one’s pen, but the heart.”

I love these comments!  Thanks for the bounty of kind words and encouragement. If my children have made my live richer, my friends have made it more appreciable. Well, I see a lot to be thankful now.