The Tenets: My Limited Perspective of a Grand Existence

The Earth has made yet another revolution around the sun, and while, in the grand scheme of things, this revolution may mean nothing, we as human beings (following the Gregorian calendar) have ascribed within it countless meaning. I believe this to be true: one of the meanings of human life is to ascribe meaning to the mundane, and an indelible quality of humanity lies within our effortless ability to do so.

I, a human too, am in a state of constant flux as I am bombarded by countless stimulations which my conscious and subconscious try their best to decipher, decompress, and sometimes detonate, to varying degrees of success. The summation of these efforts have blessed me with a perspective that I believe to be unique. In my 27 years of life, I have happened upon a cluster of tenets— or rules, beliefs, lessons, or the collection thereof— by which I (try to) govern my life. This document is my first attempt at putting a language to these beliefs, or at the very least, it is my first attempt at sharing these beliefs publicly in an informal document as holy as the blog.

My purpose for doing this now is because I have recently happened upon the belief that one of the meanings of human life is to add beauty to the lives of others. I’m no authority on what beauty even is, but at the risk of sounding vain, I think my thoughts are beautiful. And my hope is that you can share your thoughts as well so we can reach a higher beauty together.

This will hopefully be the first document of many. As my flux continues, so the tenets will need to be reformed, reshaped or discarded altogether, and if my mind and body are able, I will update them in the fullness of time. Lastly, this is by no means a comprehensive list of my beliefs, but it is a starting point. Without further ado, the tenets.

Life Is A Wave

Life, as a wave, is a cycle of ups and downs through time. The trick is to maximize the peaks and minimize the troughs.

Our mood. Our breaths. The seasons. Photons. The ocean. The planets. Sound. Sleep and wake. Hunger and satiation. Desire. Death. Birth. You show me a cycle in life and I will show you a wave. It is to the point where I equate life to being a wave, and this was a necessary view that freed me.

When I was in college many years ago, I struggled with depression and was fortunate enough to go to therapy for the first time. For reasons I could not then explain, I felt like I was trapped in an abyss from which there was no escape. After months of attending therapy and doing the work, the quality of my life and my mind vastly improved. I was cured! Or so I thought, until the next bought of sadness descended upon me. I remember going back to my therapist and being shocked when he told me that we wouldn’t need further sessions. What do you mean? I’m still sad! I’m not fixed! Why can’t I stay happy? I feel broken. And he said, “You’re going to feel sad sometimes. It doesn’t mean you’re broken, and it doesn’t mean you’re depressed.”

It wasn’t the truth I wanted, but it was the truth I needed. By his telling me that I am going to feel sad sometimes, I realized that I would also feel happy sometimes. So the next time I got sad, I told myself this feeling won’t last because life is a wave. I just have to ride the sadness out until my happiness comes again. Just by realizing that, my sadness didn’t feel as much of an abyss, and it doesn’t to this day. I still have my seasons of sadness, but I have my seasons of joy as well. Many of us are trapped in the struggle to attain unending happiness. But that is not what life is. Life is a wave.

You Are The One Who Observes

By recognizing that you are not your thoughts or your feelings, but that you are the one who observes your thoughts and your feelings, you are able to transcend your thoughts and your feelings.

In the summer of 2021, I was fortunate enough to read several books that gave me a deeper insight into my being. One of them was The Untethered Soul by Michael Alan Singer. While I do not endorse all the views within this book, one concept that was particularly transformative in my life was that I am not my thoughts. Have you ever really taken a moment to ask yourself what makes you, you? Is it your physical body? Is it your thoughts? Is it your feelings? Is it your actions? Is it your soul? What is a soul? You can do this mental exercise on your own time, but I’m going to skip ahead and share some revelations I was guided to. The first and most important one being that I am not my thoughts.

Every second of every day, we all are constantly thinking. There is a voice in our heads that chatters incessantly. Judging what we do, what other people do, what we’ve done. The list goes on and on. A lot of us make the mistake of thinking that this voice is us. We let this voice boss us around and tell us what to do and how to feel because we think it’s right. But it’s not us and it’s marginally right at best. Here’s an exercise. Tell that voice in your head right now to count to five. Now think of the color blue. Now red. Now tell it to say, “I’m a happy hippopotamus.” Don’t think of an elephant! See what you did? With the exception of the elephant, you were able to tell your mind what to do with ease. If you can tell something what to do, it means it can’t be you, right? It’s just something you told what to do. And the elephant, considering you put any effort at all into trying not to think of one, your mind disobeyed you and still thought of an elephant. That is because this voice, this mind, whatever you want to call it, it sometimes gives the perception that it is being controlled by you which, in turn, makes you think that it is you, but in all honesty, it is an entity outside of what makes you, you. The mind is gonna do what it do. You are not your thoughts. You simply observe your thoughts.

The same goes for your feelings. It can be hard to think you are not your feelings because they are so powerful. You physically can feel sick to your stomach with anxiety, or like a dagger is twisting in your heart with grief. You can feel buoyant with joy or tremble with madness. These feelings are realities. Sometimes they come unannounced and unbounded. Sometimes with great effort you can quiet them for a moment, only for them to rise back to the surface with a vengeance. How could you not identify with such powerful forces as feelings? But I have come to realize that just like my thoughts, these feelings are not me. They are simply emotions that I observe. By incorporating this truth into your life, you are able to act in spite of your thoughts and your feelings. I’ll share one example from my life before we move on.

A few months ago, I was so sad that I could not move. My room was in shambles. My hygiene was non-existent. I was surviving from Door Dash meal to Door Dash meal, even though I had no money and no job to justify it. The voice inside my head was constantly belittling me, telling me that I was worthless and I would never amount to anything. I hadn’t spoken to anyone in weeks. The whole nine yards. Simply put, I felt like I had lost control of my life. But then I remembered that I am the one who observes. Just with that thought, I started to feel detachment from my feelings and detachment from the incessant noise in my head. I needed to do something to re-establish control. I looked at a blue t-shirt among the piles of dirty clothes on the floor. I told myself to pick up the shirt. Like magic I saw my hand go out in front of me and grab hold of the shirt. I told myself to lift it high. Again, my right hand was hoisted above my head, blue shirt dangling in its grip. Then I told myself to drop it. At once, the shirt fell back to the ground. Again, I said, pick it up. I picked it up. Drop it. I dropped it. After a few repetitions of this, I told myself to take it to the hamper. Suddenly, my body was moving again— like it was just waiting for someone to tell it what to do. After that, I cleaned my room and got my life back on track. I was in control again. And all this because I simply remembered that I am the one who observes.

Energy Is Your Most Valuable Resource

Energy is the currency of your willpower. Without it, your life will be rote.

It should come as no surprise that everything we do requires energy. In its most obvious form, we can see this concept at work when we exercise and break a sweat. We may feel hungry afterwards and treat ourselves to a nice burrito bowl at Chipotle to replenish our energy, or at least that’s what I do. But for some reason, we don’t respect this concept when it comes to the ethereal nature of our choices, or at least, we don’t relate it to a very real physical phenomenon. In the most basic terms, I’m talking Physics here, all work requires energy. Have you ever wondered why it is called willpower? It is because power in Physics is defined as the amount of energy transferred over time. So any choice we make or action we take using our will is literally using a physical amount of energy. And if a choice is particularly hard, the amount of energy it consumes will be proportionally great.

Just like we can’t work out forever, we can’t make good choices forever. In fact, I think of my will as a muscle with a very finite amount of energy in its reserve. I can only do so many bench presses and I can only make so many good choices in a day. That is why I must protect, maintain, and grow my energy at all costs. Without it, I am unable to exercise my will, and even worse, I am unable to change. What do I mean by that? As I’ve said a couple of times by now, making choices is hard work. Fortunately for us, through the repetition of a choice or an action, our brains form neural networks to make the choice or action easier the next time we decide to perform it. The more we perform an action, the more efficient these networks become, which ultimately means we use less and less energy to perform the task. These defined neural networks are what we call habits, and they are our brains preferred mode of operation. So if you are not feeling particularly energetic one day, your brain falls back on the cushion of comfy habits. This is not necessarily a bad thing if you have good habits, but even people with good habits need to make good choices outside of their routine.

I’ll say it again: protect, maintain, and grow your energy at all costs! Go to sleep on time. Eat right. Work out. Get yourself out of that situation with that toxic person who’s living rent-free in your mind, because those thoughts are taking up your precious energy, and energy is your most valuable resource.

Your Life is Regulated

Everything in life is regulated, and if it’s not, it’s because someone doesn't want it to be.

A couple of months ago I was driving back to my apartment from the Long Beach Convention Center and I drove through the Port of Long Beach— a container port that is a major gateway for US-Asian trade. This port and its sister, the Port of Los Angeles, combined cover 10,700 acres of land and transport approximately 256.2 million tons of cargo per year. As I drove on a bridge that overlooks the port, it would be an understatement to say that I felt small. The truth was that I felt infinitesimally small. I’ve felt this feeling before when I’ve seen science documentaries talk about the scale of the universe, but never so viscerally. I started to take note of the infrastructure. I was driving on a 4-lane highway which connected to an interstate that spanned the entire nation. Forget that, I was driving, in a car that could transport me in an hour what on foot would take me days! Every piece of technology I passed, a new marvel: bridges, traffic lights, water towers, rooftops… the innovation was overwhelming! And to think, I was driving next to a car which housed a total stranger whom I would never meet, yet somehow I knew that our lives were deeply connected. We both would have to go grocery shopping at some point in the week; we both would have to fill up our gas tank; maybe we both were watching the same shows on Netflix.

It was then that it dawned on me that every resource, every apparatus, and every person on this earth is regulated. We don’t necessarily perceive the forces that regulate us, but rest assured knowing that at some point in our history, whether recent or distant, some body or bodies set up a system to regulate everything with which we interact. There are systems in place to know where every gram of that 256.2 million tons of cargo ends up. To know what lights are where, what roads run through what, where the water goes, what roofs are made of what, all the way down to the smallest detail. And if it seems as if something is not regulated, it is only because someone doesn’t want it to be.

But to think that regulation is only a humanmade thing would be both myopic and shallow. It gets much deeper than that. Just last week, as I was staring outside a window into my parents’ backyard, I witnessed a swarm of breeding gnats. We’ve all seen these chaotic clouds. (I was unfortunate enough once to ride a bike through them while going downhill— an experience I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy.) I watched these gnats buzz around in seemingly random directions and looked for a pattern. From my patient observation, a form started to emerge. A shape to the cloud. A signal in the noise. This form, this shape, this signal, they all are regulation. The nature of regulation is that regulation is nature. The clouds from which rain falls. The streams by which we build our cities. The trees in their perfect asymmetry. The cells that make up our bodies. Chaotic though they may seem, each of them is regulated on an Earth which itself is regulated in this Great Cosmic Dance.

Regulation is inescapable. This truth at first glance may seem terrifying because as a human being living under certain Regulations, what agency do I have to escape? What if I want to be free of Regulations altogether? Well… you can’t. But fret not. You cannot become un-regulated, but you can move from Regulation to Regulation. Let’s take a look back at the gnats. In my backyard, the dominant Regulation that controlled the swarm was the Regulation of Procreation— a powerful Regulation indeed. Say one gnat on the outskirts of the cloud flew a little too far from the group by chance. Just far enough so that it was picked up by a gust of wind that whisked it away from the swarm and deposited it a mile East. In the act of straying too far, the gnat moved itself from the Regulation of Procreation to a more powerful Regulation of Wind. Not all Regulations are equal. They vary in terms of force, benefit, stability, and a host of other variables. As a reasoning individual, I have the ability to recognize the Regulations that are at play in my life, seek out Regulations that better suit me, and avoid/mitigate Regulations which actively harm me. This takes work and willpower, but if I have taken the steps to protect my energy, I am more than able to do so.

Do Not Offend

Offense is not a useful tool in the creation of progress.

When I was in my last semester of the graduate film program at USC, Ryan Coogler delivered a web seminar to a group of students via Zoom (we were still knee-deep in the quarantine era). During the Q&A portion of the event, a student asked Ryan how he was so able to achieve authenticity in the depiction of various African cultures in Black Panther. His answer, though it seemed simple enough, became more profound the longer I thought about it. He said, “I just tried my best not to offend anyone.” Wow. This man who has the accolade of directing the highest grossing film of all time by an African American director, among many other accolades, has achieved worldwide success in part by consciously making an effort to not offend anyone with his art. Of course, some people are going to be offended no matter what you do. But his answer got me thinking: when is offense useful?

To answer this, I first had to ruminate on the purpose of offense. Why would anyone intend to offend someone else? To me, there are only two answers (maybe you can think of more that you wouldn’t mind sharing with me in the comments): you offend someone because you want to hurt them, or you offend someone because you want to change them. Let’s take a look at the former. In my worldview, hurting people on purpose is just an act of cruelty and should not be done. It creates or resurfaces traumas in others which have several unintended and negative consequences for, potentially, generations to come. The great work of the world is to undo the traumas by which we all have been subjugated. So if we can agree that offending someone for the sake of hurting them is a negative thing, that leaves offense committed with the intent to change someone’s behavior, belief, way of thinking, etc.

There are many reasons why I might want someone to change: I might want to protect them; I might think their thoughts or actions cause harm to others; I might just want to show them an easier or more efficient way of going about things. Whatever the reason, is offending them a reliable way for me to achieve my desired result? There might be some fringe cases where the answer is yes, but it seems obvious to me that the general answer is a resounding no. If it doesn’t seem obvious to you, just think back on the last time someone offended you to get you to change some part of your behavior or belief. Were they successful? Did you feel like changing? On the contrary, you probably became more tight, more guarded. If anything, you doubled down on your initial position and a bitter argument ensued where both of you ended up the losers. Some people think it’s okay to offend you if they feel they are in the right. In their view, their moral superiority makes their righteous anger justifiable. But what’s their end game? Even if they are right, you certainly didn’t take their side on the argument. In fact, you probably felt repulsed and disrespected by them. Offense just breeds division. To truly change someone’s mind, you must exercise empathy and tact.

I think it bears mentioning that trying not to offend someone does not mean you are condoning their behavior in order to keep the peace. You are not turning a blind eye. You are not absolving them of their guilt. You can be firm without offending. You can disagree without offending. You are trying to keep the peace, but you are doing so by respecting them as a human being and realizing that they have their own set of triggers, biases, blind spots, assumptions, beliefs, and modes of operation that may differ from your own. Doing this is easier said than done, especially if your preferred mode of operation is to be combative. But next time you are feeling heated and want to let someone have it, ask yourself if there is a better way to get your point across. And if you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything at all. Oh, and listening always works, too. Trust me. King Solomon said better than I ever could, “Even fools are thought wise if they [shut up… respectfully].” (Proverbs 17:27a NIV)

Selah 🕊

— AKB