The Half-and-Half Song by Li Mi-an

The following poem has helped me in dealing with a foul mood today:

The Half-and-Half Song by Li Mi-an taken from Lin Yutang's The Importance Of Living

By far the greater half have I seen through
This floating life-Ah, there's a magic word-
This "half"-so rich in implications.
It bids us taste the joy of more than we
Can ever own, Halfway in life is man's
Best state, when slackened pace allows him ease;
A wide world lies halfway 'twixt heaven and earth;
To live halfway between the town and land,
Have farms halfway between the streams and hills;
Be half-a-scholar, and half-a-squire, and half
In business, half as gentry live,
And half related to the common folk;
And have a house that's half genteel, half plain,
Half elegantly furnished and half bare;
Dresses and gowns that are half old, half new,
And food half epicure's, half simple fare;
Half servants not too clever, not too dull;
A wife who's not too simple, not too smart-
So then, at heart, I feel I'm half a Buddha,
And almost half a Taoist fairy blest.
One half myself to Father Heaven I
Return; the other half to children leave-
Half thinking how for my posterity
To plan and provide, and yet half minding how
To answer God when the body's laid at rest.
He is most wisely drunk who is half drunk;
And flowers in half-bloom look their prettiest;
As boats at half-sail sail the steadiest,
And horses held at half-slack reins trot best.
Who half too much has, adds anxiety,
But half too little, adds possession's zest.
Since life's of sweet and bitter compounded,
Who tastes but half is wise and cleverest.

Live Happy, Healthy and Long

We do not know what the deciding factors are for us humans to live a long healthy life, say 100 years of independent and disease-free life. But there are some in the world who have achieved this, so it must be possible.

For all I have read and heard, there are at least 4 things we have to do in order to extend our health span.

1. Eat with restrain (Caloric Restriction).
2. Stay physically active.
3. Have a purpose
4. Have a society of friends (a sense of belonging)

- Eat with restrain (Caloric Restriction)

How I tried to achieve this is by first calculating my BMR (Basal Metabolic Rate):

Women: BMR = 655 + ( 4.35 x weight in pounds ) + ( 4.7 x height in inches ) - ( 4.7 x age in years )
Men: BMR = 66 + ( 6.23 x weight in pounds ) + ( 12.7 x height in inches ) - ( 6.8 x age in year )

Daily caloric intake can be estimated simplistically as follows:

If you are sedentary: BMR + BMR x 20%
If you are moderately active: BMR + BMR x 30-40%
If you are very active: BMR + BMR x 50%
If you are extra active: BMR + BMR x 60-80%

In my case BMR = 1195
50% more of BMR = 1790

To eat with restrain or to practice caloric restriction, I have decided to cut back 30% from 1780, which comes to 1255.

Next step is to decide what to eat.

The easiest way to cut down calorie is to cut down starch, which includes potatoes, bread, rice and pastas. What we do is to eliminate potatoes and bread, and eat moderate amount of rice and pastas.

We also started to adhere with one rule, which is to avoid refined sugar. Read labels on ingredients, if you see sugar, glucose, fructose or sucrose in the ingredients, simply do not buy them. You will be surprised how much junk food you can avoid. Most ready made foods (even those that claimed healthy) have sugar added. We still drink fruit juices moderately that are processed without added sugar.

Right now food we eat in a typical day constitutes of:

Breakfast: Egg, Apple, Cheese & Tea
Lunch: Frozen Peas (eaten raw), Ceviche (tuna or scallop marinated with lemon juice, tomato, garlic and oregano), Grapes, Raw almonds/ pecans/walnut & cheese
Super: Rice or Spaghetti with fish (tuna, salmon, mahi mahi, haddock & basa) or seafood (shrimp and scallop, lobster if in season) and vegetables (typically carrots, onion, tomatoes, okra, paprika, cauliflowers & broccoli)

The difference between what Richard eat and what I eat is that I do not eat cheese and I only eat one egg yolk.

Calorie intake in a day is around 1400 to 1600, so I am only cutting back 10 to 20% instead of the 30% goal I have set for myself.

This practice reminds me of my youthful days trying to limit my monthly expenses to below $800. I never succeeded strictly speaking, always exceeding by $50 or so, but still cutting down my monthly expenses drastically.

My BMI at the moment is 19.8. Two years ago, my BMI was 17.6, which was way better in my opinion. The normal BMI (18.5-24.9) was probably set for Caucasians. I am Asian and have a small bone structure. At 17.6 BMI, I was way more flexible and felt smarter.

My goal for BMI in 5 months is 18.8 or less.

- Stay physically active

We are walking 8 to 14 km a day which takes 1.5 to 3 hours and I have a small perennial garden, which takes some physical upkeep.

- Have a purpose

Have purpose means that you know why you get up in the morning. I am working on to extend my health span for as long as possible, say 58 more years until I am 105. I want to be able to live independently until the day I die and enjoy every minute of it.

- Have a society of friends

The most important friend is oneself. We often forget that.

According to Marvin Minsky, a human mind is made of many smaller processes, of which he called them agents. I believe whenever conflicts arise among these agents in one’s mind, one is losing oneself as a friend. Or simplistically in Freud’s language, the id, ego and super-ego should all be aligned with the same purpose.

When you have yourself as a friend, the next most important friend is your spouse, whom I am lucky to have.

Spring, it is time to beautify our dwelling

mezzanine or loft

Last year Richard asked me whether it’s possible to make this place beautiful. I said yes. All you need is a little bit money and a lot of hard work.

So we decided to have a mezzanine built and put a floating floor. Purely from the esthetic point of view, hardwood floor would be the best. However, the old floor was tile on cement. A hardwood floor would have cost too much money and labor, and would raise the floor too much. So we compromised and put a floating floor. With the floating floor, the maximum we raised was probably half an inch, so all the doors stayed intact.

As for the mezzanine, Richard said to wait for the spring wood. So there you go, a beautiful mezzanine with spring Canadian pine and old steel gas pipes. In addition, we also added a window, changed the door. The old door was made with metal and now the new one has glass panel to allow the light to come in.

With a few touch-ups here and there still to go, all of these got done within the month of April.

It is extremely rewarding to reap the reward of your hard labor.

Right now I am extremely happy with our newly beautified dwelling and am keeping it clean and shining, free of dust.

What do you worry about?

Last night Richard asked me “what do you worry about?”

I worry most about some things are going too fast and others too slow. I worry that the medical breakthrough would not come fast enough for us baby boomers to benefit. I worry about the IT world is going too fast so that our privacy will be jeopardized. I worry that the economy in rich nations will stagnate and people will blame it on the emerging nations.

Being a Chinese in Canada 20 years ago compared to now is totally different. 20 years ago, the reaction of people in Canada to a Chinese was “Oh, poor you, you need help and we are here to offer the help to you as long as you do not ask too much”. Today, the reaction is “You guys make junky stuff; you take jobs away from us; if anything bad happens to you, you deserve it”.

I do believe that the rich nations have a duty to help the poor nations. We are all connected and related. We may have to sacrifice our luxurious life style for a few years in order to bring the rest of the world up to a similar level. From the selfish point of view, if the rest of the world is lagging too far behind us, we cannot ascend to the next level.

Right now these are the things I worry about, all in all, though, I am optimistic about the future and living my life trying to achieve the highest good in Epicureanism, a tranquility derived by the absence of agitation and the highest positive pleasure, a society of good friends. I think these two qualities can also be interpreted as faith and love.

Another way to describe the same lifestyle is by Jerome K Jerome:

Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need - a homely home and simple pleasure, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing. You will find the boat easier to pull then, and it will not be so liable to upset, and it will not matter so much if it does upset; good, plain merchandise will stand water.

Why are we here? And what shall we do about it while we are?

Comedy writer John Lloyd said that there are only two questions worth asking in his TED talk titled "inventories the invisible":

Why are we here? And what shall we do about it while we are?

To help answering these two questions, he quoted two philosophers. One is Ludwig Wittgenstein, who said: “I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.” Another one is W. H. Auden, who said: “We are all here on earth to help others; what on earth the others are here for I don't know.”

It was a funny 10 minutes talk. However, the two questions are very serious. We tend to ask ourselves all the time. My own take on these two questions is that we should not ask the first question at all.

If you have a strong will to live and are having a good time here on earth, why should you bother asking “why are you here”? For example, if you go to a party and are enjoying yourself, would you be asking “Why am I here”? By asking “why am I here” might get you kicked out of the party. It is a question which gets asked when we are depressed.

If you do not ask yourself the first question, then the answer to the 2nd question shall come quite easily. I shall have a good time for as long as possible. Or in other words, I shall have a happy and pleasurable life for as long as possible.

There are many interpretations regarding what is a happy and pleasurable life. I find mine so close to Epicurus, it makes me wonder whether I had read Epicurus in Chinese translation when I was a teen and forgot about it. He counseled his disciples to live a quiet, secretive life apart from society, avoiding responsibilities in public life or social life. This avoids the pain of ambition and fear caused by others. The highest good in Epicureanism is ataraxia, a tranquility derived by the absence of agitation. And the highest positive pleasure is a society of good friends.

This is the simple life I prefer.

I am happy

I have read somewhere that the opposite of happiness is not sadness, it is anxiety.

I would like to add that the opposite of anxiety is not happiness, it is serenity.

The opposite of sadness is not happiness, it is joyfulness.

Happiness to me is a whole lot of things. I am happy when I am not starving. I am happy to be warm when it is cold out. I am happy to have leisure time. I am happy to appreciate beauty in nature. I am happy to be in good health. I am happy to go out for a walk along the river whenever weather permits. I am happy to feel secure financially. I am happy to escape a few months of winter every year. I am happy to have a great partner. I am happy to be alive.

Right now at this very moment, it is the sunshine streaming through the big window into the kitchen where I am sitting that makes me extremely happy.

Sharing with a skunk?

my small garden with a creek

The other night, we were sitting in the garden by the tiny creek and having a good conversation. All of sudden, we heard some noises by the fence. I went with a bamboo stick in my hand to investigate, and saw a big white and black tail. Richard came inside so quickly. I followed.

A little puzzled by Richard’s reaction, I asked him “This is not a cat. Isn’t?” Richard asked me if I have ever seen a skunk before. Imagine a skunk in our garden!

We have a very small city garden, about 25’ x 25’. The creek we made is probably only 15’ long. On the other hand though, we live only 500 meters from St-Lawrence River. Because of the running water in our creek, we attract all sorts of animals. Cats and squirrels drink from it; birds bath in it. A raccoon tried to sleep in the corner. Now we have a skunk. Poor skunks, not bad looking creatures. But nobody wants to befriend them.

If you make your garden nice, you have to be willing to share it with uninvited creatures, even including skunks.

Innocence

On all of c-cassia jewelry we always say that they are made with 10% innocence, 30% sophistication, 60% cheerfulness. This comes from the maker who was known as the most innocent face on campus when she was a 16 years old freshman at a university with about 10,000 students in Shanghai. Now her friend said to her that you only have 10% innocence left. Well, many years have passed since she was the most innocent face; a guaranteed 10% innocence is not so bad? Isn’t it?

According to Wikipedia, innocence is a term used to indicate a general lack of guilt with respect to any kind of crime, sin or wrongding. Innocence can also refer to a state of unknowing, where one's experience is lesser. The reason I had the most innocent face probably is because I was a child in an adult world even though most of the adults were only 2 to 5 years older than me.

When one gains more experience, it is harder to keep oneself void of guilt with respect to sin or wrongdoing. That is why in my daily reminder number 6 is written “I have no remorse, or regrets over my own past mistakes. The past is simply written off, closed and forgotten.”

Happiness cannot be achieved if one is not void of guilt. Therefore, the 10% innocence and 60% cheerfulness are actually related. How much sophistication? You decide.


C-Cassia

Simple Pleasure

Canadian duck on the St-Lawrence River

“Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need - a homely home and simple pleasure, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing. You will find the boat easier to pull then, and it will not be so liable to upset, and it will not matter so much if it does upset; good, plain merchandise will stand water.”
Jerome K Jerome "Three Men in a Boat"

One of the simple pleasures we enjoy lately is the amazing walk we do along the St-Lawrence River in Verdun in the evening. It is only 5 minutes walk from our home. If it is not raining, we are out walking. We go about 3 km towards west along the lower path right next to the river and take the bike path on the higher ground to come back. In the midway back, we drink some tape water that comes out of a stone. It takes us about 1 ½ hours for the round trip. In addition to doing it as a physical exercise, we also enjoy the scenery. Everything is green now. The air feels fresh and crisp. You almost do not hear any city noise on the lower path.

We all want to be happy, healthy and comfortable

Richard playing golf

We all want to be happy, healthy and have creature comfort. How do we obtain them? It is a journey. You have to start with your thoughts and then allow time to elapse.

Whenever we want something, we want it now. We were like that when we were children and there is an inner child in everyone of us. Instead, try to keep a steady thought of what you want and allow some time to pass. You will be surprised at what will happen. If the result is not what you have wanted, it is because you have let your thoughts to wander. If you can tame the train of thoughts, keep them on the track, you can surely obtain what you want.

It is simple to say, yet very difficult to do. First step is to observe your thoughts daily and correct their course whenever they go off the track.