Contents:
Cynicism and Worry
Rhythm and Dance
Grand GPS Journey
Mei you at McDonalds
Integrating Aspects of your Life (Science and Magic)
CYNICISM AND WORRY
June 18, 2009
“Hope is an orientation of the heart, of the spirit. It is not the belief that things will turn out well, but that things will make sense, however they turn out.” —Vaclav Havel
I have been accused of being a cynic — “A person who questions whether something will happen or whether it is worthwhile,” according to the dictionary. Guilty as charged ! I worry about anybody in China who isn’t.
Some of you may feel that there is a disconnect between my pleas for not worrying in the last Dispatch and my cynicism for things getting done here in China. There isn’t !
My plea for not worrying is not a call for doing nothing. Saying, “Don’t Worry” is not saying don’t prepare. I am not advocating the Pollyannaish dream that everything will turn out all right. I am saying that things will turn out the way they turn out and no amount of worrying will change that, except for possibly making it worse. Circumstances beyond one’s control can always determine an outcome and worrying about them will not affect them in the slightest. Understanding as much as you can and preparing accordingly is the best we can do to influence the outcome.
“Luck favors the prepared mind.”
Previous experience of others behavior informs my cynicism and expectations. My cynicism is not a result of undue worry, it is a product of unfulfilled promises, time after time. I don’t worry about them; I have come to expect them. Any outcome to the contrary would be happily accepted, but I will not count on them. My cynicism comes from the lack of trust that others will do what they say – it is foolish not to be prepared that they won’t — don’t worry about them not doing it – count on it.
Cynicism stems from a rational, evidence-based understanding of how things are working – or aren’t. If they don’t work out that way because of irrational, illogical behavior (of which there is no way of knowing), there is nothing we can do about it.
Worrying is an emotional response to real or imagined situations and the fear of dreaded outcomes. It serves no valuable purpose except for perhaps to motivate one to act in a prepared way.
So then things work out as they work out. Do what you can to influence the outcome and realize that things don’t always come out as you expect. No amount of worrying will really affect the outcome, but a healthy bit of cynicism may help you prepare for and accept the result.
RHYTHM AND DANCE
“It don’t mean a thing, if it ain’t got that swing.” — lyrics by Ella Fitzgerald
I continue to be amazed at how many (in fact most) dancers here dance off rhythm. Dancing off rhythm to me is an oxymoron – by definition it is not dance if not in rhythm with the music. But here, its pattern and the rhythm learned (taught mostly without music) that determines their dance. When it comes time to dance to music, they do exactly what they learned whether it goes with the music or not. The music doesn’t matter, doing what they learned is what matters.
For example, when a Cha Cha comes on it is pure chaos. Everybody going through the contorted pattern* they personally learned to the rhythm and tempo that they learned it in. There is no adjustment to the tempo of the current music being played. THERE IS NO SENSE OF RHYTHM. Just flailing arms and dislocated hip gyrations in a dozen different tempos. Truly bizarre to me, completely unnoticed by others. To be fair, if all the dancers learned from the same teacher and were dancing to the music they learned by they would look like a precision drill team… of spastics. They learn their lessons well. Indeed, it is the lessons that are the problem.
All of this has become very real to me lately as I have started to help a new Russian friend here in Sanya teach dance (primarily Latin). He is good, has rhythm and does what a good teacher must do – sticks to the basics. This, of course, is not my strength, not only can I not stick to the basics in teaching, I don’t even want to “waste” the time learning them myself. Its not really that bad but it is clear what my help to him involves. It is not in 30-40 minutes of drill learning the basic step. As not to distract, I don’t even participate for the first 30 minutes. When the time comes I will join and move among the lines and pick someone who has “got it”– the basic rhythm of the steps and move off and show what kind of thing can be improvised from these basics. It seems to work. It certainly works for me. Also to break it up, couple hours into the session I throw in a country, swing, blues or rock number. Not only do basic steps get boring so does hours of the same music genre. I should also mention that I have, on several occasions, had to stand in for him and I, in spite of myself, am getting a good handle on the basics (no matter how boring they still are).
We are building a nice following every night at 8:00 at a beach park across from my apartment. Seems to attract a younger set of dancers who are willing to experiment and try something new. We are meeting a real need for a more lively, flexible dance experience. It reminds me of the early Salsa days in Shanghai (7 years ago) when it was first hitting the dance venues. Now there is some kind of Latin dance in several different venues every night of the week. Could this happen in Sanya ?
Sergey and I are a good combination. He is good at what I don’t want to do and I loosen up the process (it is like Jimbo and I in the early Swing dance days in Shanghai you might remember). As he puts it, “I need you to show what can be done with this and you bring in the crowd.” Yes, I can get them in, but he keeps them there – they want to learn the basics. But most important, WE HAVE BOTH GOT RHYTHM.
* a product of the international dance style that they have adopted here as the standard
(exaggerated to the extreme) — a style meant for international competition and totally inappropriate for most anyplace else – but I have written a lot on this before.
GRAND GPS JOURNEY
“To the Chinese the shortest distance between any two points is an angle.”
I appreciate these GPS systems as much as the next guy. Its fun to go to google.earth from here and see if my neighbor in Menlo Park is at home and whose car is in the drive way. But reliance on these tracking systems can really go too far sometimes.
A case in point: I was in Shanghai last month waiting to be picked up by my young Chinese magician friend, Erica. She was late as usual, but this time a lot more than usual – an hour and a half. Normally I would have left but she wanted me to meet some TV people with her. She arrives in a car driven by a new boy friend and fellow magician.
They were late “because of traffic” or so they said. Now we have to go and pick up the TV people at MetroCenter. Good, I said, that is only five minutes away pointing over there. We are in the boyfriend’s car with his new GPS system – he keys in the address and a road map instantly appears with a voice (in Chinese) issuing forth voice commands. He drives off in the opposite direction. I let it go for 3 or 4 blocks and finally say to Erica, “We are going in the wrong direction.” Fifteen minutes later we are still going away from where we want to go. I mention it again, she checks with him and he says he is following the map and commands.
I know this city (remember my learning experiences getting lost?) and Erica does too (she was born here). But she is not about to disagree with the new boyfriend. We are passing familiar landmarks completely on the other side of town (IKEA is a favorite of mine). Now remember they were an hour and a half late picking me up (because they were following GPS directions, no doubt) and now we have added another hour going in the wrong direction. Finally the GPS has got him reversing his direction and we pass IKEA again. Three hours late we meet and pick up our passengers (and I bet they say “because of traffic”) to go to Pudong and a school to perform. While I don’t know the school, I do know Pudong – it is across the river – an unmistakable landmark. I point to a bridge which is visible, Pudong is on the other side, in the opposite direction from where we have come. He, however, strikes off to the command of his GPS system in that opposite direction. This is becoming truly ridiculous and ultimately absurd when we pass IKEA again forty minutes later. I say then, “If we pass IKEA once more I am getting off, I have some shopping to do.” I have been in this damn car with four other people prisoner of an obviously malfunctioning GPS system for three hours and we still haven’t crossed the river which was no more than 2 minutes away from our starting point.
To me this quite unbelievable, the rest are not fazed in the slightest. Of course we had to pass IKEA again to get back to going in the right direction – I hung in there now wondering just how long the others would let this go on. I had lost the whole day to doing anything else, so lets see how this is going to play out. We eventually went under the river through a tunnel at the other end of the city then doubled back to within blocks of the other end of the bridge I initially pointed out. It was a five-hour journey that should have taken no longer than an hour even with traffic. I was not going back being led by that GPS system.
It was 3:00 o’clock before we reached our destination, an international secondary school where Erica is teaching the kids magic – the TV station wants to do a show on it. I am not sure why I was there. We all did some tricks with the TV taking preview pictures. When it came time to leave, the two TV people and I had Erica and her new squeeze let us off at the nearest metro station – I was home in 20 minutes.
MEI YOU AT MCDONALDS
Some of you may remember the Mei You Mailbox where I would report examples of what I was calling the Mei You Syndrome here. It refers to the almost universal, instant, knee-jerk, without thinking response to virtually any request. When they say “Mei You” (No/ Don’t have/ Can’t be done), most of the time it is not true. What they really mean is “ do not want to deal with this right now!”
Examples are so frequent (dozens a day) that I stopped reporting on them. But this one is too good to pass up.
Have you ever, anyplace in the world received a “we don’t have”, “we can’t do” reply to an order at MacDonalds ? An order for a regular numbered item on the menu.
Yesterday in this grand intercultural hub of Sanya, I get the ubiquitous “Mei You” to my request for a Sausage McMuffin. “Why Not?” I ask. Mei You , Mei You, they say and I ask again and again pointing to number one on the menu selection to be clear. It turns out the guy in the back flipping the patties didn’t want to be bothered with making my Sausage McMuffin he wanted to do something else – that’s all, he didn’t want to be bothered. No place but China….
I got my Sausage Mc Muffin, two of them in fact, but not without some effort and not accepting their knee-jerk mei you response.
INTEGRATING ASPECTS OF YOUR LIFE
I have just had a thrilling week in Shanghai. Working with my friend Lynn King who directs a program called “SageVision,” we have been preparing and presenting programs for the Government’s “Science and Technology Festival.”
The thrilling part was to see how those activities served to integrate so many seemingly disparate aspects of my life – science, education, environmental activism, magic, dance, art, cooking and food all of a sudden everything fit together.
There were over 400 events and activities over the course of the period May 15-22. I am told that the Chinese media chose 4 to promote and cover. We were one of the four. I was feeling particularly proud and then I was shown one of the newspaper reports. While the report was in Chinese I was able to distinguish the date they had reported for our presentation. They got it wrong ! If anyone really wanted to see our dog and pony show on science and magic they would have been two days late to see it. (Never mind – media
here is a different story best left for another time – perhaps you will remember my reporting on it during the wine company days).
Our first presentation was called, “Little Magic, Big Science.” This is what the authorities insisted on calling it — I wanted the reverse – there is still more mystery in the world than understanding. Lynn and I spent the entire morning discussing and demonstrating the difference between Science and Magic.
I began with the David Cooperfield Mind-reading card illusion that was circulating on the internet not long ago (perhaps you saw it?). I was able to eliminate the card that all 200 of the attending audience had chosen. Need I say more? As Bob Seeger would say, “The answer is in the question.”
I then moved into my old standard – ‘the cork in the bottle’ (from the old wine company days). It is one of the few tricks having a scientific principle behind it that I am award of. As usual the hardest part was getting the cork into the empty bottle. Before I had two officials in the front row sign both the cork and bottle, then once I had the cork inserted and while Lynn was diverting the audience’s attention with a discussion of right and left brain activity *, I used different coefficients of friction to remove the cork – and that’s all that I am going to say.
I wanted to post the “Dancing Girl” graphic and description at the website but am not having any luck so far. If you haven’t seen it and want to let me know and I will e-mail it to you.
I also wanted to include the power point presentation of this morning , no luck there either. The following is one slide from it.
In our presentation we were trying to show how the perception of magic and science have changed through time. Many things in the past appeared to be magic (without common explanation). Each new invention seemed very mysterious to the common person – they were magical. Daily sunrise, growth of plants, even the making of bread from grain.
We went on from there with some “Cookie Magic” where I magically produced cookies by throwing together a raw egg, flour and sugar in a pan and setting it ablaze. Lift the pan’s cover and Voila ! Chocolate chip cookies. Lynn went on to some “Cookie Science” where she explained the science of cookie-making demonstrating the changing variables of Flat and Fluffy Cookies.
Telephone, Radio, TV, cell phones — everything from GPS to garage door openers, while once magical, are all possible because of an understanding of the spectrum of electromagnetic waves. From this statement I went on to propose that possibily there were subtle energies beyond our ability to measure that influence things and that today “I was going to use the little understood magical “thought waves” to read someone’s thoughts from across the room.”
I then did my “Long Distance Card Trick” telling the audience which card he had selected without me seeing or even touching the deck of cards. This is a fun “self-working” trick that I can do over the phone (hence the name) with you all sometime.
I went on from there to ‘magically” predict the sum of four independently chosen numbers from a five by five matrix. In actuality the result is a product of the mathematical configuration.
We ended the morning with an exercise for all those attending to use their creative imagination in projecting what magical things we might encounter in the future by the extension of our ever-growing science and technology.
It was a fun time enjoyed by all.
The most difficult magic involved remains – getting the contracting agency to keep their word and live up to their promise.
The next day there were two presentations at a different venue across town. One was
“Dancing with Nature,” and an EcoArt Bag Workshop where students were guided through the process of painting their own canvas art bag for their shopping.
For the dancing, Lynn had selected music to represent each of Nature’s five elements
of Chinese lore. We then taught a group of volunteers (including some of the friends I dance with in the morning in the park and some students) a dance to go with each one, they, in turn, at the presentation taught groups of students to model it for the entire audience. We had three rehearsals taking most of two days but the results were very pleasing. I had written the following piece (which was translated into Chinese) as a hand out.
QUOTE:
IT IS NATURAL TO DANCE
“Life is a Dance.
Sometimes you lead.
Sometimes you follow.
You don’t need to know the steps.
You will remember them along “The Way.”
I have been an active environmentalist for over 30 years. Early on, I combined my interest in scientific ecology with the sage teachings of the ancient Taoists. Both of these ways of knowing teach us that we are inseparable from our environment — We are One!
Dancing is one of the best ways I know of expressing this oneness. So now most of my environmental activism is expressed dancing — being with and flowing with the Tao.
I am happiest and feel most alive when I am dancing. At no time do I feel more at one with the environment.
Taoism tells us that this kind of movement celebrates the Tao, greases the wheel of life, promotes the flow of Ch’i. Dancing can be a meditative practice to remind us of our connection.
It is my opinion that we were built to dance and it is a crime against our nature to not allow ourselves to respond to the what our body wants to do when it hears and feels the music’s muse.
Too many of us wait to be taught how to dance. It is my contention that we already
know how, we only need to remember having learned in our evolutionary past.
Indeed, the science is now supporting the contention that we oscillate at a cellular level to nature’s rhythms. We have forgotten consciously how to dance, we only need to remember how.
My point here is that “nature has more to teach us about dance than man.” Learning dance steps is a human convention, moving with nature is natural.
There is an old American jazz song, “It don’t mean a thing if you ain’t got that Swing.”
It refers to the importance of rhythm in music and dance.
The noted Webster’s English Dictionary defines “to dance” as “to move in rhythm, ordinarily with music, to move lightly and gaily, to be stirred into movement, as leaves in a wind.” To me, moving in rhythm defines dance, it is NOT about a learned series of steps, fixed patterns of movement and gestures. It is about Rhythm.
Dancing is being in the moment, moving in rhythm with nature. If you are in your head–
counting steps or thinking what you are going to do next, you are not in the flow of music and its rhythm. We need to get out of our heads. Dancing is about body movement not mental activity. Forget about looking at your feet or trying to remember patterns and gestures. Let your body flow with the music.
Do birds only sing and display to attract mates? Do dolphins only dance in the sea to navigate? Call me crazy if you want, but I believe that living things move by compulsion, unfettered natural compulsion — they play with the elements about them, they respond to their internal impulses and are shaped by the interaction. On-going compulsive play is life’s natural state and I believe it is those behaviors that have been selected for creating bountiful, successful living — a happy life. Those denying, withholding, controlling these natural impulses have moved into an unnatural state.
In other words there are other ways learn to dance than the dance lessons with the ballroom dance teacher. Just ” move in rhythm with the music.” Begin by playing the music and while listening to “its beat” learn to move with it (that’s rhythm!). Of course, a basic step characteristic of the music’s type can be used for the movement but that isn’t most important. What is important is that you are moving as the music requires, as the rhythm dictates — You are dancing. And it takes 10 minutes to learn. The fun and enjoyment can begin immediately.
To me, a session of dancing, listening to soft melodies and pulsating beats, dissolving idle concerns into the patterns of a few carefully chosen rhythmic moves can “transport you to where you are” — in the immediate present. The spirit of dance is like the spirit of Tao: it flows spontaneously, roaming here and there impatient of restraint. There is an alchemy to dance — it is a way of getting you out of your head and into your body, of being “present in the moment” and it is good for you.
Touching the Earth with the spontaneous joy of dance is healing both to you and the environment.
As for the art bags, Lynn had the students reflect on the environmental future they wanted to live in and to represent it by painting it on their bag. Some very nice sentiment and art work ended up on these utility bags which they took with them to remind of their concern and to use instead paper or plastic bags at the store.
Ok, friends I am going to end it here – I have posted some pictures to accompany much of the above. Have a look.
Until next time,
Much Love,
David “Leming” Sutton