2021–from cold resolution to burning aspiration

Failing with my new year's resolutions

I have not really done well with my new year's resolutions in the past. The system simply did not work for me. Knowing myself, I'm not that surprised, especially after reflecting on the meanings of the word: a firm decision to do or not to do something or a promise to one's self to do or to not do something. The thing is, in my experience, after embarking on some resolution, I change, my circumstances change, the context changes. Over time: I would have to soften on the firmness of the decision; slightly or considerably veer away from the resolution; abandon the endeavour altogether and break the promise I made to myself or prevaricate whenever I talk about it with others or to myself.

Of course, this tendency of mine does not automatically mean that I'm a wishy-washy, rudderless, blown-by-the-wind fellow who cannot get anything remotely medium-to-longterm completed or done. After all, I've completed five university degrees to date as well as a number of certificates of training ranging from Lomi Lomi Nui Hawaiian Massage, Third Eye Meditation, Warm Data Lab Hosting, Past Life Regressions to Webisodes in film school and others. Quite resolute perhaps.

Or so I think. I guess some could interpret the breadth of these endeavours show lack of commitment, a lack of resolution in specialising or focusing on one thing. That could be true. However, I would push back. After years of struggling with this notion myself, I've come to realise that perhaps my speciality lies in conjuring liminal spaces, that of weaving some and all of these disparate fields together. Possibly.

On becoming goalless

My dissolution with resolutions went so deep that it nudged me to experiment with living a goalless life for a few years now. And more recently to experiment with the Buddhist notion of anātman - no self or non-self. I really got a lot from this protracted experiment in goallessness. I talk about this with Gokubrah in a Liminaversity conversation which you can watch in the video below. For example, we began this topic in the course of our conversation with:

GOKUBRAH

Has your purpose changed throughout the years? Has your perception changed? And when those changes came what was your best way to deal with that change. If anything I've learned from life in the past month or two it's like things can just change like that and you're like well this is upside down and you need to just like gasp up for air and breathe you know and that purpose thing is the only thing that will help you survive and keep afloat.

OLIVER

Right now, I've come to a different place with this. I've been doing goalless practices. Let's say you know your goal. When people say I know my purpose, I know my goal. It's there right? The mere fact of doing that I've already killed any other possibilities. What's gonna happen is I want to reach that and I should define it. I think 'define' is an interesting word because life is full of nuances. It's really fine. Fine grained. To define it is to make it coarser so that I could understand it. I can only understand something fully if I'm outside of it. Like this glass on my hand I know what it is because I'm outside of it. If I'm in it it's like fish they don't know what water is because they're in it.

Aspirations, a new experiment

This 2021 I'm experimenting with something new. Instead of going all the way to the polar opposite of resolutions (goallessness) I will be trying spaces of transformation that lie somewhere in between the two. These would be based on my understandings of aspiration which I continue to learn from the philosopher Agnes Callard. She defines aspiration as the rational process of value acquisition. The way I would apply Agnes' characterisation of aspiration vis-a-vis my hitherto notion of resolutions would be as follows.

With new year's resolutions, I would already fully know what I want, what I value. What remains to be figured out is how to get there. A simple example would be if my resolution was to lose weight then I would already value losing weight. There's really not much veering away from this valuation. To me, it's a bit like when people say 'set and forget'. Like setting the destination's GPS coordinates in one's navigator. It can be as specific as to have the goal of losing a stone in body weight for example. What remains is a cold calculation, if you like, on what could be the most effective or efficient means of getting there, of achieving the goal. There's value in this, of course. As I learned in my Lomi Lomi training: 'efficacy is a measure of truth'. But perhaps this and its polar opposite are not all there is.

Aspiration is different. At the outset, I may only have an inkling or a vague valuation of that which in the future I would value highly. I may even come to encounter it by accident or chance. But as I go along the journey, as I move forward in time my appreciation, my valuation of it changes. And I myself change in the process because the things I value comprise a significant part of who I am as a person. If you will, if I am the wood then I am consumed and transformed by the very fire of my burning aspiration.

My singing journey

An alive example of this for me right now is my journey of learning how to sing with SCSing. I started this journey in the middle of Covid lockdowns here in Sydney, Australia.

We at SCSing are a school and community of singing teachers and learners who meet each morning and night, over Zoom, Monday to Saturday. Mornings we have: warm-ups; vibrato, mix voice and intuitive singing training. Evenings we have classes on: anatomy studies; learning to sing specific songs including songs from places and cultures other than in Australia. For example, we're learning African songs this month.

So SCSing is like a sing gym over Zoom and more. As Covid restrictions have eased up here, we also have started to meet in person.

All the things I mentioned above do not cover the field. I've got more things ahead of me including an upcoming live performance which I'm both excited and terrified about. If you peruse the document below, you will see there's a whole year of singing made available to me this 2021.

Where aspiration comes into this is that when I first started my singing journey it was more out of a curiosity. Apart from the occasional belting of a Bon Jovi song at a close friend's home for karaoke, I have not really pursued singing with much panache. When the pandemic hit, I began to look for things to do during lockdown. I began to ask myself, what if I put real effort into this, what would happen?

Three months in: my apprehension, appreciation and valuation of singing has greatly moved on from my initial curiosity. For example I am beginning to value singing in community as an awesome, comprehensive, and fast becoming indispensable practice to maintain and enhance my physical, mental, emotional, and dare I say spiritual well-being.

For one thing I am starting to have a more intimate relationship with certain parts of my body I never had before including with my diaphragm; voice box; tongue; hard & soft palate; nasal cavity and parts of my skull. Also, I am learning a way of breathing different from that of my previous experience in yoga, cardiovascular exercises, and Wim Hof ice bath breathwork — a form of breathing more akin to that when doing laps in swimming.

More so, knowing that my overall physical health greatly affects the quality of my voice renewed my enthusiasm to be seriously fit this year. For example I have recently embarked once again on a paleo/ketogenic diet with the SCSing founder and a close friend of mine.

Plus, I am starting to listen to singers sing their songs with much more respect and appreciation of their craft. Perhaps I am starting to emphatise with how difficult it is to make some of the sounds some singers seem to make quite effortlessly. There's also some delightful branching off into the adjacent possible. For example today I chose to enrol in a beginner's piano course at the Sydney Open Conservatory after last week's lecture on subvocalisation. Among other things, what I learned from the lecture was by not trying to recreate the pitch inside my mind but simply listening intently to the sound as the piano keys are played in realtime and visually connecting the sounds to printed sheet music, I had a much better chance of improving my pitch.

Moreover, I'm beginning to realise that a lot of the barriers I had to singing in the past were more psychological rather than physical. After all, I've got a working corporeal wind instrument in me. Not only that, being in regular sessions with people online and in real life I feel is meeting my needs for conviviality. Also, learning songs from cultures foreign to me I feel is helping make me a better citizen of this planet—someone who appreciates all its diversity.

There's a lot more I could say. Suffice to say I could not have coldly and methodically specified the things above as goals before deciding to join SCSing. I wouldn't have had the language or conceptual framework to even begin putting them into words. They came to me as the burning flame of my aspiration started to consume me.

Another meaning of resolution

Perhaps my difficulty with new year's resolutions in the past lied less with their directionality but more with their specificity. I feel fine with having a general direction of travel but not to have every little turn fully mapped out prior to taking the first step.

This interestingly loops back to another meaning of resolution. Display resolution in digital screen involving pixels. The more pixels, the higher the definition of display resolution.

Maybe with aspiration, at the beginning of the year, I could start with a low definition resolution (320 x 200 pixels) apprehension of value. Gradually as the year progresses this could ratchet up to standard definition (640 x 480 pixels). At the end of the year perhaps I may attain high definition (1,280 x 720 pixels) or even beyond to have ultra high definition of the value of that which I started off with.

It would be less about focus but more on enriching the experience.