The Talking Traveller

I have finally set my heart and mind on a new mantra that is most applicable in my current state of mind.

As you will see it reads “Learn to know what to do, and then do what you know”.

 

Many times I catch myself thinking “I don’t know what to do!” “I don’t know what to do with my speech, I don’t know what to do with this word, I don’t know what to do with this situation, I don’t know what to do with my finances, I don’t know what to do with these two spare hours I have in front of me, I don’t know what to do with this relationship, I don’t know what to do on this trip, I don’t know what to do with this extra day I have free, I don’t know what to do with my life! Etc. etc.”

The trick that my mind is playing  is that it creates the illusion that there is an absence of knowledge or positive experiences. This is of course false in most cases. My mind does this maybe out of lack of confidence, concentration and maybe because it is a habit?

I believe that by asking a different question I gain different results. I now ask “Am I doing what I know?” which indicates that I have in the past successfully handled a similar situation, and I need only to concentrate in taking the correct action.

Thus a new recipe:

1. Find out what you need to know.
2. Study it, learn it, practice it.
3. Use it to gain a positive, successful outcome.
4. Keep doing it to form a habit.
5. If you find after some time you are slipping back into the old habits and thinking “I don’t know what to do ……boohoohoo” --> go back to step 1.

Just a quick report on an incident I had a few moments ago. I went to our local convenient store to pay some bills and also add credit to my mobile phone. I approached the situation quick confidently and formulated the sentence in my head. With my best effort I said (in Chinese) “I want to pay this bill AND I want to sell a mobile phone credit”. After the initial confusion on the poor cashier’s face she handed me the book of mobile phone vouchers so that I could choose the one I wanted. It was at that moment I realized that I had said “sell” and not “buy”. The phonics of these two words are identical “mai” but the tones differ. Sell – mai having a downward tone . Buy – mai has an down-up tone v. I started laughing at myself and entered into such a giggling state that I forget to utter the well rehearsed line “Sorry, my Chinese is not very good”. They say that a healthy person is one who can laugh at himself and his own mistakes. For 15 minutes today I was in a very healthy state of mind :)

As you can see I am tinkering with new options of control the blog website admin has granted it's users. It is not final yet so you may see a new adjustment on every visit. Good news is that I got a score of 94% percent on my first Chinese semester test and if I had not made little, almost undetectable to the untrained eye, mistakes with some character strokes I would have had even more!! The test also included an oral section and it went quite well. Some anticipation anxiety beforehand and a few stumbles during, but no major uncontrollable mouth jerkings.


I am in the process of finally deciding my plans for next year. At this stage they are leaning towards staying in Taiwan until end May 2008, backpacking Europe for 3 months, and then returning to Taiwan or another Mandarin speaking country for 1 semester and then visiting my own country again. These thoughts change everyday, but at least this is one option.......any ideas!?
If there is anyone in the UK that can offer me a four month (April-June) temp job, please let me know. Come back soon for some photo's, ok?