跳脫「掙扎」之二

English→Free from "Struggling," Part II

當我們常常做著某些事情，這些事情也慢慢會成為習慣。在12月19日當天的短文裡，我領悟到要讓自己養成一個新的習慣，而往後的事情就只要順其自然即可！因此，我嘗試讓自己在繼續寫其他主題之前，把稍早的幾篇文章的英文先翻譯出來。

一個習慣的養成，果然不是一天兩天的事情，今天，感覺到沒有半點心思去完成既定的翻譯工作，也覺察到腦海裡迴盪著許多聲音、感覺、和噪音。不過既然之前已經立下了決心要養成翻譯前一天文章的習慣，自然也會經驗一層更深的猶豫，對於到底今天是要寫新的主題，或是完成翻譯前一天的文章，遲遲無法作主。為了讓自己能夠先靜下心來，索性讓自己先洗個澡平靜，而這一招對我來說總是有用。在這段短暫的放鬆時間裡，今天到底要做什麼，也就逐漸地看得越來越清晰……

首先，我捫心自問，到底製作這個網站的最終目的是什麼時，便看到只需讓自己勇往直前毫不間斷，總是會有那麼一天會完成這些翻譯的工作。

其二，我把今天這一篇，改用英文先寫出來。因為我感覺到之前在做中翻英的時候，彷彿失掉那一份融入在寫作中的情緒和心情。而要能夠找回當初寫作時的心情，卻需要花些時間再融入要翻譯的文章一遍。可笑的是，今天讓我改變心意先寫英文版的，也是在前一篇『跳脫「掙扎」之一』裡，告訴我先去寫出中文版的那個同樣的聲音——因為中文是我的母語，我用中文會寫得比較快，只是這一次變成翻譯比較快。在這掙扎的過程中，我也學著讓自己不要想太多，就讓自己先放手去做，然後去看之後的結果如何演變，而事情總是會是呈現出它本來的面目。

其三，我覺察到有一份恐懼，隱藏在撰寫一個新主題文章的背後。我過去的找不到靈感的挫折經驗總是會回過頭來侵襲我，總因為如此，我讓自己迷失在過去的經驗中，也忘記讓自己該好好地活在當下。儘管如此，事實的真相是，我的腦袋瓜子裡有著許多聲音、感覺、與雜音。我只消把雜音除去，留下的想要表達的聲音和感覺，而這些就是今天真正值得去記錄下來的！

除此之外，有另一份恐懼需要再被挖掘出來去除掉，那是一份害怕沒有人想要閱讀所寫的這些文章的恐懼。而事實的真相又是，只要我所記錄下的，是有用的、對人們有幫助的事，與其是要為了「娛樂」自己而寫，不如說是為自己想要「分享」而寫；那麼，出自於不同出發點所做的事就會相當的不同！從另外一個較科學的觀點來看，為何人們會在閱讀中找到樂趣？答案是相當簡單的。如果我們能夠送出一個特定頻率的訊息出去，讓讀者跟我們的作品產生共鳴，也就是說，如果我們能夠道出眾多讀者的心聲，他們便會在閱讀中感受這份閱讀之樂！總而言之，就是先輕鬆自己，保持腦波在α波的頻率，而剩下來的工作，就會是「隨心所欲」……¶

Merry Christmas 2004 | 耶誕快樂2004

Merry Christ 2004

今天我拍下了這些聖誕紅的照片，然後把它製作成卡片；改天再告訴您整個幕後製作過程。如果您有興趣想要一探究竟，歡迎您改天再光顧小鋪，也祝福您佳節快樂！/I shot the poinsettia today and made this card. I will demonstrate how it was made later on. If you are interested the process of creation, please stay tuned, and wish you good for the holidays!¶

Free from "Struggling," Part II

中文→拔除「掙扎」之二

When we get used to something and something becomes our habit. As the Free from "Struggling," Part I I wrote, I just learned to acquire a new good habit, and the habit will just make things right! Thus, I tried to catch up the translation works and finish all of them before I forward my topics further.

Today, I felt that I am not in the mood of working on the translations, and I noticed that there are many voices, feelings, and noises in my mind. While I was committed to myself to finish the work of translation, I experienced another inner struggling of hesitating on to write a new topic or to do the translation. In order to help myself calm down a little bit, I went to my shower, and it works to me all the time. During the short break time of relaxing, my topic of today finally gets clear…

First of all, by looking into my ultimate goal for producing this web site, I realized that as long as I keep on track without stopping, I would always be able to finish all the translations eventually.

Secondly, I changed to write first in English today because I felt when I was doing the translation, I lost the emotion and mood of writing. It takes sometime for me to return to the mood when I was writing its original. Ironically, why I changed to write in English first, it is because of the same thing in previous 'Free from "Struggling," Part I.' It's the same voice told me–since my native language is Chinese, I'll write Chinese easier and faster. Yet, there is a little difference that I'll translate into Chinese faster. During the whole struggling process, I learneded that I need not think too much on whatever, but just do it and try it to see the result, and then things will turn out to be the way it is, the way it supposed to be!

On the third, I was aware that there is a fear behind writing a new topic. My old failing experience of no creative idea would come back to me and strike on me. Therefore, I lost myself in the past experiences, and forgot to live myself in the present time. However, the truth is now I have many voices, feelings, and noises in my head. I just need take out the noises, and the voices and feelings left are the real something today to record them down!

Moreover, there is another fear need to be dug out, that is a fear of afraid of people not enjoy my article. While the reality is, as long as I write down something, which is useful and helpful to the people, I write them down for “sharing” myself, but not for “enjoying” myself; and then things will turn out to be very different! To explain this further in a scientific term, why will the people enjoy of reading? The answer is quite simple. If I am able to send out a signal of a specific frequency to make the reader resonate with our works; that is, if we can speak out the voice of the reader’s heart, they will be enjoying the readings! So, just get relaxed, and keep the brain at the α wave frequency. The rest of things are just to take it easy…¶

Rambling about *Eternity*

中文→漫談*永恆*

Everyone should have the experience of cleaning up your place, especially when there is a career move. Whenever cleaning the old stuffs, I noticed that my mood has just taken a sauna bath. My thought always jumping between different stages of returning to the past, examining the present, and looking into the future. While cleaning up the room physically, I also wipe out the dusts of my mind, and later on, I can identify the “nothing” that I shall throw away, and the really “something” that I shall treasure more…

Today, I felt unwanted to spend any pennies on a new folder, so I found an old one filled with aged files. Inside this folder, except an antique software manual that could be trashed, I accidentally recovered some documents about the same generation. One of them without the numbers of its pages, it was not easy to reorganize them in the right sequence. I sensed it to be a printed document downloaded from the web. At a very tiny moment, a flash light hit me, “Why don't I log on to the google and find it out!?” I took the action right away.

The paragraph titles inside this article repeated NetInfo for many times. I thought that it was written in the Mac OS X previewing period. Turn back to the “flash light” I mentioned earlier; there was a part two about it, I think it is something worth of sharing: When I examined my habit of using google, mostly I only input the key words to google, and then scan through the respond result while digging into and filtering out the information I really want. Almost as soon as the flashing googling moment, I was thinking if I only type in NetInfo to be the key of searching, I might still receive a goooooooooogle result. The discovered items equal to zero. At that nano second, while my eyes was staring at a literary paragraph title, “NetInfo: All-Singing, All-Dancing System Management.” “Why don’t I just pump in the whole sentence in the google search bar of Safari?” (Please don’t forget the quotation marks to quote the whole sentence if you want to try it yourself!)

“Bingo!” That’s right. It’s this article from Daemon News! I shall raise my thumb and praise google’s incredible searching power!

After the whole google searching experience, I calmed down myself today, and read carefully through the company’s overview and the basics of google search for the first time, although I’ve skimmed over it a couple times. While I read the company’s ambition over the Internet business and its mission, I was touched peacefully. Why did I get touched? Since the Internet business blooming in the middle of the 1990s, the virtual cyber space has been taking over the traditional media, and has the knowledge transmission become easier then ever. However, it also brought us to face the Big Bang of knowledge exploding pressure, while we are enjoying all the material abundance and the convenience of technologies, especially for those of lucky us who live in the developing or developed countries in today's term. Go back our topic to google again, according to its web site official, this word google came from the math terminology “googol,” and its meaning is the unimaginable number of 10 to 100th power, which also symbolizes google’s passion on conquering the tremendous amount of data shuttling on the information high way!

I have been seeking for an ultimate Truth, from moment to moment, for such a long period of time, during my living days of twelve thousand something. After reading hundreds of books, seeing and believing in thousand miles of voyages, in some manner, to get along with the knowledge-exploding era, I wish I could filter and extract out all the essence of knowledge (feeling like a dumb in a way), and dump out tons of short-lasting gunk knowledge produced by the mankind during the small piece of time comparing with the age of the universe, and to be able to glimpse all knowledge at once, in a glance of the simple Ones; And, that distillation of the human living experiences is about to be the shining thesis of today, the *Eternity!* Be the Shruti never grow old; Be the Smriti from time to time ∞

In the latter-day East, there has been a “Si-Ku-Quan-Shu, a complete book of the four thesauruses” during the Chinese Qing Dynasty commanded by the Qien-Long Emperor to be edited by scholars; While in the West about five to six hundreds ago, the Renaissance man Leonardo da Vinci’s manual scripts illustrated and noted an avant-garde rhapsody during the knowledge desert age; thus, it inspires the modern Western civilization in many fields! In the recent years, the software billionaire Bill Gates won a fraction of da Vinci’s scripts in an auction; thereafter, the “Encarta” E-encyclopedia of which makes Gates proud has been released to the publics.

Looking far from yesterday while introspecting about today, shall we figure out what to bequeath our descendant tomorrow?¶

From 2D to 3D

中文→從二維到三維

Prologue: This article is written for those who are not profession in design or art, but they are interested to learn more about design, as well as to gain more knowledge about art appreciation. If you are an expert in these fields, you can skip this article, or if you would like to join me, discuss about it, or have additional comments, you are very welcome!

Feature text: This is quite a fundamental topic. I believe that most people have experienced something that I am going to express here, but just did not pay attention on how it worked and its rules. This also recalls what I have mentioned yesterday in the “Preface” about–graphic design is focusing and researching on those visual elements which an ordinary people will not aware its existence.

In the Western art history, we can see those pre-historical drawings in caves, or the old Egyptian paintings and ancient Greek vase drawings recorded in the early human history. These are all two-dimensional graphic arts. Until some unknown (please pardon me that this will need to dig into a deeper research), light and shadow started to appear on paintings. In the ancient Roman paintings, we can see the light and shadow technique has been developed. During the Renaissance time, from the popular Leonardo da Vinci’s works are painted with multi-points perspective, accurate proportion on human, scenes, and objects, as well as depicting the light and shadow. Those techniques have made the art works look alive, and pushed the realistic paintings to an ever-had historical peak.

The above is a simple description on the three-dimensional composition for art. To apply these rules on graphic design, I think that we can apply the same logic on the page layout design and arrangement of objects. Add light and shadow effect, and overlap objects with appropriate proportion to create a visual depth-of-field vision. From 2D to 3D, it exceeds the two-dimensional boundaries for graphic design by adding an untouchable depth of the third dimension!¶

Preface

中文→序

I studied Business in Taiwan before I went to the U.S. and majored in “Computer Science” in the first semester. Although I still love computer so much back to then; however, the foundation courses, such as Calculus, Advanced Algebra, and Physics, had make me feel boring while I can still work them out. I thought my art classes were fine since my elementary school time; therefore, I switched my major without fear to the new founded “Graphic Design” department at the University.

I finally understood the teaching of Ms. Gwen Amos, my graphic design instructor who inspired me with her “design principle fundamental,” after the first semester had finished. For God’s sake, there has always been something that can only be realized but cannot be mentioned. That thing can only be realized is the pains of doing graphic design. While not discussing about its methodologies and technical sides of creation, the challenge of graphic design is to dig into the “VISUAL ELEMENTS” which most people do not see, to focus on the “MESSAGE” behind the piece of work; nonetheless, even to demonstrate the hard-explained invisible “SPIRIT” beyond what the “MESSAGE” can express, and to stick on one’s own discipline on the “ORIGINALITY” of an artwork during the creating process.

After the baptism of Gwen’s “design principle fundamental,” those teachings have become the essential elements of my creation; however, it’s also become an abyss which I fall into, a deep thinking process. While focusing myself on those “MESSAGE,” “SPIRIT,” and “ORIGINALITY” too much, I did not want to look into those works without enough depth of connotation that I think they are. Thereafter, I had lost myself in the kingdom of my own high standard, but forgot the great saying by Confucius who said that thousand years ago, “When three people walk together, they are all my teachers. Look at the goodness and learn from that; take the weakness out and change from that.”

Until now, I also want to acknowledge another teacher who gave me a new life, Mr. T.C. Wu. Wu is a special person. He is a person I knew, “a teacher of virtue” who focuses on his own well being greater then preaching, but not “a teacher of books” who only passes the knowledge to the students. While taking a deep look on his soul, I conform the extra-ordinary experiences that he has been through, and witness his abundant immanence beside his virtue. Moreover, I admire his wisdom crossing the Eastern and the Western cultures, and his broad-while-focused profession integrated different domains. He can finally establish his own doctrine of “Applications on Space and Potential Energy,” building on top of his twenty-years accumulated hard-working experiences. I met him at the most blanked and conceited moment in my life, while he gradually melted my arrogance in transparent when I was not aware. He has guided me to arrange more spaces for improvements, has taught me not to confused by the narrow-minded knowledge, as well as helps me to step into a higher level of practicing. Under his osmosis and hardness-simplified teaching, I could deeply know more about myself, see the weakness of myself, remind myself, and lift myself. Until some day unremembered, I could clearly aware what my big problem is…

Bingo! I finally realized that things couldn’t be over done. While extremely focusing on the “MESSAGE”, “SPIRIT,” and “ORIGINALITY” behind the creations, I bounded my hands and legs without awareness, and forgot to let myself “just do it!” Wow! I could ultimately enlighten myself with the help of Mr. Wu’s teaching as the followings. ”How one could light up a creation consistently is derived from accumulating the “light bulbs” of each flashing moment, and really taking an action to fulfill every light flashing. Learn from the mistakes during the actions, and collect its positive lessons ceaselessly so that, in the future of an unsure quantity of time, one is able to eventually and naturally become a master whose creations expressing the “less is more” philosophy are appreciated by the people, no matter they are outsiders or Pros. Furthermore, One might have KNOWN about the above for sure, but one might hardly to BE that for unsure."

“Creativity Zen Espresso”– not only an “design principle fundamental” from my old class notes, it is a multidimensional cyber space combining different aspects such as, computing, humanity, pop science, music, art, philosophy, and mind-and-spirit. Drop in anytime! We are here 7-11 online starting from the middle of December 2004. You are very welcome to drop in, and have a cup of the concentrated awaking drink, made with the extraction of heart and sane: ) ¶

Post Script:
I wish the creations of this web site, to give them to my parents who gave me life and lifted me up, to all of my inspiring teachers–Mr. James Yang who taught me MIDI, MS. Gwen Amos who taught me Graphic Design, and Mr. T.C. Wu who taught me his wisdom of Applications on Space and Potential Energy, and to every friends who love me, encourage me, grew up with me, as well as to my wife Faye who is now living and being together with me.

跳脫「掙扎」之一

不論是什麼事情，能夠立下決心貫徹到底，絕對是個好的開端；讓自己持之以恆、貫徹始終，卻是另一個層面的事。很多問題，總是得先碰上了，才有機會想出解決之道！而如果沒有開始去做，就什麼困難也遇不到，那才叫真正的大不幸。回顧這幾天來，開工的心情無比喜悅，由內在升起的平安踏實，覺察不到黑暗、恐懼、害怕，悄悄地，那還沒浮上表面的深處掙扎，才在近日內潛伏發酵……

昨日掙扎 如今成煙 如何掙脫 且待訴來 掙扎其一 惟吾心願
對照中英 完於同時 認知現實 當日並書 實行不易 礙我如礁
猶豫心生 進度自囤 豫何時書 他日何妨 既待他日 進度受羈
對照中英 未能同成 矛盾自起 矛盾既生 掙扎自起 一兼兩顧
心願何成 佛家有言 煩如菩提 菩提即惱 白話解之 問自解答
事之有掙 實為本能 其用在警 警醒覺悟 且就此礁 破礁除障
靜觀此事 倘依原方 超出所限 其心有餘 其力不足 情緒自擾
掙扎必生 認清現實 中文母語 書寫速快 譯中成英 順挪隔日
心願即成 絕無囤積 因除果消 掙扎除矣

昨天的掙扎，如今宛如雲煙，如何掙脫開內心的交戰，且待我慢慢訴來。令我掙扎的事情之一，是心中願望著中英文對照的文章，能同時於當日完成。認知到現實生活中客觀的時間環境並不允許，強要當天一起寫完，實行起來並不是那麼容易，這件事就這般像塊海底的暗礁，阻礙著我向前進。猶豫從內心升起，進度自然不斷地囤積，猶豫地思索著該騰出什麼時間來寫英文的對照，如果說，改天再寫也沒有關係，但是既然要另外找時間寫，既定的書寫進度一定會受到牽制，中英文對照無法同時完成，內在的矛盾自然地生起，矛盾拉扯既由內心生起，掙扎也就自然孕育而生。想要一兼兩顧，這樣的心願要如何達成？佛家有句話說得好：「煩惱如菩提」，用白話文來解釋，可解讀為「問題的答案往往都潛藏在問題裡面。」事情之所以會感到掙扎，這實在是一種本能反應，而它的用意在警惕自己要能夠從中覺悟。且就今天遭遇到的這塊暗礁，試問如何破開礁岩去除障礙，靜下心來觀看這件事情，如果按照我原本的方法來運作，事實是超出自身能力所限，心有餘而力不足，無端地受到自己心情的干擾，掙扎必然會從中產生。認清楚現實的客觀環境，讓自己先用中文母語來寫，書寫的速度一定比較快，何不順勢而為，把翻譯成英文的工作，就直接安排在隔一天，那麼原來的心願可以一了，再前進的速度頂多晚個一天，絕對不會造成進度的囤積，把導致掙扎的原因消除掉了，這棵掙扎的內心雜草，也就這樣被一同拔除了！

一顆寧靜的心很重要，它可以幫助自己去過濾掉不必要的訊息。

在觀察去除掙扎的整個思緒過程中，我依然遵循著向來的順其自然、順勢而為的隨緣哲學，而體會不到其精義的人，往往只感受到其看似消極的一面，卻忽視了如何讓自己「保持輕鬆、自在逍遙、隨心所欲」的另外一面；而藉由此一過程中，讓好高騖遠的心找到歸宿，更深刻地學習一步一腳印達成目標，清清楚楚地看見下一步該怎麼走……

倘若您問我，為什麼堅持要寫「英文版」，其實又可以針對這個主題，另外用一篇文章來解說，我們改天再敘！

後記：今天的經歷很精彩，您會在這篇完成的文章裡，看到白話文、和四字文言文的交替。直到今天，我第一次感覺到寫精簡文言文的輕鬆自在，開場時的段落先是用白話文寫的，只是在繼續往下寫的過程中，總發現雜亂的思緒太多，改來改去，遲遲未能定稿。忽然間，一念閃過，「何不用最簡短的文言來書寫！」，就此一轉心念，沈靜凝思，全神匯聚在詞通、達意、暢言上，除去了糾纏的思緒冗節，不會還沒寫完，自己就給自己打敗了，這是今天個人意外的發現與感受，其何樂哉！¶