Author: Rebecca Toh

23 thoughts and lessons from 2023

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1. When your ego dissolves, the pain might not go away, but the suffering does.
2. Empathy means: We don’t have to understand; we just have to believe.
3. I thought fiction was about understanding, now I realise it’s about believing.
4. You don’t have to ‘find your passion’, but if passion finds you then it is the most wonderful thing on earth.
5. To be a better photographer, be like an animal – be driven by something primal, raw, pure, or even unhinged.
6. Only in silence can we discern what is important and what is not.
7. When we liberate someone, sometimes we end up oppressing someone else.
8. Holding two opposite thoughts at the same time is essential to the development of our soul.
9. Your biggest flaw cannot be the thing that most defines you.
10. You can be judged, but you cannot really be defined.
11. True freedom is always one hair’s breadth away, so close as to be invisible to the eye. It’s annoying and exhilarating at the same time.
12. My favorite writing is made up of the simplest language.
13. I want to move through the world collecting, digesting and reforming ideas and feelings and stories and then presenting them back to you (and myself) in the form of a gift.
14. I am always happier right before my first bite of the McSpicy burger than after I finish it. The McSpicy burger is just such a delicious IDEA.
15. If you fail at loving, you are allowed to try again as many times as you want.
16. The more I move my body, the better my brain functions.
17. Lesson #546 from skateboarding: If you practice enough at the edge of your competence, you are not gonna fall much.
18. You don’t have to learn how to waste time. You knew how to do that as a kid. Be a kid again.
19. Does it really matter what I’m doing, as long as I’m enjoying myself?
20. Writing is easy if I don’t think too highly about myself.
21. The kids in my life add a substantial amount of love, laughter, wonder, and meaning to my life. My ambition is to successfully grow old so I can endure their antics for as long as I can.
22. The moment I fell in love with photography again was when I realised how little I knew.
23. I am slowly turning into an ENFP (?!!) because every day I want to spend more and more time with the people I love.

Bonus quote (my favorite of the year): “No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted.” – Aesop

Also read: 22 thoughts and lessons from 2022

2:30

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I have this feeling that I want to spend all my time reading and writing and falling into worlds not like my own. It’s 2:30 in the morning and I need to wake up early later to let the painters in. But all I can think about is how I want to finish this Haruki Murakami book and then read some Raymond Carver and maybe even some Orhan Pamuk.

lost and stupid

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I don’t want to become someone who is too sure about things. I want to be a friend of doubt, just like Anthony Bourdain was. He said, “Life is complicated. It’s filled with nuance. It’s unsatisfying… If I believe in anything, it is doubt. The root cause of all life’s problems is looking for a simple fucking answer.”

So no simple fucking answers. I’m fine with that.

2023 has been quite surprising. I have streamlined my commitments – cutting and letting go – to create more ‘open time’ in 2024 to do some personal projects I’ve been wanting to do. This is an exploratory and learning phase, and I’m feeling good and excited.

I ended the year having learned some major lessons about life and existence, which I will outline in this year’s ’23 thoughts and lessons from 2023′. I’ll update with the link once I’ve written it. If you’re interested you can read last year’s ’22 thoughts and lessons from 2022′ here.

‘normal’, ‘true’, ‘real’

blog, Paris

After I came back from Paris, my world opened up even more. The workshop I did with Pinkhassov there gave me the chance to experience time and space as much softer, less defined entities. I could feel a melting within, those parts of me that were previously solid or whole, such that I became melded with the world a little more than before.

This is a sensation I’ve been trying to access as a creative or artist, but for a long time I felt blocked. Sometimes it’s hard to tell if the blockage is from my mind or from life, but once you feel the physical sensation of being free, you cannot go back again. Or maybe you can, but definitely you are changed in some ways that leave you slightly different.

I believe more than ever in the mundane idea that this ‘normal’ life we’re living isn’t quite ‘normal’, ‘true’, or ‘real’. If you see me on a daily basis, you might not find me acting differently, but inside I feel changed.

A useful image:
There used to be a door at the dam, locked and unopened. The door prevents anything from passing through. Now a key has unlocked the door and it’s been pulled open. Whatever is behind the dam has the force of a tsunami. Once this door opens fully, it cannot be closed again. Nobody can predict what’s going to happen next.

I feel more curious, more interested, more open to new experiences and new people. At the same time I feel more ignorant than ever, like I still have so much to learn.

I declare this to be a wonderful state to be in.

metaphysical

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I’m in the process of discarding my skin/mask and becoming the person I was always meant to be. I think it’s got something to do with growing older and going to Paris and talking to the astrologer who lives in London – who said I’d have a big change of identity in mid-2024… or just being fucking sick of not being the person I was always meant to be. But it’d be a mistake to say I’m changing. No. I’m just being revealed. I think ‘change’ is a thing of the world – the result of space interacting with time (I’m making this up). Change is physics. But to be revealed, that’s metaphysical. Again I’m making things up. But I’m feeling real good about this.

22.11.23

AI, blog

“We could have gone off and just built this in our building here for five more years,” he said, “and we would have had something jaw-dropping.” But the public wouldn’t have been able to prepare for the shock waves that followed, an outcome that he finds “deeply unpleasant to imagine.” Altman believes that people need time to reckon with the idea that we may soon share Earth with a powerful new intelligence, before it remakes everything from work to human relationships. ChatGPT was a way of serving notice.”

From here.

Quite possibly the scariest paragraph I’ve read in awhile.

iain banks

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Discovering Iain Banks feels almost like the first time I read Anthony Bourdain. It’s a feeling of pure electricity.

It will forever be an honor to read words written by beings who’re born to write.

People like these are not just writers, but conduits of forces that are spiritual or alien or out-of-this-world. They remind me that the world isn’t just so. There is definitely something beyond, but what? In the meantime art and writing and music and the countless results of inspired creativity will sustain us here, until we get there, whatever and wherever that is.

As always, I’m a little late. Iain Banks is no longer with us. But I read a really beautiful obituary about him in The Guardian and I feel… satisfied.

My satisfaction comes from knowing that he had lived a life filled with most of the things he wanted – books, writing, readers, the chance to live in his imagination, and the ability to warp the shape of this universe through his thoughts.

I’m satisfied, and I hope Iain Banks was too.