Sucre is a beautiful city, I had an excellent chance to see it from outside today as I went this morning with Coco (my spanish teacher) to learn to ride a motorbike with gears. He is a motorcross competitor when he isn't teaching and allowed me to practice on his bike. I am going to rent/borrow one on Monday and go with him for a tour all around the outside of the city.
I have been staying with a host family, Enrique is the owner of the house, his son, daughter, maid and her two daughters live there as well. They are INCREDIBLY hospitable people, Enrique speaks very clear and comprehensible spanish, and is always willing to help me with whatever I need including driving me to a guitar lesson last week (also in spanish). I took my guitar to a church jam session on Monday and felt humbled in front of all the other guitarists who were much better than me, I have been practicing just as much as ever though and I can see very slow but steady progress which is very encouraging. My command of the language is getting better every day as well and I intend to stay in Sucre at least another two weeks to take advantage of this excellent learning environment.
Conversational fluency is a nebulous goal. To fully master Spanish such that I could speak it as well as English would probably take a good few thousand hours of practice and multiple years in a Spanish speaking country, reading Spanish literature. However, to learn it well enough to have a conversation with someone is much easier. Thursday marked a milestone for me, I met a Bolivian girl out and about in the city and brought her back to my house, the first time I've picked up speaking only Spanish. Now of course it is possible to pick up without saying much at all IF you are a pickup god but this is a pretty good accomplishment for me and an excellent incentive for me to continue learning the language. I don't think it marks practical conversational fluency just yet but I can't be far off.
I met a very interesting fellow student from my spanish school the other day. He is a 38 year old American physics graduate who wants to set up a luxury resort in a snall Peruvian town. I spent about three hours in a bar with him discussing his beliefs and how he thinks he has achieved some of the best moments in his life. In the spirit of my recent venture into practical philosophy as an operating system for life, I tried to apply some of his beliefs into my existing framework. This has resulted in an interesting theory that I want to apply to my life and see if I can't use it to get some results:
I made some notes in my notebook after I spoke with him, they are roughly as follows:
A human is:
The universe come alive
An eddy current in the universal flow of entropy
An atom's way of looking at itself
The universe's attempt to save itself from entropy death
A tool for making thought real
A knot in time - the body in the past, emotions in the present and thought in the future
A meta-consciousness having a human experience
After I graduated in physics I thought I understood the world. This was so far from the truth as to be laughable. Truth is not physics, it is not black and white, it is what you apply to get results, nothing more and nothing less.
The world you experience is a reflected reality. It is NOT an absolute. What you experience is defined by a complex mixture of your sensory input, your beliefs about who you are, your beliefs about other people and your current emotional state. Your brain likes to maintain a congruent reality at all costs, such that if there is something that does not fit into your reality your brain will do whatever it can to make that reality congruent again, either by ignoring input or trying to output action to change the input into something closer to the ideal.
The upshot of this is that if you want to have something in your life, whatever it is, start acting as if you already have it. In fact, start believing that you already have it right now even (especially) if it doesn't seem to be true within your current reality framework (note the emphasis on current).
If you to continue to operate with the belief that you don't have this thing that you want, and it is hard to obtain, your brain will constantly look for references to support this in order to maintain a congruent reality. I theorise that if you flick the switch and start believing that what you want is everywhere, easy to obtain, and you could always just take it if you wanted, your brain will start subconsciously leaning in a direction that takes you closer and closer to this new reality in many tiny ways.
Over time your mindset will adjust such that the reality is congruent again and you really do have whatever it is that you wanted. Although this approach could take years to really work especially with big things, I am certain it will work better than focussing on what you DON'T have, which will only entrench you further into your current reality.
One thing I have learned through learning guitar and continuously putting myself in unknown and unpredictable situations is that your brain is far more powerful than you think it is and you should trust it more.
The blogs are a bit thin on the ground now. Please update! mumx
ReplyDelete