Yesterday brings an end to what I consider my Korean Experience. It's been an interesting journey, and I have experienced a great deal. It has been profound to see how each year was different, and of a Higher Order than the underlying year. Each year I set higher and higher goals.
The idea to set about doing the Ironman happened in Korea. Sure I'd thought about it before, but I saw Raynard win his first Ironman (also the first African and South African ever to win an Ironman), I gave him the flag and spoke to him in his hotel room. And from then on I pursued my own Road To The Ironman. That was an unexpectedly long journey too, longer and tougher than I'd imagined.
Living in Korea has also resucitated, in ways that living in England did not, my ambitions as a writer. I have written a number of published articles and letters, and conjured up novels called The Half Full Moon, Heaven Is In Your Heart, Ridiculous and My First Mother.
I have also reached a possible breakthrough, here, at the end, by representing ideas that seemed to have starved to death by Jnauary 2002. By July 2005 they had fire again, and I've redeigned logos for Rocketboy, and submitted clear signals to Venture Capital sources in South Africa with, so far, good feedback. I will be following up on the proposals already sent to Ackerman, Gie and Shuttleworth.
Someone sent me this message recently:
I think you're now encapsulating your thoughts in a
much more concise manner and your What document I
think conveys what your concept is. One thing that
struck me in your email: "I'm just looking for the nod
to go ahead and develop this."
You don't need the nod from ANYONE Nick. You go ahead
and develop all your ideas and don't ever rely on
anybody else to approve or disapprove of it. Just do
it. Otherwise you will encounter people with their own
fears and they will project them onto you and then you
will doubt yourself.
I believe it encapsulates a great deal of how I have approached people and what I have done with ideas. I am now willing to invest myself in these ideas, and I honestly don't care so much if others don't agree, understand or support my ideas. I've found that a lot of people out there know less than I do. But it's good to have an open mind. And a sense that something can always be improved...a better way is always possible.
I believe this:
If the path to the better there be
it begins with a full look at the worst
Thomas Hardy, 1887
The Power of Negative Thinking is that we can appreciate what isn't working. It's critical thinking, but the end result is positive. Many people criticise me for what I've written in this blog, saying I'm focussed on negatives... Sometimes I have been, but read the quote again.
It is insanity to ignore the terrible crisis of our time.
I have come to understand people - that mysterious subject - slightly better. It is better not to judge people or to be too honest with them. People can only stand so much reality. It is better, I see now, to be gentle with the truth, and important to be kind and polite. These may seem like social decorations, but people learn to trust other people through the consistent application of courtesy, of our good manners.
In Korea I have met many hundreds of people, hundreds of faces (see diary extracts below). People enrich our lives more than things. People are more valuable than money. People are more important than beauty or things people say about other people. A person you hardly know is just like you, and in that sense, you know that person very well. They sleep, and dream, and love, and cry, and complain and hunger and hope and feel just the same as you and me.
People give names to things, to cities, and animals, and rocks. They try to do the same to people, and individuals are more complicated than the names and stigmas we give them. I felt the sting of some of those stigmas. Because I'm South African, because I'm a westerner, because I'm bald, because I'm older...for whatever reason.
Teaching children has helped me understand the elementary nature of trying to teach any person anything:
- keep it simple
- make it relevant
- repeat
- test: do you understand?
I'm grateful for the friends I've met here, and the friendships that have grown and matured. I feel Corneli has matured a great deal into a much stronger, happier, and more beautiful woman, and I'm happy we shared this experience together. Minjung has also come a lo0ng way from when I met her, working in a hagwon.
Not all my friendships here were that constructive, I fear because of the lingering of past pain and insecurity that troubles so many foreigners here.
Fear of what people think, and fear of the unknown is the diet of teenagers. It ought not to sustain adults with university degrees in a faraway country, vested with the task of teaching young, impressionable minds not only English, but who we, as world travellers, are.
My personal view, is that it's troubling to what extent the foreingers here in Korea represent (to each other and to the Koreans)'what isn't right' in the world, as they do here. A lot of foreigners here would not 'fit in' that well, even in their home countries. There is some comfort then, that they find a measure of safety and popularity here. I have, I did.
But instead of using this opportunity to flourish, many fall back into what I call, 'bad habits'.
Things like drunkeness, promiscuity, vulgarity, excess, ignorance and so on...
I have a sense that people do these things when they live in fear...afraid of who they are and afraid of what they've lost, afraid of being alone (and sobre) with themselves in the long hours of the night...I have felt that way too.
I have found some of these people difficult to talk to, and difficult to understand. If I didn't say that my account, this summary, of life in Korea wouldn't be completely geuine.
There is nothing to fear but fear itself.
Peak Oil...and its implications...we ought not to fear, but accept, and then resolve to find our way through.
Thus I feel the most valuable lesson I have learned, by far, in Korea, through the information highways of Koreas awesome broadband connectivity, is the lesson surrounding Peak Oil. We have to change the way we consume. We have to powerdown.
This information will play a critical role in our lives in the coming months. To plan a future, to pursue dreams and goals, without realising that man is about to change his operational lifestyle, in fundamental ways, not through choice but by forceful circumstance....these are very valuable insights.
I am profoundly grateful that in my loneliness and exploration I have been allowed to read Kunstler, Chomsky, Heinberg, Campbell, Simmons, Friedman and so on.
I am fortunate that I do not need time and reality to wake me to the urgent emergencies that will soon be upon us. It's clear. For many, the future will
be an increasingly convoluted jungle steeped in deepening darkness. Not knowing what is happening will make it worse.
I would like to dedicate as much as I can, and be as practical as I can, from here onwards, to communicating practical and implenting useful technologies towards developing New Urban (sustainable)Communities.
One of the steps on this road is to write a non-fiction book for a South African population, on the particular effects of Peak Oil for the Southern African subcontinent. I will be working on this as soon as I arrive in South Africa. I will interview industry experts and paint a local picture of the global challenge.
It will be called: Our Thirsty Land: What To Do In The Peak Oil Era
The world is about to change in radical ways. Mine too, if only in terms of the geographical reality of it.
I wish all my readers well, and I wish you good health, and a long life, in the long emergency. Let us all hold on to the good, that we believe, still remains in ourselves, and each other, and in this world we have made for ourselves.
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