Trying Hard to Chew 贪多嚼不烂

Sitting in the large hall with a few hundred other participants, the thought I must have bitten off more than I could chew 贪多嚼不烂 tānduō jiáobulàn crossed my mind. Here I was attending a seminar given totally in Mandarin on emotion 情绪 qíng xù when I did not even know what this word was before I signed up. When I started this blog, I intended to immerse myself into the Chinese speaking world to see what rubs off besides the language. Anyway, I believed that to really learn something, one has to leave familiar ground and extend beyond our comfort zone.

So there I sat, stretching my ears to pick up unfamiliar sounds, words and phrases from 1 p.m. in the afternoon to 9 p.m. at night. At the end, my ears were exhausted and my head was swimming but I was still thinking in English. I could comprehend maybe 80% to 90% of what was conveyed in general (and much less word for word) and which was not good enough for I would not want the doctor who is deciding whether I am sane or not to only understand 90% of what I was saying and guessing the rest!

This team of experts from Taiwan was led by Dr. Xu TianSheng 许添盛 (also Hsu Tien-Sheng due to the way Chinese is pronounced in English). They asked a provocative question – did you invite your depression 忧郁症 yōuyùzhèng, chronic diseases 慢性病 mànxìngbìng and cancer 癌症 áizhèng to be your spokesman? All 5 talks were preceded by a short sketch that impressed upon the audience how little control we have on our emotions. How we let powerful emotions such as panic 恐慌 kǒnghuāng, anxiety 焦虑 jiāolǜ, anger 愤怒 fènnù, self-reproach 自责 zìzé and jealousy 妒忌 dùjì rule us. I was swarmed not only by feelings but also words of feelings! Now I was beginning to feel a little inadequate, 不自量力 bùzìliànglì, of trying to run before I could walk. “没关系” méi guānxi (never mind), I tried to console myself. A missed word or two here and there was not going to trip me.

The speakers told us how we recognize these emotions as negative so we strived to restrain and suppress them. But this misunderstanding slowly and gradually leads to a distortion of our energy that affected both our physical and mental health. And as a result, we became afflicted with diseases. It also resulted in wasting a precious opportunity to reflect on what our body and emotion is trying to tell us. I was beginning to understand what 普悦 pǔyuè meant (see April 5 post on Emotional Utopia) when she told us that she listened to what her cancer was saying to her…

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(to be continued…)