R.I.Chalmers Passionate About English

Happy New Year in 133 Languages

I created a star-filled video to say Happy New Year to all my students across the world.

Posted under Society, Teaching

“[By 1985], machines [computers] will be capable of doing any work Man can do.”
Herbert A. Simon, of Carnegie Mellon University, one of the founders of the field of artificial intelligence – speaking in 1965

He wasn’t quite right with his timing, but I have to agree with his prediction if we move it forward a few years. But why won’t there be any language schools in the future? Because computers are becoming more powerful daily and this progress is unlikely to stop…ever.

From the fictitious Encyclopaedia Galactica – from Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s  Guide to the Galaxy: “The Babel fish is small, yellow and leechlike, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language. The speech patterns you actually hear decode the brainwave matrix which has been fed into your mind by your Babel fish.”

Last year I wrote an article for ETp and in it said: “The history of machine translation by computer began with a 1954 experiment in which sixty Russian sentences were translated into English at the Georgetown University in the USA. Though widely and enthusiastically reported in the press, such is the complexity of language that the journalists’ enthusiasm proved to be little more than premature extrapolation.”

Google Translator Toolkit can currently translate 345 languages between 10,664 language pairs.

Dragon Naturally Speaking types my work for me on my computer as I speak with 99% accuracy. Text Aloud reads it back to me with astonishing clarity and excellent pronunciation. Accurate speech-to-text and text-to-speech are already here. We even have to speak to machines on the telephone – and they speak back, too.

Translingual Information Detection, Extraction and Summarization (TIDES) was being developed by military departments before 2002. This project is the development of “advanced language processing technology to enable English speakers to find and interpret critical information in multiple languages without requiring knowledge of those languages.”Speech-to-speech translation in the form of an electronic Babel fish might seem a long way off, but may not be so. We would not want to make predictions like that made by Dennis Gabor, British physicist and author of Inventing the Future, in 1962 when he predicted: “Transmission of documents via telephone wires is possible in principle, but the apparatus required is so expensive that it will never become a practical proposition.” Since then the fax has come and almost gone, superseded by email and other electronic data transfer systems.

Remember the advent of the digital calculator? I do. I had one of the first programmable ones way back in 1976. I wrote a BASIC program for it with which I could play a Lunar Lander game. Back in 1976 I could buy something in a shop for 9.65, hand over 10.65 and be given the 1.00 in change without the shop assistant so much as stopping for breath. Try that today in Carrefour, Sainsbury, Tesco or whatever shop you have near to you. Better still, hand over the 10.00 and wait until the shop assistant has punched it into the till, and then offer the 65 pence, cents or whatever. Watch the panic form on their face as they desperately try to figure out what they are supposed to do. The till is telling them to give you 0.35 change from your 10.00 note. Even with a calculator to hand they will struggle to work it out. There is no longer any way to get rid of the loose change in your purse.

The electronic calculator removed the need to do simple mental arithmetic and thus spelt the end of humanity’s ability to do simple mental arithmetic.

My prediction in this post is that Google Translate, Babylon, and other such language tools will eventually become so sophisticated that they will have the same effect as the pocket calculator – they will remove the need to have the skill of speaking another language.

They may not be capable of speech-to-speech translation yet, nor may be able for some time, but this group is concerned with the question of private language schools of the future. In the future, dear reader, I can promise you that accurate speech-to-speech translation in real-time will be a reality.

The danger for the language school of the not-too-distant future lies close at hand. I regularly read Russian, Chinese, Arabic web pages translated very accurately, as far as I can tell, into English. I often communicate with my online students by email in English, but sometimes provide a Google translation into the student’s own language where necessary for clarity. Keep the sentences simple and Google does a wonderful job.

Just as the world stopped wasting time learning to do mental arithmetic after 1976, might it not also stop wasting time learning a foreign language when any document, or spoken word, can be quickly and accurately translated by machine?

How wonderful a Babel fish device inserted into my ear and connected to my iPhone, or whatever electronic wizardry might happen to be in my pocket, by bluetooth would be if it could automatically translate the spoken word from Spanish to English and vice-versa! This is the future, have no doubt. Would I waste my time learning Spanish or any other language with this resource at my disposal? Absolutely not!

So, I’m afraid that there won’t be any language schools to look at in the future, private or otherwise, and the TEFL industry had better start looking for a new cash cow to milk.

Posted under Teaching, Technology

by Moira Allen

Manuscript format should be a fairly simple issue. Yet from some of the questions I’ve received, it would seem that people like to make it complicated — from editors who prefer a particular style and therefore declare that all editors want the same style, to writers’ groups who insist that one must use this font and that layout and so forth.

If conflicting advice on format has left you confused (and wondering if your manuscript will be rejected unread simply because you put your address in the upper right corner instead of the left), the following tips should help clarify the issue.

 

Print Manuscripts: The Basics

Most editors in any genre (articles, short fiction, long fiction, etc.) want a manuscript to conform to the following basic requirements:

• Good quality white paper (20-lb. minimum, never erasable – beyond that, use what works best in your printer) – in the U.S. use 8.5×11 paper, in Europe and elsewhere, use A-4. (Note: If you are submitting internationally, don’t worry about trying to use “their” paper; U.S. editors understand that non-U.S. writers will be using A-4 paper, and vice versa.)
• Double-spacing
• 1-inch margins all around (at least)
• A clear, readable font (more on this later)
• Paragraphs indicated by indents (tabs), not by an extra line space

Articles and Short Stories should begin about halfway down the page (some folks say two-thirds). Your name, address, and other contact information (phone, fax, e-mail, etc.) should be placed in the upper left corner of the manuscript, in a single-spaced block. The wordcount of the article (rounded to the nearest 10 or 50) should go in the upper right corner. Your title should be centered on the page at the halfway point, in a larger font than the text (boldfacing is fine). Skip two lines, and center your byline (either your real name or your pen name) in a slightly smaller font. Skip another two lines and begin your article.

Novels and Nonfiction Books require a cover page. This can be prepared in a variety of formats, but the simplest is to center your book title halfway down the page. Skip two lines, and center your name or byline. Skip another two or three lines, and center your contact information (real name, if different from your byline, address, phone, fax, etc.) If you are using an agent, you may wish to include the agent’s name and information here (or the agent may prepare a separate cover sheet). Skip another two or three lines and include the total wordcount of the manuscript. Then, begin each separate chapter of the book on its own page, beginning halfway down the page with the title of the chapter (or number, if the chapter has no title). Do not include your byline on each chapter, or any contact information.

Running Headers are expected on articles, short stories, novels and nonfiction book. A running header should appear at the top of every page (except the first), and include the following information:

• Your last name
• The title of the article, book, or story — or a keyword from the title if the title is long
• The page number

For example, a running header for an article titled “A History of Feline Chiropractic Care” might look like this: Allen/Feline Chiropractic/…2

Page Numbers in a book-length manuscript should be sequential from the first page of the book to the last. Don’t number each chapter separately (e.g., 1-1, 1-2; 2-1, 2-2, etc.). Today, it’s the rare computer system that won’t allow you to work on an entire book-length manuscript in one document. However, if you find this cumbersome, there’s no reason why you can’t create each chapter in a separate file and assemble them into a single document later. (Keep in mind that these days, most publishers will expect you to deliver not only a printed copy of your manuscript but, eventually, an electronic copy as well, generally in Microsoft Word.) If you find it too difficult to get your headers/page numbers to skip the first page of each chapter, don’t worry about it; this is a manuscript, not a finished product.

Contest Submissions are formatted much like regular article or story submissions, with one exception: All your contact information should be included on a cover sheet, like that used for a book-length manuscript. Do not put your name or any contact information on the first page of the story/article itself, and do not include your name in the running header. The cover sheet will be removed from your submission, so that the judges do not know anything about the author of the piece. (If you see a listing that asks for work to be submitted in “contest format,” this is what it means.)

Fonts and Format

Amazingly, people get into heated discussions over what types of fonts editors prefer. Some folks claim that all editors want manuscripts in Courier (the font that looks like your typewriter font). Lately, some editors and writers have come to prefer Arial. So what do editors really want?

The truth is, most editors really don’t care, as long as the font is readable. (I can state this with confidence, having done a survey of about 500 editors; 90% expressed “no preference” with regard to font.) Very few editors will reject your manuscript because it happens to be in New Century Schoolbook, Palatino, or Times Roman. Generally, it’s best to use a 12-point font size, and to choose a font that doesn’t “squinch” letters together too closely.

The rationale for Courier dates back to the days when editors did an eyeball “guesstimate” of line lengths to determine exactly how much space a piece would fill in on the printed page. Courier is a “fixed-space” font, meaning that each letter takes up exactly the same amount of space. This made it easier to estimate how an article would appear when typeset. Today, however, very few editors need to do this (or even remember that it was done).

Arial is a nice, readable font — but it is also a sans-serif font, which many editors don’t like. (To see the difference between a serif and sans-serif font, compare Arial to Times.) So before you use this font, be sure your editor really, really wants it.

The bottom line on fonts is simply this: If your editor expresses a preference, or if you’ve heard from five other people who have submitted to that same editor that s/he is obsessive over fonts, use the font the editor prefers. But if your editor has no preference, don’t assume that s/he has one — and don’t “get your knickers in a twist” over the issue of font.

Some editors prefer that you do not include bold or italic type, and use underlining to indicate titles or emphasis. To be honest, I ignore this injunction, and have never found that it “hurt” my sales, with the single exception of Byline magazine, which scans hard-copy manuscripts and therefore does not want formatting. Again, if the editor is emphatic about this, listen to the editor; otherwise, follow your heart.

Submitting Your Manuscript

Submitting your manuscript is a fairly simple process. If your manuscript is short (less than five pages), it is acceptable to fold it and send it in a regular business-size mailing envelope. If, however, your manuscript and cover letter combined come to five pages or more, it is better to use a manila envelope for your submission.

Use as small an envelope as possible that will allow your pages to lie flat, but not slide around. A 9×12 envelope will usually be sufficient, unless you have a very thick manuscript.

Do not staple or paperclip your pages. Insert them into the envelope “loose.” If you are including photos or artwork, protect them with cardboard. (One good approach is to put them inside a separate envelope, with cardboard protectors, and put that envelope into your main mailing envelope.)

Address labels look more professional than hand-written addresses. One easy way to generate address labels is to buy a Dymo label-maker for your computer — you can simply copy the address from your cover letter, paste it into the label-making program, hit “print,” and you have a neatly formatted label. Otherwise, I recommend typing labels (it’s a great reason to hang onto your old typewriter!) I also recommend ordering preprinted return-address labels for yourself — and don’t clutter them up with puppies or flowers or such! (You can also use these return address labels to label your SASE.)

Now that most writers use printers rather than typewriters, most of us consider our manuscripts “disposable” — i.e., we don’t expect the editor to send them back. (And no one expects editors to scribble suggestions and comments on our work anymore!) So it’s no longer necessary to include a return envelope that will hold your entire manuscript, or enough postage to return that manuscript. Instead, just include a business-size, stamped, self-addressed envelope (SASE) for the editor to use to respond to your submission. (Do send a return envelope with postage if you want photos or artwork returned.)

Some writers like to include a stamped, self-addressed postcard with “check-off” boxes for an editor to use. Some editors find this simpler than a SASE, but it requires you to actually develop a postcard for the editor to “check off.” Personally, I consider this more trouble than it’s worth; it’s much simpler to just self-address an envelope and put on a stamp (and a postcard really doesn’t save you that much money).

When submitting a book manuscript, you’ll usually need a box. While such things as “manuscript boxes” do exist, they aren’t easy to find — and they aren’t necessary. Instead, just use a regular mailing box — such as the type of box you might receive from Amazon.com. A file-folder box will also work well for mailing a manuscript, but you may need to pad it a bit to keep the pages from sliding around. (Plastic shopping bags work just fine for this.) Again, don’t secure your pages with staples, paper clips, or heavy clips. At most, if you’re afraid the pages may slide around in the box, you can secure it with a single rubber-band around the middle. If you’re including a disk, put that in a separate envelope inside the box. Again, most publishers aren’t going to make comments on your manuscript, so there is no need to include postage for its return; just include a regular SASE.

 

Electronic Submissions

As you might imagine, electronic submissions break nearly all the rules listed above. If you are sending a submission as an e-mail attachment, you can still format your manuscript as you would for print; however, if you are including your manuscript in the text of your e-mail, you’ll need to follow very different format guidelines.

In e-mail, obviously, you don’t have to worry about paper quality, ink, margins, or running headers and page numbers. Here are some of the things you do have to worry about:

1. Don’t attempt to double-space text.
2. Double-space between paragraphs.
3. Use a readable e-mail font.
4. Avoid formatting, such as bold, underlining, or italics.
5. Turn off “smart” (curly) quotes in your wordprocessing program,
6. Include your contact information
7. Do not use HTML,
8. Do not send your submission as an attachment unless you have received permission to do so.
9. To be safe, convert your wordprocessed document to a text format before pasting it into your e-mail.
10. When in doubt, e-mail the piece to yourself first, to make sure nothing went wrong.

Most e-mail programs automatically convert a double-spaced document into single-spacing; don’t try to change it back. This will only create format problems at the other end.

You can still indent, but some e-mail programs “lose” the tabs, so a double-space may be the only way to indicate a new paragraph.

I am always amazed to receive e-mail messages in microprint. Mishawaka is a good e-mail font; be sure to select “normal size”. When in doubt, send yourself an e-mail; if the font looks tiny, increase the size or change fonts.

Most e-mail programs still don’t translate these well, resulting in odd symbols that make a transmission look garbled. Indicate underlining or italics by placing an underscore character next to the word being _underlined_. Indicate bold with asterisks on either side of the *word* you want to emphasize.

if you are going to transfer that document to e-mail. This includes curly apostrophes. These do not translate well in e-mail, resulting in a manuscript that is littered with weird symbols — a manuscript your editor will not only find hard and frustrating to read, but will have to go to great lengths to “fix” for publication. Do not use a keyboard-generated “m-dash”; use ” — ” to indicate a dash instead. Do not use symbols at all if you can help it; you never know what an accent mark will turn into at the receiving end.

(name, address, etc.) and wordcount at the very beginning of the e-mail, before the title.

or send material that has previously been formatted in HTML. Remove all HTML codes. Turn off any option in your program that is likely to convert your submission to HTML.

(Do not send any unsolicited submission as an attachment.)

This can eliminate many format problems. (Use plain text, not Rich Text Format.)

 

A Final Word

I mentioned putting your name and address on your manuscript at the beginning of this article, and I’m going to mention it again. I am amazed at how many manuscripts I have received in the past couple of years that don’t even include the author’s byline, let alone full contact information. Keep in mind that when you are submitting a manuscript as an attachment, this document may well become “separated” from the “cover e-mail.” Most likely, an editor (like me) will store manuscripts in one file and e-mail messages in a completely different file. And since, like me, most editors may keep a manuscript six months or more before publishing it, by the time we get back to that article in the file, we may have no idea who wrote it.

Thus, the bottom line in all manuscript submissions is really the top line: At the very least, include your name!
———————————————————-

Moira Allen is the editor of Writing-World.com (http://www.writing-world.com) and the author of more than 300 published articles. Her books on writing include Starting Your Career as a a Freelance Writer and The Writer’s Guide to Queries, Pitches and Proposals.

Posted under Writing

I know what a whale feels like. I don’t mean that I’m immensely fat and try to avoid Japanese tourists wherever possible. What I mean is that I have just been eating camarones. Camarones are small shrimps. I say small, but they are actually tiny, and their tininess, and the fact that I was dropping them into my mouth by the thousand, made me think of whales. Whales eat krill, and camarones remind me very much of krill.

Shrimp, or prawns, come in a wide range of sizes here in Spain. You have giant things as big as your hand and you have the tiny camarónes at the other end of the scale. To show you what I mean, I took a photo of a standard sized Spanish prawn from my refrigerator next to a Camarón and my finger for scale.

You can see that the standard Spanish prawn is rather a handsome beast, and as succulent and delicious as a succulent and delicious thing that has just visited a salon dedicated to making things as succulent and delicious as possible.

The camarón, on the other hand, seems somewhat pathetic and about a succulent and delicious as school dinner gravy.

A friend of mine does not like camerones because she believes that they devour the corpses of dead people and animals that happen to end up in the sea. For my part, this does not bother me. I am not adverse to drinking a bottle or two of chilled Perrier water, which gets its flavour, if legend is correct, by percolating through old plague pits before emerging from the Perrier spring.

I thought about my friend’s reasons for not liking camarones and decided that as I was about to eat the corpses of many thousands of dead animals I was not too far removed from them myself and so bought a quarter of a kilo. The cost was 2 Euros. The haul was immense.

As you can see from this photograph, you do get a lot of camarones in a pound. To give a sense of scale, I took a photograph with a ruler in the foreground. The markings are in millimetres.

You eat these tiny shrimp by the handful. The texture is like crunching on soft-bodied ants, but the flavour is exquisite. (I don’t wish to offend any ants here, and am open to the possibility that they, too, possess an exquisite flavour if eaten by the handful – though I have yet to know what an anteater feels like) If you can steel yourself against the natural squeamishness of having to chew down on heads, bodies, eyes, and other bits, a mouthful of camarones is a seafood-lover’s delight.

If you are lucky enough to visit Spain, look out for camarones. You will find them freshly cooked like in the photos above, or in an small fried pancake called a “Tortilla de camarón”. These tortillas are a great way for the squeamish to eat camarones. The camarones are buried in a pancake of flour, parsley and garlic, and you would never notice their eyes staring mournfully up at you from your plate. Their eyes are so small anyway that it is hard to imagine anyone noticing them.

A delicious plate of Tortilla de camarónes

A traditional recipe for this dish

Half a pound of live camarones. If you can’t find them in your local supermarket, try inventing a machine that will shrink anything you point it at (like the one in “Honey I Shrunk the Kids”) and point it at fifty pounds of king prawns. If the Camarón turns out to be a bloke with a beard, you’ve got the wrong kind. He’s a popular Spanish flamenco singer. See below for details.

Half a pound of semolina flour, or chickpea flour will do just as well. Both are pretty much impossible to get where you are anyway.

Half a pound of finely chopped onions, and I mean finely chopped. Non of your wishy-washy diced stuff.

2oz of fresh parsley

Water to make the dough

Extra virgin olive oil for frying not drizzling!

Salt – extra virgin Mahatma Gandhi sea salt. This will make the camarones feel more at home.

Dump the flour in a bowl and little by little mix in the water to make a slightly liquid dough. Throw in some salt to taste.

Throw the live camarones into the mix with the onion and parsley. Leave it for an hour.

Spoon tortilla-sized plops of dough into the extra virgin olive oil and fry them on both sides (obviously! Why am I even telling you this?) until golden (not black and carbonised)

Eat them. Tell your friends about this great website.

DANGER! This is the wrong type of camarón for your recipe:

This is the right type:

Translation? Sorry! A picture says a thousand words, so switch off your speakers and watch the film. There are thousands of pictures and millions of words.

Posted under Lifestyle

“Andalusia and flamenco are two concepts which cannot be separated, and neither one can be fully understood apart from the other.” This statement from Juan Polvillo, one of Seville’s leading dance teachers, perhaps best explains why so many aficionados from all over the world come to the city to study flamenco.

If you want to dance you have to come to Seville. The teachers are there. The atmosphere is there, is a common belief held by many students who study the dance form. Often you can be in a bar and a small group with a guitar will just start playing and people will start to dance. There is a passion and a naturalness about flamenco in Seville that you just do not find anywhere else.

Many students find it difficult to study flamenco in their own country. There are few dance schools outside Spain, and if a student wants to progress they have to travel to Spain, and Seville in particular. Some of the greatest teachers of flamenco teach or have taught in Seville. The Andulusian city is, after all, the birthplace of flamenco.

There are many forms of flamenco. These include, the Tango, Bulería, Alegría, Garrotín, Guajira, Tango de Málaga, Solea por Bulería, Caña, Seguiryia, Tiento, Sevillanas, and the Rondeña. Each form has its own choreography anc there are various parts to each dance such as the letra, the escobilla and the silencio.

Schools normally have classes of between ten and thirty students. The classes specialise in the different techniques with lessons that allow students to master the use of the arms, the practice of footwork, and turns.

Schools also teach the techniques of the Bata de cola, the traditional skirt, and the Mantón de Manila, or shawl, in forms such as the Solea, Alegría, and Solea por Bulería. To complement dances such as the Guajiras, Alegrías and Caracoles, students also learn traditional fan techniques. The compás, or rhythm, is integral to each form and students learn to distinguish the different types of compás from the simpler rhythms of tangos to the more complicated rhythms of the bulerías. Many classes have guitar accompaniment.

Typical courses last two weeks and cost around three hundred Euros. The price normally includes three hours tuition every day, Monday to Friday, with other classes of compás y palmas, the handclapping.

Besides the cost of the course, and the necessary airfare to Seville, students must find suitable accommodation for their arrival. For most students who have no contacts in the city the Internet is one of the easiest ways to find a place to stay. Many students find accommodation through many of the local websites. The amount that you pay for accommodation depends on whether you want a one-bedroom apartment or the cheaper alternative of a shared flat or a stay with a family.

A typical private room in shared accommodation in the centre of the city close to the schools will cost around two hundred and fifty Euros a month. This compares very favourably with even the cheapest hotel accommodation in one of the city’s many pensions. Prices rise during Semana Santa, the Easter Holy Week, and during the city’s spectacular Feria, the traditional April Fair, when tens of thousands of extra visitors descend on this vibrant city.

Flamenco is a wonderful way of making friends and meeting people from all over the world who share a common interest. Many classes will have students from as far afield as Slovakia, Czechoslovakia, Turkey, Switzerland, Germany, and France. The Japanese are also very interested in flamenco and most courses have some Japanese students.

With so many nationalities, language is not essential, though for taking the classes it does help if you speak some Spanish. Students are normally advised to relax, listen, look and learn. They are also told not to worry about the lessons too much and just enjoy the experience. Most of the students who have the energy and the obsession for flamenco go to Seville and most have a great time.

Obsession is a word that is as synonymous with flamenco as Seville and Andalusia. For many students flamenco becomes a little bit of an obsession. Like drugs, it gets inside you. It comes from the soul. Great dancers have an extra, almost indescribable something known as “duende”. It translates roughly as soul or spirit and it’s been described as the artist becoming the dance, instead of the artist doing the dance.

Most students would agree that flamenco is a passion. It is something that you have to have in your soul. Many students have said that once they have seen it once they just have to do it. They can’t stop. For many it gets to deep inside their soul.

Flamenco and Andalusia are inseparable and obsession plays a big part. While Seville exists, flamenco will exist, and students will flock to the city in their thousands each year to satisfy that something in flamenco that searches for everything, all their weaknesses, all their strengths. It is this something that can only be defined as “wonderful” that will keep flamenco forever alive.

Posted under Lifestyle

Like a lot of people in our materialistic society, I used to identify myself by what I had. That is to say that I believed that who I was was determined by my possessions. I used to subscribe to the myth now prevalent that having “stuff” was the route to happiness.

Paradoxically, the more I possessed, the less content I found myself. In 2003 I began to ask myself why this was.

After my marriage of 20 years became untenable and we divorced, I found myself in an entirely new position where I could no longer sustain the lifestyle that I had endured before. Having freed myself from a marriage that was causing me a great deal of pain and anguish, I began to free myself from my possessions, too.

The first thing to go was my car. I simply rang the finance company and asked them to take it back. They initially tried to pursuade me to sell it and pay off the outstanding loan, but I was within my rights to ask that they take it back. This they did.

When the man came to collect the car, the sense of loss I expected to feel was instead of profound sense of relief. It was as if a huge weight had been taken from me. It was as if the car was a burden that I had taken upon myself along with all the other possessions I had so jealously clung to throughout my adult life.

It occurred to me that if it felt so good to divest myself of my car, it ought to feel just as good to divest myself of other possessions.

Having had so much, but been so unsatisfied, I decided to try the opposite path and have as little as possible. The car had been the first thing. The marital home would be the second.

I instructed my solicitor to sign over the house and all the remaining contents to my wife in order to expidite the divorce settlement and cause as little disruption as possible to her and our two children. My solicitor was horrified and begged me to reconsider. She said that I was entitled to half of the house and that I would get it. I stood my ground, instinctively knowing that my decision was the right thing to do. My solicitor made me sign a disclaimer to the effect that I had made the decision willingly and had not been given bad advice.

With the house gone I set about getting rid of my remaining possessions. Most things I gave away to friends who I knew would have a use for them. Many of my friends thought I was temporarily insane and only took what I gave them on the understanding they they were “looking after them” until I regained my senses. Everything else that I could find no friends to take I sold for nominal sums.

I sold my remaining 400 books to an elderly bookseller who was both delighted and surprised to get them for 40 pounds. He told me that several of the books were individually worth more than what I was asking for the lot.

I sold a Piaggio scooter for 100 pounds, the maximum price an item could be sold for in the local paper’s free ads. Such was the interest in the scooter that people were bidding more and more for it, the eventual offer I received being over 1000 pounds. I sold it to the first man who had called for 100 pounds, as he needed it to get to work.

I parted with my beloved microscope and many other previously “prized” possessions for equally small sums over the next few months. Eventually I possessed only the clothes that could fit into a rucksack, and an elderly laptop that I got in exchange for my powerful desktop and 22 inch flat screen monitor.

While all this was going on, I was living alone in an isolated rented cottage. Without a television or other distractions I was able to sit and look at myself over a nine-month period, and eventually find myself.

Finding oneself is something of an old cliche. People climb mountains, sail oceans, and do a million other things to “find themselves”, but all you really need to do is give away everything you own and sit alone without distractions for a long time. If you can’t find yourself then, you don’t exist.

I would liken finding myself to a form of enlightenment. It is an enlightenment that has not diminished since. I no longer measure myself by what I have and I no longer find myself wanting to possess things.

As Lao Tzu said: Knowing others is wisdom, knowing yourself is Enlightenment.

I have everything I want and need in my life; a loving and well-loved wife who shares my philosophy of life and time to spend fulfilling my potential.

I am no longer motivated by money or possessions. I earn little money, but have difficulty spending it as there is nothing I can think of that I want or need. I am simply free to be myself, and to achieve my potential – not in terms of material possessions, but in terms of understanding, fulfilment and creativity.

I do have things now, but I have them on different terms. I don’t possess them, and only have what I need. I don’t buy things for the sake of buying them or to make myself happy. Except for food, I rarely go into shops. When I do I find myself saying, “Look at all these things I don’t need!”

I don’t worry about losing the things I have. They are not me and I am not me as a consequence of them. I am who I am and who I am is not dependent on anything outside of myself.

The things I have are the things I need for my work. My work is my fulfilment. I work because I enjoy it not because I want to make lots of money. I write. I translate. I teach. I create art. These things I do because I love doing them.

I think it was Confucius 孔夫子 who said something like, “Find something that you love doing and do it for the rest of your life. You will never work another day in your life.”

He was right.

If there is one message I would like to pass on to the world it is that everyone needs to shut their eyes and ears to the greedy and materialistic world around them and look inward without distraction. Throw away your television. Cast out your magazines. Sit quietly, alone and without distractions, and look at yourself.

This is the way you will find yourself, and having found yourself you will understand the importance of being you.

Posted under Health, Lifestyle