Happy Chinese New Year. It’s the Year of the Dragon, my birth year (1952), according to the Chinese zodiac on the placemats at Luo’s Peking House restaurant, which comprises the sum total of my knowledge of the Chinese zodiac. According to Luo’s, if you’re a dragon, you’re “full of vitality and enthusiasm. The Dragon is a popular individual, even with the reputation of being foolhardy and a ‘Big Mouth’ at times. You are intelligent, gifted and a perfectionist but these qualities make you unduly demanding on others.” It claims I would make a good artist, priest or politician [or columnist?]. Famous fellow dragons include Joan of Arc, Pearl Buck and Sigmund Freud.
The great winged, fire-breathing serpent has entirely negative connotations in Western culture, where, in our myths, we’re always killing it. But not in Asian culture, where it is a symbol of considerable power. Emerging from the depths of the unconscious, the dragon represents the life force, a source of tidal energy, capable of great creativity and great destruction — not necessarily evil. The Eastern world view has always done a better job of integrating the light and the dark, the conscious and the unconscious, epitomized by the circular Yin-Yang.
The Year of the Dragon, I’m told, carries considerable significance for the Chinese, which seems timely since China is rapidly emerging as a world power. But it could also be a propitious year for the rest of us if we all get in touch with our inner dragon.
Last fall, I had dinner at a Chinese restaurant in Walworth, Wis., which had really bad food but really good fortune cookies. I saved them, and since I spent plenty of time in the bathroom afterward, I had a lot of time to peruse them.
Fortune cookies normally range from lame to insipid. The only thing they’re good for, according to a friend, is adding the words “in bed” at the end to generate a few laughs. The only way fortune cookies predict the future is through self-fulfilling prophecy — your self fulfilling their prophecy. But I always open them with fervent hope, however many times I end up disappointed.
This group of fortunes was different — oddly phrased, smacking of substance.
You are given the chance to take part in an exciting adventure.
Not “you will be” but “you are,” as if we all are, all the time. The adventure can take many, varied forms (in bed?), but life itself is as exciting an adventure as we choose to make it.
Minds are like parachutes. They only function when they are open.
Wow, a liberal fortune cookie! We’ll call this the Steve Jobs fortune. He was certainly in touch with his inner dragon.
Human Evolution: “Wider freeways, but narrower viewpoints.”
I don’t know who is being quoted, but this one seems to contradict the previous fortune. The faster we go, the narrower our perspective? Sounds like it also applies to the Information Superhighway. Someone actually putting thought (and research) into cookie fortunes? Astounding!
It’s in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped.
Good reminder.
Love or Money, or neither?
Ah, you have to love the inscrutable fortunes. Does this mean that if you get Love and Money, you get neither? Does it mean there is something other than Love or Money to aim for and that they’re mutually exclusive? Or is somebody just messing with our minds?
This is the month that ingenuity stands high on the list.
Like every month?
It is better to have beans and bacon in peace than cakes and ale in fear.
Now we’re talking. Enigmatic, yet mundane. Odd food combinations! Odd emotional combinations! Being poor but placid is better than being flush but afraid? I’ll drink to that.
To give happiness is to deserve happiness.
Good Karma. Make someone happy. Make just one someone happy. But deserving happiness doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be happy — or does it? (In bed?)
Those who wish to sing will always find a song.
Deceptively simple. A useful metaphor for inner and outer congruity. But will we always find the right song? Or am I singing the wrong tune?
And finally, the piece de resistance, the perfect Homer & Jethro “Corn-fucius say” butchering of the King’s English:
When more become too much.
It’s same as being not enough.
Subject-verb disagreement! A period after the opening dependent clause! Dropping “the” before “same”! It’s how every Hollywood Chinaman talks! But what does it mean? When you have too much it feels like not having enough? Upside-down wisdom for the Age of Information Overload? Someone at the fortune factory was definitely not taking the path of least resistance on this one.
Certainly these are fortunes fit for a dragon.
And I’ll leave you with one more to ponder. I’ve had it folded up in my wallet since May 23, 2005, when I tore it off my desk calendar. It claims to be a “Zen saying” and I don’t understand it, but believe that, someday, I will:
“Do not be afraid of the true dragon!”
In bed?