The question we all need to ask - Lessons learnt while being in another land
This is a way long overdue post since I came back to tanahair, well to speak about how I feel returning home. There are so much thoughts flying in my head lately and weight in my heart that I feel I should just put it all down in ink. Or in this case, bytes and fonts.
I always felt the 6 months is meant to be a space for discovery. To be taken out of my once well-established routines and plunge me into new grounds where I'm forced to re-orientate my life again. To find avenues to discover what's the deal with this journey of life I'm contemplating time and time again. Enough of meandering around like a lost pilgrim. During this period, I somehow hoped I will find what i'm searching for.
The fact is, the answers were always right in my face.
The fact is, I have tried to imagine that the search for meaning in life is a never-ending process. I tried to think that with the confrontation and discovery of new experience, the journey is all so dynamic and you can never say you truly lived until you grasped it and squeeze out of every passing second the essence of that moment. In other words, I'm very much a hedonistic existentialist who is always in search of something "new" to quench for thirst for meaningful living.
Most of it i realise now it's just a bunch of bullshit. No, i'm serious.
Cos during the 6 months, it's not so much that I discover what I want to be, it's very much about what I DON'T want to be. Work your ass off in the day, party away in the night. Don't bother very much about anything else. Focus on what makes me secure and happy. (This is in no way a reflection of everyone's life in that country, it's just a personal discovery i had through my own experience) A good friend over there told me that "the corporate life is an illusion. You can't derive the meaning of your existence from there." He even told me to give up my dreams and my need to fit into the patterns of this world. The system will just suck you into it. "In the end, death will show that everything you have ever achieved is just nothing basically. Dust."
While his blatant in-your-face forthrightness doesn't really sit well with me, I definitely think he has a point. It set me thinking. The fact is, my vision of hope is screwed up all this while.
Hope governs how we live our lives now. It's about the question "What are we waiting for? And what are we going to do about it in the meantime?"
And i'm very convinced of this. If you don't ask those two question right now and seek the answers to them diligently, you will find that your life might swayed in a direction that one day might not be agreeable with you.
Or it could be when that day comes, you've probably arrived at a state where you can't really do anything about it anymore cos you're so far into it there is nothing else you or anyone can do. Or it has reached a point when you just don't care how you turn out anymore.
It has come to a point when every morning, I will have to force myself to ask that question. Cos that really is the point.
Everything from my stay in Singapore to my conversations with certain key people have directed me to this juncture of asking "What is my hope really?" Not so much "how can i achieve my dreams" or "will i make a difference?"
I just had a meal with a friend. He's a very good pal and we both are passionate about fitness. He decided to leave his corporate job eight months ago to take the plunge to start a new venture in fitness. He told me about it and I plainly told him it's not viable, risky and he will have to suffer doing it in order to survive. Most probably it will not work. But he's going after his passion and some part of me is secretly hoping he might succeed cos I understand his passion. Now i'm back and he told me he cannot sustain this business anymore. He wants out of it and have learnt a valuable lesson. All he ever wanted is to earn a decent living doing what he loves best. But as with most dreams, it comes with costs and failures. I salute him for taking the plunge, instead of doing the "I told you so" thingy.
The point of me sharing this story is this. Our dreams may come true or they may not. We may achieve our goals in life, or it could fall apart. The structures in our lives which we so carefully build may hold for a period or be swept away by a single wind of crisis. But in the end, it's our hope that pulls us through. My friend is continuing his journey in life, battered by broken dreams, clearly carrying a hope of a better tomorrow. And in times like this, with the economic turmoil and unceasing political uncertainty in our tanahair, we have to ask the question, "What is my hope?"
Not a misguided feeling about the future or a naive blind optimism. But a refined, chiseled hope born out of a solid conviction.
6 months of being taken out of my usual routines and put into solitude have lead me to this conviction. I pray you will find your 6 months, one week or even a one month's worth of fasting to get to that point.
Because how you want to live your life depends on it.
I've worked in advertising for 3 months now, and I've come to a few conclusions:
1. I love T-shirts and jeans. Or T-shirts and shorts. Or T-shirts and whatever the hell you wear to cover your pee-pee. I just love T-shirts.
2. Advertising can turn into an obsession. You see, there are jobs people do because they need the money. Then there are jobs that people do because they love it. And then there's advertising - a job that demands so much of you, you either burn out super-fast, or fall for it like the first time Jack saw Rose on the Titanic. If I'm not thinking up stuff in work, I'm doing it in Starbucks. If not Starbucks, on my dinner table. If not my dinner table, while I drive. It's an obsession. Someone should stick a warning label on the entrance for new staff.
3. There exists a myth that young Christian working adults cannot be 100% full-out Christians in the advertising world, or they won't survive long. Having been in it for 3 months, I have to say it's an interesting question. I'll post more thoughts on this later, on a round of Anchor.
4. I miss writing.
I do. I mean, writing is still my job - but it's different when your words are allowed to flow and wrap themselves in experiments of expressing what the heart really wants to say, as opposed to writing that lands on a bank's flyer. I could resume journalling regularly, but no scientist has created a cure for laziness.
But great news today! Siew Lian came to church this morning, and revealed: THINK is back online! It's vastly different from the previous incarnation though - it's, um, slimmed down. Very slimmed down. Like, it's basically one page at the moment. But Siew Lian and Rachel will experiment, knowing them. In fact, THINK will pretty much be an experiment from now on. But it's great - I now have an outlet to write again. Call it writer's masturbation.
Greatness usually reveals itself without showing off
Good movies usually tries to make up for weaknesses in its plot with superstars cameos, pulsating action and drama, sleazy love scenes and the works. But GREAT movies allows the story to speak for itself. GREAT movies reveals to us something about our humanity. And touches us in a way that good movies cannot. Don't even talk about BAD movies. They are in a league of their own.
I heart Wall-E. I think this time, Pixar has created a character that is so insanely difficult to hate or dislike. As opposed to the Joker in Christopher's Nolan masterpiece. Both deserves the world's applause for 2008. Both, though not in this world as far as their physical existence is concerned, should be given Oscars.
A bit of conspiracy theory for you on the plot (warning: SPOILERS)
"What is the difference between a living thing and a dead thing? How to tell one from the other?....In the medical world, a clinical definition of death is a body that does not change. Change is life. Stagnation is death. If you don't change you die. It's that simple. It's that scary.
Leonard Sweet, Soul Tsunami
The result of the past six months is Realization. That working out your salvation everyday is such a profoundly difficult endeavor that it could only require strength bestowed from another planet. Not all of us are world-class athletes and even they are certainly not changed within a day, a week or even a year. We need to diligently examine self, wisely prepare our training and stick to the regime with determination. We need to understand the cycles and workings of our bodies, minds and soul. Most of all, we need to know that we are weak - a mere mortal.
We are likened to broken colored shards of glass fitted together into a mosaic to form a masterpiece whose beauty is brought out by the illumination of truth and grace.
Change me as I come into the light. Let my prayer-soaked fears be transformed into courage. To live through those divine moments of change.
