When You Were Gone

So, how did it feel when in the time I was gone?

Well.. to be frank, the front part was actually quite exciting. I mean.. it’s been a long time since I had only myself to care about, and suddenly I’m have all this freedom to do whatever, wherever, whenever and with whoever. For a good few week I was up and about doing everything, meeting everyone.

Then… the loneliness started to set in. After I had run out of things I wanted to do, I found myself feeling a bit lost. There was no one to go home to. There are only so many times you dared bug your friends in a week. And I started to realize how… well…. Lonely… it felt being all by yourself. I thought back to the last time I was single.. over 8 years ago; how did I manage being so busy, happy and fulfilled all by myself?

I realized that if I was going to survive the next year, I had to re-learn how to be by myself again. I started doing the things I used to enjoy doing when I was by myself – I picked up the guitar a lot more, I started writing more, meeting up with friends, reading. And in a way it helped. It helped me remember how I was like before…

And then?

And after a good few months of doing it.. I guess eventually got into the groove of surviving on my own again. I hardly stayed home, I was always out with people.. and whenever I was free, I headed to Starbucks instead of home….. I guess I knew being at home would just make me feel more depressed. While I missed you terribly, I had to find a way to get by without you without feeling totally miserable.

I longed and missed the constant companionship, the laughs, the emotional intimacy, the comfort of having someone physically there beside you… but I also started to enjoy the freedom, the flexibility, and the care free nature of being just by myself.

So in other words, you got on just fine without me?

Well.. I don’t mean it in THAT way. I managed to cope, yes. But being alone also made me more aware than ever about what how it is like being with someone. I was always aware of the fact that I was alone… and while I did learn the joys of singlehood all over again, I also was sorely missing the joys of being a couple .... and after knowing both, I actually knew with greater certainly, which one I wanted for myself…

And which one is that??

Singlehood of course!

WHAT?

……… Just kidding dear. You're the best thing that's ever happened to me.

Season Greetings

To you my friend who is reading this:

Merry Christmas (belatedly)... and a happy new year ahead of you. Thank you for reading and sharing in my thoughts, fears and rants all these while.

I would never know who you are unless you decided to make yourself known to me, which some of you have.... and I am very grateful and thankful for that. It is a heart warming experience to receive care and concern from total strangers who find somehow still find it worth their time sharing and caring with a person they don't even know.... It gives me great hope and comfort in the goodness of humanity. So thank you from the bottom of my heart.

My wish for you -

may courage never leave you,
may laughter always find you,
may peace always settle in,
may friends always come,
may problems never stay,
may hope always be abound,
may faith always remain,
may love always grow,
may God bless you and keep you safe...

All the days of your life...


With Warmest Regards
Me

Stop & Stare

Boy, what a morning it has been.

I was feeling kind of excited last night as I left work, ready to hit the road straight to Singapore in my new car. Well, new old car that is. The previous car I was driving was starting to make one too many noises and my boss finally agreed to change it to something that didn’t look like it was about to fall apart before the next traffic light. The replacement just came last Saturday, and I was eager to put the car through its paces, to check out what this baby can do.

Zoom zoom zoom.. and before you know it, I was right at the border of Singapore. So far so good… it felt like I was on a flying carpet… with wheels of course. I decided to hang on the phone a bit more talking to my other half before crossing the border.. enjoying the air conditioning and the soft feel of the leather.

And then everything just went started to go downhill..…

The hazard light suddenly came on, lights started flashing and beeping sounds started coming from areas I didn’t know existed in the car… and finally the engine itself chocked to a silent eerie death.

“WTF...?”…

I turned the ignition but the car wouldn’t start. A desperate call to my boss asking for advice – he told me to wait and try again later. What a genius. Didn’t work. Popped open the hood and peered in and started touching and shaking stuff. Had no idea what I was doing. But all men feel compelled to ‘pop the hood and check’ as if they knew a thing or two about fixing a car. Gave up and went back in. Opened the glove compartment and did what I know only engineers would do – read the manual. While it wasn’t as cool as popping the hood, it was a lot more informative. Read cover to cover hoping to find a solution, but still wasn’t any closer to getting the car started. At least I now knew what all those knobs and lights were for.

By this time it was 3am in the morning, and I hadn’t had a bath in 18 hours. Stick, dirty and smelly, I decided to try getting some shut eye in the car. But with the windows half open, I kept getting up every half an hour convinced that a bunch of night raiders were about to pounce on me and drive my car away. But since my car was out of order, they’d probably get pissed off and kill me instead. Or so I imagined.

Anyway, I somehow managed to make it to morning with some decent sleep and all my body parts intact. Hope against hope, I tried turning the key again. No sound. Damn car just won’t start. Lucky for me, I was parked right at the rest stop. Took my bag out and went to the washrooms. They had showers there mostly used by lorry and bus drivers to freshen up. So, a shower and a shot of caffeine later, I was feeling almost alright again. Quick calls to the workshops and some colleagues and tow truck was fast on its way to rescue me from my misery.

But this being Malaysia, it was just a matter of time before a bunch of busybody’s started congregating around my car. All men of course. How do they help? By standing around the car, hands at their waist, staring at the engine, thinking really really hard. We men like to think we can fix anything if we stare at it long enough. Only guy that was helpful was the tow truck guy. After all, he was the one actually charging me for assistance. But not before trying to kill me it seems.

After hooking up the car, I hopped into his truck. Maybe I was high on caffeine or something, but I was kind of enjoying sitting in the old beat up truck. Had a real old school feel about it, and it didn’t even have seatbelts! Coolness! I was thinking this might turn out so bad after all. I’m riding old skool style babe!

….and then he made a right turn…….and the door next me swung open, and I could feel myself being thrown right out the door, my body floating in thin air before crashing to the ground in slow motion…before getting squashed by the incoming cars….

OK, not really . But it really did feel like it was about to happen.

The door did swing open, but I managed to cling on to something to avoid flying out. Wasn’t proud of my few whimpy cries I accidentally let out in the face of certain death, but considering the truck driver himself almost shit in his pants too, I wasn’t too bothered. With doors locked this time, I sat close to the centre and keep my grip firmly on the seat for the rest of the trip. Riding old skool didn’t seem so fun after that. Damn it, why isn’t anything going right today?

But not to worry…as I write this, I’m sitting snuggled into a nice comfortable seat with air conditioning, free wifi, and a pretty looking waitress fetching free flow espresso coffee for me while I wait for the mechanics to figure out what the hell’s wrong with my car. I can tell they’re on it because from where I sit, I can see the mechanics all standing around the car, hands at their waist, staring at the engine, thinking really really hard. I’m sure that’ll do the trick.

All You Need Is....

Gosh.... I wish someone would just whisk me away to the North pole this Christmas.

Work has been such a drag these days. What I usually get done in an hour is taking days. What I'm supposed to get done in days is taking forever. Maybe it's because of the Christmas season. Whatever it is, I'm definitely not in the mood to do anything productive at work.

A lot of has been on my mind of late (as always)... about love, about money, about the future.. about life. A quick look at my last 5 post usually tells me the general state of mind I'm in at a particular time.

One thing I'm starting to take note of is this - people tend to open up to me.

Initially, I thought it was just a fluke. Everyone needs someone to talk to.. it's naturally for them to talk to the closest person willing to listen And it just so happens that I'm there. No biggie right? But then after a while, I started counting and it was like "Gee...is this just the way things are or am am I starting to look too much like Dr. Phil?"

For example, I think a year back, someone sent me an email telling me about the loss of her boyfriend in a war, and asked for advise. Not too long ago, some guy sent me another email, talking to me about his relationship problems and about how women just don't seem to like him. He asked me what he can do about it. And mind you, I don't even know these people. A colleague suddenly started rattling away about how frustrated she was with her husband and how she seemed to have lost her social circle and life. There are other, but these are just some examples.

I enjoy listening to people and trying to help out. This whole thing of emotional truths, deep seated feelings, fears and frustrations..... I connect with it. To me, it feels a lot like a gateway to a person's soul. When they share something with me, I feel I am that much closer, that much deeper in into the persons mind and heart.

And unsurprisingly, here’s the common theme - love. As cheesy as that sounds, love is the biggest source of people’s joy and heartache. Everyone wants to feel love and needed, everyone's trying their best to love, and nobody's finding it easy. A lot of people talk about wanting to find meaning and happiness in their life without really realizing that meaning and happiness are ultimately the product of love - both in the giving and receiving of it. It's not just the couples and romantic kind of love... but just love in general.

I realize that a lot of the happiest and most contented people I know are often the people who have love in their life. You know it by the way they talk and act. They are often patient, giving, self sacrificial, selfess. They're always giving people things, doing favours for people or helping someone out. And it's almost like the less they keep and the more they give, the happier they are. People who have love are also surprisingly brave. They dare do things beyond what others tell them is the limit, they dare take on task / missions seemingly bigger than themselves… and they often do it for the sake of something or someone else.

And the people who seem to forever be discontented and hungry for something, feeling like something is 'missing' in their life; they have very little experience of giving and receiving love. They are condition more to taking, achieving and winning (not that any of that is evil). There is a very distinct selfish, self preserving nature about them. They are often brave too.. usually for reasons that are to their own benefit. But no one’s perfect, and I believe we all find ourselves to be like that at one time or another.

This Christmas, my thoughts will be on the ones who shared their problems with me this year. A lot of them carry with them problems and burdens beyond what mere advice (however good) can solve. What they need is a seed of love in their life that will grow, take root and keep them grounded and steady through the storms of life. And that seed, only God can plant.

God bless you dear friend.

In Heaven

“I think you would like my daughter. Want to see how she looks like?”

“Oh? You think so? Sure..let me see.”

She takes her phone out and show me a picture of a pretty young girl in her twenties.


“Pretty… takes after her mom I suppose? Where is she now?”

“In heaven……………died in a fire.”

“Oh… I’m so sorry………long time ago?”

“It’s OK. Just last year actually…”

I too shocked to say anything for a few seconds. My heart sank. From behind that smile came a deep sadness when she talked about her daughter.

“We were very close. People used to say we were more like sisters. We’d talk to each other about everything….even about sex.”

“How did it happen?”

“They say it was the electrical socket that caught fire. She got trapped inside… I lost everything in that fire. By the end of the day, I only had the cloths on my back.”

I dared not ask anymore. The thought of this persons daughter dying so tragically in a fired was a bit overwhelming. To listen to her talk about it so candidly barely a year later was also another thing. I still find myself not very good at dealing with death.

I know no parent would even want to see their children go before them. They want to die knowing their children live on. In one of those rare show of emotions, my father once shared with me that he had a dream; and in it I died in front of him. It shook him so badly that he woke up from his sleep palpitating and sweating. I looked at him and I could see that it was a thought that genuinely disturbed him.

I think I understood perfectly. When I was 6, I dreamt that I was digging a grave for my father and mother during twilight. The sky was orange, I was sobbing and I was using a shovel to move the dirt. It disturbed me so much I woke up crying and ran next door to my parents room, banging the door telling them not to die.

People have asked me why I believe in God. And this is one of those reasons why - death. I don’t know how to live life and not despair if all there was to it was to be born, live, suffer, then die, the end. I cannot believe that life on earth is pointless… because every fibre of my being, every strand of my existence tells me that we are here for a reason. There is a meaning to all of this. And that meaning is found in the divine.


That night as I drove home, I thought about what more I could have said to comfort her. Perhaps I could have said that she's in a better plance now, with God.. But it’s hard to talk to someone about heaven when the word ‘God’ and ‘faith’ isn’t in their dictionary. Then I remember what she said in the beginning... She said her daughter was "In heaven..."

Funny how people can live their life completely ignoring God, yet talk about heaven when faced with death.

Choicelessness

I came across a quote the other day.

“We do not choose to be born.
We do not choose our parents.
We do not choose our historical epoch, the country of our birth, or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing.
We do not, most of us, choose to die; nor do we choose the time and conditions of our death.
But within this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we live. “

- Joseph Epstein

Beautiful isn’t it? Capturing in just a few well written lines the essence of living life on this earth.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately… about how many of us choose to live our lives. Many of us are all driven by the same wants and needs; enough money, happy family, good friends, rewarding career, fulfilling relationships. Not always in that order.. but more or less the same things. But somehow, the choices we make in trying to reach those goals differ so greatly.

One friend decided to study her PhD overseas to escape the country, and another just can’t wait to be home from abroad. One decided she needed two jobs to make ends meet, and another stopped working altogether. One close friend quit or turned down every single job she ever had if it came in the way of her commitment to church, and one guy once asked me why he should bother about God when God seems to not give a damn about him. One person I knew married a man everyone felt she was too good for, and another friend of mine refused to date a guy after finding discovering his less than average dick size (WTF right?). One friend has changed so many boyfriends that I stopped counting, and another is going into her thirties and has never even dated anyone.

I’m getting to that age where I’ve known the people closest to me for at least 5 years. And the more I get to know them, the more I see that we’re all struggling, in one way or another. There is no one I know who has had their life figured out. We’re all told that we’re supposed to have some sort of ‘life plan’ or career path to follow. But from what I see, we’re all basically just taking it one step at a time as life unfolds itself.

I look at my own life from here on and ask myself “Where is all this leading me anyway? Are my plans going to come true? How will it all unfold? Where will I end up? And I find that just like the rest of my peers…. I don’t know the answer.

Many times, the plans we make for ourselves don’t translate into reality. And when things don’t go according to plan, we call it a setback. But over time, that setback somehow turns into a detour. Then more time passes, and that detour becomes a ‘temporary break’, and by the end of it all it becomes some sort of ‘blessing in disguise’. So how are we supposed to chart our life out, when we already know it will take a course of its own?

I try peering into the foreseeable future, and a many things stir in my heart.

Thoughts of my only brother as well as my father leaving the country – I would have no more family left here. Thoughts of my friends, many of whom look likely to relocate overseas or far away – I’d be losing my friends. A sadness fills me…… of losing the people you love.

Thoughts of family, young children yet to be born, and old folks standing by to fall ill – I’d have more burdens to bare, more ends to meet, new roles to fulfil. Will I be able to do it? A deep fear fills me… of not being able to provide.

Some people say you should not concern yourself with things beyond your reach, but instead to focus on things that are within your control. Do what you can with what you have and choose the things that are on the table. That even in the choicelessness of life.. you will still get to choose… and in some sense, we are in control of our lives.

But is it really control, when all we’re really doing is selecting from a range of options that life has already pre-determined for us?

Good night world. I choose to sleep now... eventhough I didn't choose for it to be night. 

Cheers

P/S: On hindsight, I should have just stopped typing after the beautiful quote. Everything else after that just sounds like pure crap written in a real fancy way. But I went through all the trouble typing it.. so what the heck, I'll post it anyway.

Good Luck Bad Luck?

Something personal I wanted to share. 

On our wedding, we were asked to choose passages from the bible we would like read out during the service. This went through a lot of verses.. but finally selected this one.. because we identified most with it. Personally, I felt very strongly about this verse.. because the message beneath it was something very close to my own heart. Here it is:

******************

Matthew 5 :1-12

Now when he saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to him, and he began to teach them saying: 

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
 Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
 Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
 Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.
 Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.
 Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
 Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God.
 Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

"Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.12 Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you"

**************************

I felt like if I was a dying old man and I had but one thing to tell my children about how to live life on this earth, this would be it. That the things that are truly valuable in this life, isn't the things the world tells you is. That what is unseen is often more poweful and more significant that what's on the surface.


Interestingly, the priest solemnizing our wedding noted the verse selection and said that not many couples would choose such a verse on their wedding. Everyone else had a tendency to choose verse with themes of love. He said he reminded me of an old chinese story. Here it is:


*********************
There is a Chinese story of a farmer who used an old horse to till his fields. One day, the horse escaped into the hills and when the farmer's neighbors sympathized with the old man over his bad luck, 

The farmer replied, "Bad luck? Good luck? Who knows?" 

A week later, the horse returned with a herd of horses from the hills and this time the neighbors congratulated the farmer on his good luck. 

His reply was, "Good luck? Bad luck? Who knows?"


Then, when the farmer's son was attempting to tame one of the wild horses, he fell off its back and broke his leg. Everyone thought this very bad luck. 

Not the farmer, whose only reaction was, "Bad luck? Good luck? Who knows?"


Some weeks later, the army marched into the village and conscripted every able-bodied youth they found there. When they saw the farmer's son with his broken leg, they let him off. 

Now was that good luck or bad luck? Who knows?

***************************

The moral of the story is that everything that seems on the surface to be an evil may be a good in disguise. And everything that seems good on the surface may really be an evil. So we are wise when we leave it to God to decide what is good fortune and what misfortune, and thank him that all things turn out for good with those who love him.

And as the Priest was repeating the story, I was tugging at my fiancee wife trying to tell her how excited I was in hearing it... because many years earlier I had heard the same story and shared it with her because I felt it really said something about life.

Of course she just shooed me away, told me to stop grinning and pay attention to ther sermon. :-P

Was it pure coincidence that the Priest chose to mention that story? A story that I related so strongly to also?

I think not.

Cheers my friend. :-)

Decisions

If you don’t already know, I’m a big fan of Calvin And Hobbes comics. This particular strip stuck with me. Not because it’s funny, but because of how much I relate to it.

I don’t know about other people, but being an adult isn’t what I expected it to be. Like Calvin’s dad in the comic, I too just imagined that once I grew up I’d just automatically know how to behave like a proper adult. But now that I have finally become an adult, I realize… it doesn’t work that way. Transitions in life don’t happen so smoothly. A lot of things are ad-libbed and learnt along the way.

One of the biggest changes is in decision making. When you’re a kid, you have all the decisions made for you. Your job was either to comply or kick a fuss. But one way or another, you had no say in the matter. When we finally get into our teens, one of the earliest things we try to do is wrestle control of our lives away from our parents into our own hands. Be it smoothly or through a lot of struggles, our parents do eventually let go for us to run our own life. Suddenly, they don’t tell us what to do anymore. Suddenly, they go along with whatever we want. Suddenly, we have to make our own decisions. For a while there, it’s nothing short of liberating. You run your own life, you are in charge, you do whatever you like. And then you realize it’s not so easy.

There are so many decisions to make in life… many of them literally life changing. Where to work, where to live, where to settle down, what job to do, what career to choose, how to spend your money, who to date, when to get married, how much to save, what to believe, where to go, how you travel, what to buy... Everything calls for a decision to be made, and you feel the pressure of making the right decision for yourself… because as much as the decision is yours, so are the consequences.

Over the last few months, I’ve had so many conversations with so many of my closest friends, over what they want to do in life, their career path, their love lives, their beliefs… and the thing I see is that we’re all making life decisions as an complete independent adult for the first time in our lives… and surprisingly, we even now as full grown adults with none of that hormonal imbalance as an excuse, we don’t always know what to do.

I felt like I needed some advice the other day, and I spoke to my father hoping for some sort of fatherly guidance on what to do. I felt like perhaps he could give me a nugget of wisdom or insight, having lived twice as long as I have and all…. But surprisingly, what he said to me was “Follow your gut instinct. Do what you feel is right.”…….. and I fell silent.

I wondered if he was just side stepping the question or was he truly trying to tell me something about making decisions in life. I was turning to him to give me a yes or no, right or wrong. But in the end, he still threw the ball back at me asking me to use my own wit and judgement. I guess it was his way of reminding me that I was an adult now.

I guess it’s scary in this way; when you’re a kid and you don’t know the right answer to something, you know at the back of your mind that SOMEONE has it. Either the teacher, or your parents, or next door neighbour or that smart kid from class. There is someone you can turn to who can give you the right answer. But when you’re an adult, you learn that there is no such thing as the right answer to everything. There is only decisions and consequences. And it’s up to you to make the best decisions to get the most desired consequences. Your friends and family are still there to support you,


but even they don’t have all the answers anymore.

Season Greetings

It's that time of the year again.
I've always loved Christmas time. As a Christian, Christmas is one of the most significant celebrations in all of human history, matched perhaps only by Easter. It is the day we celebrate the birth of Jesus
Christ, the man we outrageously claim to be the Son of God; who came to earth to die for our sins so that we can be reconciled to God again.

Anyway, this years Christmas will be a particularly meaningful one for me. I'm getting baptized on Christmas day.

For those of you who don't know what that means, it's basically when a christian is dunked into water in the presence of the entire church. When he does this, magical properties in the blessed water will
transform you into a Mother Theresa like saint and you're officially allowed to rebuke people and exorcise demons. It also means that you're allowed to take a nibble at the last supper a.k.a 'super bread' that all Christians know make you float like a butterfly and sting like a bee.

But jokes aside..

Baptism IS a big deal, but not in the way I talk about above. There's nothing magical about the water nor the ceremony... And there's nothing magical about the communion bread that's taken either. Baptism is merely an outward sign of what Christians believe should have already be present within - and that's the presence of God and its transforming effects on our lives. Baptism doesn't 'make' you a Christian. Baptism isn't your passport to heaven and baptism doesn't make you any better than other unbaptised people.

Rather, baptism is YOUR outward act of profession to others that you are now a follower of Christ and submit to his will. It's about you 'dying to self' aka stop living like you're the king of your own life and being 'born into christ' aka acknowledging that you actually have a Big Boss upstairs you need to love and obey with all your heart.

There was a testimony I had to give to the pastor before we could proceed... And I gave a rather emotional one...which I will not repeat now. Suffice to say that for me personally in my own walk with God, this baptism will mean a lot to me....

God has a funny way of making things work out, not in the way we want, but the way he knows is best. And that has been true for me for the past ten years of my life. If you aren't a Christian, or you don't believe in God, or you think you're doing pretty well and don't really need God to start butting
into your affairs, I urge you to start exploring. Because whether you realize it or not, the love of God is already inside and all around each and every one of us.... You just need to know how to see it.

God bless you my friend...