Category: Life

  • Sometimes

    sometimes, they’re just beaten into submission

    and we assume their lifelessness is actually death

    when in fact, they’re just cowering out of fear

    hoping that no one will notice them

    but then they wither away because they were not noticed.

     

    sometimes, we find that the smallest things have the greatest impact

    but fail to notice that the small things were actually the big things

    but we were too distracted to notice.

     

    sometimes, life happens while we’re making other plans

    sometimes, death happens while we’re making other plans

    sometimes…we over-think life while forgetting to live

  • This is all starting to feel too adult for me. I prefer playing with kids. They usually have no hidden agendas, political motives, or underhanded suspicions. If I imitate them, they’re happy, and if they imitate me, I’m happy, and we give and take without keeping score. All adults know is to be territorial as if puberty makes it compulsory for them to mark their territory. These adult games are ridiculous. Adults need to learn from children again, before the current template of adult role models all but eliminates any traces of the innocence of childhood.

    CJ

  • To my daughters…

    cynicallyjaded:

    I pray that you never will understand some of what I’m going through, some of what I feel, or some of what I think…because to understand you would need to experience what I’ve experienced. And I wouldn’t want you to feel the pain and the anguish that I’ve felt that made me feel, see and think the way I do. Although it’s the same pain and anguish that has given me this appreciation for life, for a smile on a stranger’s face, or for the chirping of the birds. My wish is for you to learn from my experiences and the experiences of others because there’s so much more to life than the opportunity to make your own mistakes.

    The only way you can cheat time is to learn from the accumulated wisdom of generations past. But if you insist on learning it all yourself, know that you’ll never learn more than anyone who has lived only a single lifetime without any wisdom to draw on. Know that your pain and your anguish will be unnecessary, and know that your life would only ever be half-lived, if even that. So instead I pray that you are able to cheat time, acquire a wisdom beyond what you may inherit, and give your children more than what you had to cheat time with. And if you do this, know that you have achieved more than any human being can be expected to achieve in a single lifetime. This is the only path to immortality that I know. 

  • Awkwardly regrettable

    Awkwardness is having to tell your friends that have turned into acquaintances about an important milestone in your life while suppressing the demons that beckon the memories of the mocking ridicule that was disguised as friendly jabs at the news of your last divorce. The laziness and callousness of people is most evident when they see fit to make fun of a traumatic event without having embraced the reality of it first.

    I have always had a tendency to take things in my stride, regardless of the pain or humiliation that accompanied the experience. More than anything else, this provided a graceful exit for those around me that were handicapped in their skills at dealing with such grave circumstances. I was raised in a family where physical shows of affection were avoided at all costs. The odd embrace would be a formality of greeting at specific occasions only. Even on occasions of death, there was always an awkwardness in the embraces received from siblings, if received at all.

    I chose to finally share the news of my recent marriage with some ‘friends’ of mine. It wasn’t a very long list, and it didn’t really qualify as friends for the most part. More like acquaintances that I’ve allowed into my personal space. Having a friend is a foreign concept for me. It requires a level of trust and acceptance, not to mention commitment, that I’ve grown weary of. Friends have been a convenient presence in my life until the point where my life’s experiences became too burdensome for them. By the way, that convenience was on their part, not my own.

    Betrayal has become a clichéd part of my life. I don’t expect it, but I don’t dismiss it either. More often than not, the reason for betrayal has been the weakness on the part of the betrayer rather than any inherent sense of dishonesty in the person that I may have once trusted. That weakness manifests itself when it demands commitment, selflessness, or most often, when it demands that we face our past demons in the experiences of those close to us. That’s when most recede because the experience is suddenly too close to home.

    To the one that’s betrayed, the reason or justification is irrelevant. It still remains what it is. And trying to define it only nurtures the regret and the awkwardness. So instead, I’ll leave it to fester so that I have a companion to look forward to when I’m peering at the end of the road on the horizon waiting…just waiting.

  • Advice and Death

    Advice given by one in a moment of adversity is often sincerest. Death visits us at times that are not always of our choosing. We’re often left bewildered because we live with the endless optimism that today will not be our day. And because of this reality, when death does strike close to us, it shakes our core because even at that point of denial, we’re mourning the loss of someone close to us, when in fact we should be mourning our own lives that are fraught with missed opportunities. 

    Apart from just taking the time to appreciate others while they’re here, do we appreciate what we need to do to part in good standing, or are we always leaving for tomorrow that part of our lives or estates that we should have resolved yesterday? At times when we’re reminded of death, we should look at the state of those left behind and consider whether they were left burdened, or blessed. We live lives of probability, otherwise we’d be too worry-stricken to be functional. We survive death on a daily basis, several times a day. When I’m not distracted, which is on rare occasions, I consider the probability of being within inches of death every single time I pass an oncoming car on the road. But I’ve survived passing them so often, that it hardly ever strikes me as a moment that could end my life before I completed my next breath.

    By design, we take life for granted even when faced with death often.

  • Timely Rambles

    I’m tired of taking photos of places that I visit in the hope of sharing it with others in abstract. It never completes the moment. Worse still, I never feel fulfilled in having shared it, because after the click of the shutter, I’m still standing there alone with the camera.

    Business trips used to have a specific appeal for me in the past. It provided some sort of affirmation about my significance. Someone was willing to pay for my indulgence because they valued what I had to offer. That’s how it felt before. Now it feels like a chore. An obligation that needs to be fulfilled, and despite the apparent prestige of the function I fulfill at times, it doesn’t provide the comfort that I need nor does it fill the void of purpose in my life.

    It scares me when I see young people dedicating their lives to academic and professional pursuits with little or no focus on wholesome endeavours. They’re so excited about carving their niche into a world that will never fully accept them, and will only ever affirm them as long as they have something to contribute. Once they’ve passed their shelf life, they’ll be put out to pasture like everyone else in this consumption-based world, and if they haven’t secured a truly meaningful relationship by that time, it will erase the successes they enjoyed and the true meaning of ‘ephemeral’ will finally be revealed to them.

    Recently I’ve been obsessed with the realisation of how short life is when I reflect on the lives I’ve already lived. The future that awaits seems too short to achieve what I had hoped to achieve in life while the purpose of life is changing hues almost constantly these days. The swaying pendulum is catching up with me, and I sometimes feel as if it will not carry me in its swing but instead it will cut me off at the knees providing final confirmation that time was never on my side to begin with.

    Time sniggers at me. It was never a welcoming friend, but rather a saluting foe. It always pretended to be giving me more all the time, but instead it has been taking away from my treasures. But because it seemed like an inexhaustible supply, I assumed its source was other than my own vault. I was deluded. It was  feeding me from my own resources, and upon each indulgence it was my own store that was being depleted even though I assumed that that was the intended use of this scarce commodity.

    I now think of years as hours, if not minutes. What used to seem like a long 365 days is now simply a changing of the seasons without respite. The ground hogs are laughing while we’re distracting ourselves with our self-importance. Life is slipping away while I look on helplessly.

  • Reflections

    When I look at what may lie ahead for me in life, it feels like my struggles have just begun. The uncertainty and hopefulness, if left unchecked leaves me feeling ambivalent about important goals and objectives and often results in me slipping into a morbid state wondering if the future holds more promise than my past, which gets me reflecting on my past. In doing so, I realise how my life has been nothing but a blink of an eye. It feels like I was in high school just yesterday, yet when I consider the events of the many exhausting lifetimes I’ve lived since then, I realise exactly how much time has passed.

    Just yesterday I was looking up to my uncles and other elders in the family and contemplating if I would be able to achieve as much as many of them have achieved in life. Quite literally in a blur I suddenly realised that I am now the uncle and my nephews and nieces will probably start viewing me in a similar light. The secrets of the future have always been such a distraction despite being proven time and again that I have no control over the outcomes of so many incidents in my life that I exhaustingly applied myself to.

    There were times when I believed that no matter what came to pass, I would persevere and I would be successful in overcoming the obstacles I was faced with, only to realise that despite my greatest efforts, my efforts would only ever cause my own will to yield to the objective at hand, but never the will of others. That has probably been the seed of my cynicism in life, because each time I reflect on my foolhardiness to lift myself up and try again, I’ve realised that I’m not cynical about life, just people because people are most unpredictable when they’re fearful. Even the most seemingly dishonest person only acts that way out of fear for the repercussions of honesty.

    Living sincerely takes away our excuses to bow out gracefully at times, because we’re forced to deal with the raw emotions of others that have been allowed to touch us where it hurts most. Each time we’re hurt we recoil and establish a barrier to protect ourselves from such hurt again in future because we’re survivalists by nature. If we live consciously, we remind ourselves of the context of that experience, optimistically believe that not everyone is the same, and persevere sincerely into yet another skirmish with fate.

    But most times we lose consciousness to reality and instead dwell in our space of fear, resulting in those barriers being cemented rather than contextualised, which causes serenity to evade us, and beauty to be stifled. It’s this idealism that has given me much to cry about, but even more to reflect on with smiles when I sit in that swing on my porch marvelling at the obliviousness of the next generation as they go about their lives believing that they’re invincible until their first great disruption. The circle of life. Everyone quotes clever thoughts and memes about it, but so few grasp it.

  • Choose Dignity

    After exhausting all avenues of treatment, my uncle and his family are now faced with the decision to either leave my aunt in hospital in the hope that something about her condition may change, or take her home and make her as comfortable as possible since any treatment she’s currently receiving can easily be administered at home. Inevitably, the first concern that was raised was how would they (the family) feel should something go horribly wrong if they took her home.

    I think that’s the wrong way to look at this. Similar to death, and I don’t mean to sound insensitive or morbid here, but the real issue is that this is not about the family, it is about the patient. This is not about appeasing the conscience of the family or creating sufficient disclaimers regarding their culpability in the face of a bad outcome, but instead it’s about giving an ailing person the dignity of choice to decide what circumstance she would prefer, especially since she is still lucid and competent enough to make such a decision.

    Consider the alternative. Should things take a turn for the worst, would anyone consider the fact that her last wish to spend time in her own home and depart peacefully was actually ignored because of the selfish (albeit sincere) considerations of those around her? Again, like death, this is about the person that is affected, and not about the effect it has on those around them. It may seem like a cold and cruel position to take, but in our grieving and concern, we often make things about ourselves when in fact it is not.

    We’re still hopeful for a positive outcome, but I wish people would start looking at this from her perspective rather than how it affects everyone else around her.