Tag Archives: journey

The Place I Long To Be

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It has been like 10 years since I last heard Kingston Town by UB40. I heard it again yesterday night after little J called it in early. The song did not bring back a lot of memories. But somehow it captivated me again. Like a little boy that is certain he has met the love of his life.

I was in anticipation of a difficult Monday morning. Skeletons in the closet from predecessors came back to haunt us at work. And Monday morning was another round of showdown after lots of threatening and taunting. And I now need to face them. Perhaps that is why the reggae was calming. I was on the maroon rug, my back against the sofa, feeling blank, with the song on repeat.

I decided it was about time I give myself time to think and contemplate again. I moved myself back into the bedroom. Work has taken me so far away from myself that it is about time I reeled myself back in again. I need this. I need this with S asleep recovering from her bout of flu, J asleep perpendicular between S and I, the humidifier humming away in the background, the electric blanket keeping winter away. I need this moment of silence after many months of drifting.

I could hear myself thinking after I put on the earphones with Kingston Town on repeat like before, but thinking no more about work. I went off in many different directions like two horses pulling at different directions without the charioteer. I reeled myself back in again many times but the horses persevered. I gave up.

I adjusted little J and I tried to sleep with Kingston Town still playing through the earphones. The night eventually took over and I dozed off. But I remember two further thoughts before I fell asleep.

I thought about getting a retreat. It need not be up a mountain or deep in the jungle. I will just try to spend nights alone in a separate room trying to pick fragments of myself up during the long break of Chinese New Year. I should.

I thought about myself, walking into a dark temple. In the middle of the temple was a candle, or an oil lamp. I walked towards it and lighted it. The temple was still dim from that small source of light, but it will be a start. Perhaps the small little flame will stoke a fire bright enough to light the journey ahead.

I fell asleep with UB40 still singing the catchy reggae tune through the earphones. Funny how certain songs at the right place and right time can throw us off on a tangent into a reverie, looking for a place I long to be, where the moonlight lingers on.

 

When Education Breaks Down

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Yes, J, it is hard to expect others to be as kind and gentle and understanding. It’s the third day at knidergarten for you, and the “daily report” from the school may seem discouraging, but that is the state of the education that kids, like you, go through nowadays.

Despite the effort by your mom in trying to find the best educational instituion for you, it is hard for us, as parents, to swallow when the feedback at the third day of school seems to think that “you cry a lot and hopes that you will be more easy-going in the future”.

I know that you don’t really cry that often at home. Even if you do, you are just a kid, and it is natural to cry as a sign of displeasure for you lack the ability still to make others fully understand you. I believe it’s because your teachers can’t understand you or can’t cope with your vivacity.

For about 20 years of your life, you will be in the process of formal education. You will be spending probably half your waking time during that 20 years in an education institution. You will be spending a quarter more on education each day of that doing homeworks and assignments.

If teachers in kindergarten can’t even understand your nature and behaviour, and as a 3-year old child, and see things from your level, don’t be disappointed. To most, it is just a profession where passion is a bonus, not a prerequisition.

School will be more crowded and will contain less individual attention once you head into primary education. It will be worse in secondary. By the time it is tertiary education, your lecturer will assume maturity and independence and responsibility, which you may or may not already have. This is the structured and rigid world we live in, and we are bound by it.

J, I guess the only way is not to hope for too much but only to take in the formal knowledge that will be transferred at formal educational institutions. Expect no more than that and you won’t be disappointed. When you need love and passion and understanding, you will always find it at home. From mom. From me. Forever.

Losing It to Treasure It

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What if we all don’t grow up but stay as kids? Will the world be a better place? Forget for a moment that we need to become adults before we procreate. And that babies come from storks that flew to the chimney and delivered them (or else you’d argue and say that we will die off after one generation). Where will we be now?

I was with J for an hour or two at the indoor playground at the neighbourhood mall. It is her typical Saturday activity. It is something she will wait patiently from Monday to Friday, before declaring to me after breakfast that we should go kai-kai and go playground. She has accepted the fact that we first have to go for lunch (so that she has “strength” to play) and that she has to leave when we say so (because she would have played hard and tired), only to detour to the arcade next door (so that she can have her finale). It is a day she counts down to every weekday night before going to bed. If she has her way, the world will be a big, big playground and everyday is Saturday (or Sunday, but preferably Saturday, because Sunday comes with the disappointment of the approaching Monday at night before bed).

Her day at the playground started without me, but with S. When I caught up to give S a break and took over, J was playing building blocks with some kids. She couldn’t really fit in. She was the youngest and kids there were about double her age. They could build tall towers, but J was building only forts. A kid, wanting to build a taller tower, asked J for a piece, and J, without hesitation, handed one of her pieces away. The kid thank her, to which J replied a simple, “You are welcome.” As the tower got taller, one of the kids, unhappy with the height he has achieved, took a piece from another and a minor struggle ensued. No fighting. No screaming. No crying. With a few that-is-mine argument between the kids, it was suddenly all over as if it never even started. And J took it all in without moving an inch. When the tussle ended, J turned around and said to me, “Naughty boy-boy, hor? Take things from small boy-boy.” If J has her way, she’d police the world so that everyone plays fairly.

J moved on to the slide, the trampoline, avoided the balloon house (she seems to have lost interest in the boring activity of chasing balloons around), pool of plastic balls (so that she can dive in) and more slide. I stood at a distance to let her venture and explore the environment on her own (I got this from a programme on cheetahs on Discovery, and maybe from some advice from other parents). I soon realized she was shadowing another kid, staying close but at a distance, testing his reaction, imitating him to break the opposition defence, and making attempts to attract attention through sudden shrieks and loud laughter (which started making J look as if she is like a cheetah). To us adults, it will be stalking. Unlike adults with negative motives, J just wanted someone to interact and to play. If she has her way, all kids will be friends.

J eventually got her prey, and they both ran around, jumped into plastic balls, annoyed each other by throwing balls at each other (except that the boy’s father and I both prevented them from doing it) and simply had fun. Falling short of holding each other hands and walked around the playground, they were a pair that did everything together. It’s hard to tell what the boy thought, but to J, he is a “friend”. It made her day at the playground complete. She even wanted to be in the frame when the boy’s father tried to take a photo of his son. She posed next to him. How embarassing! But kids don’t live with protocols and social ettiquettes. It is only when we tell them “not to do this because it is not nice” and society tells them “not to do this because it is not right” that kids fall into a mould. If J has her way, there will be nothing embarassing but just pure natural. 100% natural.

The day had to end and the only thing left was to drag J from the playground with the enticement of the arcade. She agreed even though she showed some reluctance. I was already at the exit when I found she stood there looking around. She turned to me and asked, “Where is boy-boy?” Before I could say anything, she answered, “Boy-boy has to go home. It is dark already. It is night time, lor.” She caught up, left the play area, sat down and wore her shoes. She wanted to head straight to the arcade even though we insisted a detour to the toilet. She left all disappointment of leaving the playground, not having a chance to say goodbye to “boy-boy”, and moved on to the next thing that will bring her fun like nothing ever happened. She remembered all that happened at the playground, of course, but the future must have been more exciting. If she remained this way and has her way, life will have no disappointments, because there will always be something new and exciting to look forward to.

What if we all don’t grow up but stay as kids?

There will be nothing but pure fun and joy, and there will be no grudges except short-term disagreements, where everyone will be friends with everyone because they react naturally without inhibition of protocols, and life will have no disappointments because the next moment will be just as exciting, if not more.

But J will have to lose all these in order to treasure it. And that’s the sad, sad truth we have all grown up to understand.

A Fool Waiting For Fools

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The rain won’t be coming again anymore. Not today. Maybe tomorrow, but probably not today. It has been a wet couple of days. It even rained three times in a single day a couple of days back – morning, afternoon, evening.

He stood at the balcony observing that the rain had cleared the sky. Lights on buildings seem to be clearer. The rain may have cleared his thoughts too. Or perhaps it is because he could not hold his thoughts. There were too many to concentrate on a particular one.

Problems seem to be trivial on a night like this. They seem to be like specks of light in the dark sky. They are like stars – bright and trying to catch his attention – but it won’t even fill a small corner of the universe when grouped together.

He realized his thoughts are like the stars, and he just stared into the horizon, beyond the outline of the concrete towers littering the skyline. He breathed a heavy sigh and wondered when will it all be over. And then he remembered the story of a wise, wise man told to him long, long ago.

There was this wise, wise man and he sat, and sat, and sat under a tree thinking, and thinking, and thinking. It doesn’t matter whether it rained or snowed, or day turned to night, he sat, and sat, and sat under that tree thinking, and thinking, and thinking. After many, many years, he suddenly found the answer to his problems. It is at that very moment that he felt as if the doors of heaven opened to him, like liberation before him, like chains unbound, like a big, big sweet chocolate cake waiting only to be consumed. But he is a kind, kind man. He wanted to wait for every single being to come to the same realization as him before he enters the door, experiences the liberation, drop the chains and taste the big, big sweet chocolate cake. He is a compassionate man.

He smiled a bit, still standing at the balcony, because he believes that man is a plain, old stupid fool to wait, because we are plain and simply incorrigible. He recalled that day when he burst out laughing on a particular evening at Costa Coffee near his workplace. He had just left work, bought a coffee and sat down outdoors. There were all kinds of people – kids skating with their parents around, evening drawing old aunts and uncles out, songs making people dance in a crowd, dogs taking their owners out on a stroll.

With minimal outdoor seating, people just walked up and took the Costa Coffee outdoor chairs away from his table without asking and sat down without buying a coffee even if it is meant only for paying customers. He saw dogs peeing everywhere and their owners thinking that is just fine because it is not their home. Parents were telling their kids to skate better because they had bought the gears and paid for the classes. He saw a man parked his motorcycle right next to the main entrance of the mall even though parking was not allowed. For a split second, he realized the people around him were like stars – loud and trying to catch the attention of others around – but they won’t even fill a star in the vast expanse of the universe when grouped together.

He laughed. He realized he is one of the people there – one of the fools. Suddenly, he laughed harder. He realized there is a bigger fool – and he is waiting for him.

Unpredictability and Elastic Time

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Shanghai, China.

The weather has been unpredictable lately. It was only last week when Super Typhoon Muifa was suppose to hit Shanghai directly. I bought a Medio Coffee Cooler from Costa Coffee when the Shop Manager told me that they had kept all the outdoor tables and chairs in anticipation of the typhoon, predicted to reach Shanghai in a couple of hours. Heaven must have favoured Shanghai (and most of China) as the super typhoon was downgraded to typhoon, before eventually ending up a tropical storm as it bypassed Shanghai altogether and headed northwards into Shangdong Province.

Shanghai, China. Again.

Situations at home have been unpredictable lately. It was only more than a month ago that I was bitten by an unknown, but highly venomous, bug. I was downstairs with my Dad when I realized the sting. It was a sharp sting. But born and bred in the tropics, I assumed that no insect was as dangerous as those found there. At the very least, we have the commonly found Aedes mosquito and such, which can really kill. The itch and rash started spreading and I tried to relieve the itch with a warm shower only to find that it had gotten worse. Within half an hour of the bite, I collapsed at the porch waiting for the taxi to take me to the hospital. But fate must have favoured me as I found the rash slowly subsiding as the corticosteroid dripped slowly into my blood stream.

Shanghai, China. Where else?

J’s health has been unpredictable lately. It was slightly more than a month ago when her cousin was here and they were happily being kids. And both being kids, they played together, ate together and did almost everything together. And both got sick together too. And it all started with J playing doctor with her cousin. She insisted in using her toy stethoscope, bug him, play diagnosis and medicate him. She was eventually so sick that it became one of those rare occasions we took her to a hospital. She resisted so strongly that it was more painful for us to see her struggling than it was for her to be sick. But nature must favour her genes as she recovered soon enough and returned to her usual self although it took a while for her ulcer to recover and one more trip to the hospital after that..

Didn’t wiser people say that time waits for no one?

I have only 168 hours a week, with more than a quarter of it (45 hours) official working hours. Left with only 123, the time needed to prepare myself in the morning (say, about an hour) and extra hours put in at the office (on average about 2 hours per day) leave me with only 108 hours. I’ll be left with 52 hours if I put in decent 8 hours of sleep per day. Since I need to take dinner and shower at night (1.5 hours, if I’m efficient), I will still have 41.5 hours. Giving S and J 1.5 hours each per day, I’ll have 20.5 hours remaining. If I take 1.5 hours a day for some personal time, there are 10 hours remaining in a week, and that’s less than 1.5 hours a day. But I guess time must favour us for I seem to still have time to deal with the unpredictability in life.

Time, it seems (physicist will assure you), is elastic. And I guess I can safely say I have experienced that elasticity myself. All I need to do now is stretch it longer and make time wait for me whilst I deal with the unpredictability in life.