The best "fit"

There are times that when we sit idly and think about everything and nothing in particular, we wonder what it is that we need for our lives to be more complete. The phrase "more complete" itself sounds like an oxymoron but if a complete life is theoretically out of reach, it does comfort us a bit that at least we are approaching the asymptote.

Recently I borrowed a book written by Vicki robin: Your Money or Your Life. It is not just another one of those self-help books or finance-management 101s. It is a mindset changing recipe. While I barely started to read its full message, merely reading its book reviews makes me awed at how much the book has changed so many people's lives. Successful people.

When I was young, I used to think money is kind of an integral element of being successful. I need to study algebra and language hard to get into a good middle school, get into the top few percentiles in my level in middle school to get into the finest high school--in flying colours, and getting that opportunity to be amongst the most privileged few to be through-trained to the most prestigious local universities. This was the route that I had in mind when I motivate myself to go for that extra mile, to feel indefatigable all the time, to ride my bike in starlit morning to school at six thirty and to finish my lunch at school canteen in five minutes, followed by a nap of fifteen minutes before the battle is on again.

Such a highly regimented life is like clockwork. I felt I was living it for a purpose. A great purpose. Somehow it put some dubious sense of assurance in my young heart that by working hard, scoring well, I can be highly employable in future and get high-paying jobs and live an enviable lifestyle in the eyes of many--including most of my provincial relatives.

Such assurance ran long and deep that I felt I was ALWAYS on the right track. Anyway thousands and hundreds of other kids are working just as hard to fare well. And I seem to fare better and get all that attention from my teachers and fellows--so no way that I am going astray.

Parents and adults asked about ambitions and dreams, all the time. Some adults really care; others ask to satisfy their warped indulgence in voyeurism. I offered many answers, genuine ones, at various different stages of my life: a scientist and Nobel laureate(that one I gave to my grandparents) when I was ten or eleven; linguistic interpreter(when I was in the finest foreign language middle school in my area); diplomat(when I was eighteen or nineteen); anthropologist and neuroscientist.

Now it is a judge. I really want to go to court, but I do not want to be a litigator. A judge now is my ambition. It seems amazing how my dreams and ambitions can seem a far cry from what they used to be and the way they develop is just: non-linear. There was a marked shift in my interest from science to humanities in my JC days. I never had any trouble with science and maths before: I was the Queen of Maths and Physics back in my hometown. I made the record in my middle school years by scoring full marks for every single paper. But in JC I found out how inadequate when it comes to creativity, the depth of understanding when it comes to scientific truism and the width of knowledge testable in Olympics. I felt inept.

So it is natural that when I felt severely overshadowed in the science arena--especially when it comes to Olympics, I turn to channel my passion and self- esteem to what I could do much better. I could write well, or if not I love to write. I frequented libraries to read, and while I am very forgetful about most of what I have read, if something strikes me that much as to compels me to write about it--I remember it well. Some areas of interest perpetually occupy a special place in my mind: game theory, politics and international relations. These are the kind of topics that I involuntarily draw myself towards to if nothing is compelling me to read anything in general and in particular. Hence comes my inchoate ambition to become a diplomat, or an anthropologist.

That part about neuroscience, it was very hard for me to just let go. Johns Hopkins remains my dream too beautiful that when it almost came true I was speechlessly awed. I felt for the first time that such recognition meant a lot to me. A tremendous surge of self-worth and all that. Lifted in the air--flying without wings.

But then I am in law. Doing well. There seemed to be many variants of specializations stemming from the same broad umbrella three-letter-word called law. I don't feel I am spoilt for choices but I do not feel they are Hobson's choices either. Both of my parents are plowing the legal trade most of their lives. They are not the proverbial rich people, far from that. And I am sure I want my life to be vastly different from theirs. But something in common seems to tie us close in ways that I cannot fully appreciate.

So what kind of life do I want? I was thinking about that when I read Your Money or Your Life. People in hostel like to refer to all of us law students as lawyers, but really, different lawyers can have so different kinds of lives even. A religious one. That is the first thing I've decided this year. It seems that God is trying to guide me along the way, making me reflect upon the people I meet, ways of lives I admire, types of relationships I envy, and trying to figure out the best "fit" for me.

I want a classy type of lifestyle, and I am trying hard to hold myself onto that. But this "classy" type of lifestyle had nothing to do with branded goods, luxury holidays, socializing venues, etc. I love holidays: the thrilling one in snow-capped mountain in Japan as well as those quiet ones in some river-side village; I love good food: those in high standard buffet as well as those local delight sold on roadsides; I would love a magnificent villa, but a cosy small cottage would also do. Everything is adaptable so far as the person I am spending my life with is the best fit.

Then I wonder what type of person I am attracted to. Markedly two types of people , both belonging to a sub-species of Homo sapiens called introverts. There is a magnetic pull from those either highly intellectually gifted or artistically gifted. All the guys I love, or contemplated about seriously loving, have either of the two characteristics. Some guys are nice to me, polite, gentle, having that nice emotional strain and masculine charisma, but most of the time I do not like back unless they strike me as either highly intellectual or admirably artistic.

I am a fan girl. I knew it quite long ago when I was in primary school. But to me being intellectual differs from bring nerdy--it has to be this seemingly effortless style of getting things done, elegant but not swag, quiet confidence but not too much sense of self-entitlement. And somehow my balance tends to tip in favor of those who emanate masculine confidence, so they are very hard to get.

There is one article about becoming the one you fantasize over. You impart that nicely touching element of life that you admire into your own mechanism so that you are like him. This is a powerful way of life-improvement for me. It is such subtle emulation that adds things on my wish list, beautify my new year resolutions, and making me feel that I am living for a purpose. These fragments of small purposes can be so trifling but they are made to mean so much to me.

Simply so I can have a taste of living like you do, though not with you.

To live with a purpose. And to live in the moment. Both are so important ways to live a more complete life. I felt very fortunate to ponder over such words, and I am thankful. For the myriad ways of finding that purpose, of feeling energetically about everything, and of getting that not so dubious assurance that I am, after all, getting somewhere.

When faith is tested

The exams are near but I put myself on this emotional roller-coaster which took me for a wild ride every now and then, giving me no respite.

God has made me see that I should cherish someone that denounces Him. This is rather queer: but in my dreams His message is very clear that I should cherish people around me, whether they are believers or not, and I must have this leap of faith that all will be reconciled and whatever hardship I have been through will not burden me unnecessarily.

But my faith is shaken. I get both impatient an dejected and put on a pair of grey and gloomy glasses when I look at things-- and they look gloomier than before--all things started off so well in one day with every thought organized and every muscle mustered and the atmosphere could turn wrong at the midway point! All kinds of readable tension and pent-up angst is so apparent that I am drowning in it. I feel I am returning to the status quo, I am not making improvement, I am living like an open wound.

For the first time in these two months, I shivered and almost developed shingles. The feeling was terrible-- the rain is heavy and everything felt so wrong when they should be so blissful. I could not muster up courage to alleviate any tension though things could not get wronger. I could not get away from fe sorrow that I was thrown in without being numbed by my pain.

I feel something died inside. That moment, that is not relief, that is not fallen expectation, that is not self-consolation, that is not anything.

Many times I said that there is gonna be one person that makes you feel that even if you look stupid and crap, it is worth a try. Now that part of my faith is shaken too. About all the worth. All the pent-up passion. All the pent-up disillusion. Like many years ago when I ran in the winter for hours to quieten down my feelings, to shout out aloud. I never changed. The feeling never went away.

I am being tested. It is challenging indeed. But I will hold on!

Living sacrifice

The Precept lessons on Romans 12 are amazing. For the first time I feel God's words are clear and powerful--not the first time I feel so, but the first time I feel SO MUCH. A powerful message sent to me last week was to live as a living sacrifice, to offer and present our bodies to Him, and to fulfill His glory.

About this sacrifice a friend of mine was undergoing a struggle about reading the signs of God and not heeding the words of man. God's signs are elusive but once found they are transforming. I felt glad that she found her signs and was able to finding peace and a sense of settledness. What a blessed state! She told me sacrificing does not necessarily start from your whole body, but can be in part, an ongoing sacrifice in a piecemeal manner. Her sharing did not register much on my head until Easter--when I wrote the things I was willing to sacrifice on the paper and pinned it on the cross. It is hard to sacrifice something that I cherish so much, SO much that I do not want to approach it. But it is in Christ that I live so to Christ is what belongs to Him.

Earnestly, I seek the signs and whispers of the God. Sometimes He does speak, He does know me well. He is reassuring in His manners and all anxiety is removed from me. I feel that I am getting closer and closer to His plan for me and in it He planned me a future.

A future that He put in my head when I was most down. The future that might make me the living testimony of God.

See it from afar

There are too many times when I am preoccupied with possessing something: objects in the display window of a fashion boutique, beautiful flowers growing in the garden, pets and people as friends. The desire to possess something gets really strong that sometimes even when I realize such may not be the best way to appreciate their beauty, I continue to be dissatisfied with merely appreciating from afar. There are sudden urges of getting it that compel me to open my wallet, pay for it and get it home, only to discover that when It actually stands on my table, it is less adorable than I thought it was.

And it is not just about the Qatar snowball standing on my desk right now. It's someone precious to me that I could not tolerate the thought of letting go. There are time that I pray hard for a sign or a hint, whether I should press on or let nature take its course. The hint has yet to come: so I will keep waiting and appreciating it from afar, mesmerized.

Tabula rasa

Valentine's Day is not a faraway memory, I can still remember the innate urge to prepare something "special" as the day draws close, to get a gift, not any other gift, but a gift that fits nicely into a series of gifts so that I create a meaning for the gifts that can be remembered, and a gift that whenever it is thought of, it thrills, then after a while, it lingers. When this particular Valentine's Day came, however, I forgot. It occupies a merely numerical existence in my mind that beckons no sweetness; it does not instigate my urge to do something, or in fact anything; it perpetuates a zombified state--a blank created by something taken away.

Or is it a clean slate, tabula rasa?

It always hurt the most when things first went off. It is like the most precariously held expectation starting to tumble down. It may be a small sign, a simple look, an offhand remark, a dismissive tone, but it hurt. When a relationship normalizes, I start to feel it is normal, part and parcel of everyday occurrence that makes a relationship real, that makes a life a life, not drama, a state of being worthy of experiencing, not al-together blissful, but anyway, worthwhile. So such a small sign gets internalized into a mechanism of blind acceptance and self-denial that "a sign is a sign, and a bad sign is a bad sign". Its weight is lifted off the heart. It no longer hurts that much. It ceases being registered in the consciousness of a mind now knowing how to be blissful, and grateful. So the angular shape smoothens, the irregularities normalize, the spikes hammered down. 

So I am fogged in this blissful and grateful state, wrapping myself in blind acceptance and self-denial that everything is good. Badness is temporary. Things change. Things get better.

The truth is: things cannot get worse.

Self-suppression becomes almost an innate attribute but pent-up emotions need to get released elsewhere. Work is a good way to seek solace from. You bury yourself in work, in intensive intellectual working, in a vague comparison that boosts a little bit of self worth; then you try again.

It is like a reboot. Clearing up everything. All the fragments of realisation here and there, all the useful revelations or wasted junks. Gone. No single discretion is involved in that.

Tabula rasa.

I have in me a perpetrual, fear, for this. How to start, from here? From where?

Cowardly, I refuse to face this clean slate that is bereft of all the prejudice or harm I have suffered from. I refuse to embrace it as a new lease of life. I reject the opportunity to be reborn. I want to sleep it over.

So when nights are deep, I cry and bite the pillow. I shiver and I start. I am lost.

And the pattern repeats and repeats and repeats. There is some karma that makes it repeat itself, linearly, inter-generational, era after era, trapping everything inside in a huge engulfment.

The same biting of the pillow, the same shivering, the same startled face with fear. It recurs, just in different physical places, just...feels the same...

When I finally have the courage to say: enough is enough. When I finally feel the true anger. When I finally tell myself to breathe rather than to stand all these. I truly feel alive, burden-free, hopeful, invigorated, tabula rasa.

My fresh start.

Centimetres of growth~

It is a sobering thought that I am 21 and still look like a child. Never a tall girl like some others whom I used to play skipping rope with, I always try to feel tall: standing on a stool; standing on my tipped toes, or, as I am now entitled to, standing on heels. Resolution plays a great role in a person's life to spur him or her on to reach for the unreachable. Unreachable it may be, when I really do stretch (my joints when I train splitting for Latin), I feel pain, and eeriely, a true sense of existence. Resolution is about one thing at a time, planning for the future and molding it. Looking back, I had so many plans at the beginning of this year. Now this year is drawing to an end, I grow barely a few centimetres, though I do feel that maybe I get more than a few centimetres of growth.

There are times that I doubt whether looking back is a wise thing, when moments of self-denial strike. At some crossroads in your life, you were bound to have more choices than you currently possess, more untrod paths to explore, more possibilities to test on and more stories to imagine. For me, choosing law was one of the choices, but it never was a real choice. Devoid of any grievance or sense of grudge like some peers in law school have as they are nudged to pursue half-heartedly a degree with perceived "better prospects", I thought law was a too far-fetched choice: it was too good for me. Even now I still doubt that I would ever get the crux of it or really know the rope of mastering it. "Mastering" is a really big word, as I am, though learning fast and avariciously, still learning the basics--taking the first sampling. It does taste good.

Compared with some other paths that I used to imagine myself taking, law is not the most grueling one maybe. My heart went for things that do not operate like rocket science: I wanted to be a diplomat, to get my hands in international relations and to meet (rather than fantasize) truly amazing people--talking things out, making things happen--all so exciting. I also considered succumbing to the reality of being an engineer, capitalising on my forte in numbers, despite knowing full well that I do not really have any talent with creation, a trait all useful engineers have. When I tried to prime myself with what I was going to dealing with for a good four years of university life (and maybe longer), I went to Kinokunia this summer. Hopping from one bookshelf to another, I suddenly realised no matter how hard I wanted to prime myself to "get interested" in certain books, I could not make myself do it. I tried to decipher how an arch bridge was built in a book on civil engineering but subsequently decided that it was not my cup of tea. The law of natural gravity is as hard to resist as the natural attraction or predilection I feel for some realms of knowledge/facts/opinions. I would rather spend time on political science or possibly, economics. Strangely, I did scrutinize some law books quite cursorily and decided that those people writing/reading those books must have invented a language of their own! That was not normal English I was reading: seemingly innocent daily vocabularies take a life of their own to mean something drastically different. Strangely specific lexicon, I thought. I could not follow most of the books so I dropped them. Indeed, until now I still feel that literature on jurisprudence is so much more interesting to munch on than writings on substantive law, including some apparently commonsensical legal journals. 

What really features in my half-year's dalliance with law is the art of subjectivity, or rather the manipulation of innate subjectivity. The word "manipulation" maybe a lot stronger than I meant. The emphasis is on the art of crafting sentences/creating sentiments/evoking reactions in academic writings using objectively assessed materials. The sentence may be a bit self-contradictory, but of all things in the world, there is room for subjectivity in any self-declared objective process. The due process in criminal procedure can be excessively technical, the reference to the "reasonable man" figure can be equivalent to no reference at all (despite the modicum of truth in that not all legal fictions are fictitious), and the irrelevance of motive/intention is going to crack somewhere under the disguise of public policy arguments proffered by courts. I know such proclamations are bawdy and irreverent even. They are against the legitimate image of law and the paramount role it plays in promoting order and certainty in daily life. However, subjectivity still seems to be mastered before the making of a truly brilliant law student. One MUST have an opinion--qualified or not. A subjective opinion is everything. There must be a stand to fight for. Though the orthodox holds the view that objectivity is so much more important that one needs to look through troves of old legal literature/case law before arriving at an opinion, I somehow finds it stifles creativity and due development of--common sense. What the Dean of SMU Law Faculty said is still fresh in my mind: you have to be critical--if you agree with a statement, there must be a reason why you agree with it, and if not why not. You must be able to back it up. Anything short of backing it up will cost you...(there is a lot un-backed arguments are going to cost you). For a short period this mantra really spurred me on to doubt or affirm with reason anything I read: articles on Euro-zone crisis, newspaper articles etc. It can get really interesting how the forum pages in the Straits Times can give diametrically different opinions. Sometimes I pick one side and draw skull-head on arguments I find unconvincing. It is great fun and great brain work. Everything is about subjectivity?

Of course there are failed attempts in putting forward the message in paper assignments. Not a native English speaker, there are times I have to bear the brunt of not getting the pithy part of my ideas across: too late to reach the point, belabouring on the obvious, or using the wrong word (miserably) repeatedly in the wrong context. Still, it is great fun to grapple with it, sometimes equally fun as to grapple with a substantive legal idea.

Sacrifices come along the road when there is no time left for other leisure. No one really loves living a hermit life but to be a truly dedicated academic one has to be a hermit once in a while. True revelation comes in peace. When people say "take time to..." they do mean take the private, quiet hours to reminisce/reflect/drill your mind. However, camaraderie does not necessarily suffer. It is healthy to rant or vent your emotions together with someone going through the same process as you.

So much for my searching for self and searching for law. Whatever abyss lies ahead, the best way is to hold the head high, really high--I have to put myself up to it, to look like it, to feel like it and confidence ensues. What is the "it" I am talking about? It can be anything! A desired self takes no definite form!

Even though sometimes I have to tip-toe, there are times the few centimetres do not matter. It is the centimetres of growth that matters.

Peaceful, rustic and undisturbed lives

It has been about half a year since I boarded the airplane with utmost relief and ineffable joy to depart from Vientiane, Laos International Airport. Now in the midst of a hard-wrought schedule with "eventful" days and weeks and semesters rolling in like items on an assembly line, I can no longer deny the deepest visceral longing--secret though--for an otherworldly retreat to deliver me out of this meshwork of spinning confusion.

Though my departure from Vientiane was as exhilarating mentally as it is uncomfortable physically, which I will talk more about in future, my arrival was definitely breathtaking. It is hard to depict how it feels like when I was one of those passengers crammed in a budget airline for the first time along with other familiar faces with the sole aim of landing safely, and returning from the harsh, and definitely backbreaking volunteer work unscathed. We had several transitions in between, and I purposely ensured that I was wide awake when any plane took off. The sound of engines roaring, wheels trembling, wings lifting and the sense of defying gravity towards an unfathomable sky were too awe-inspiring to be missed. I particularly treasured the moment when our plane had to wait at the crossroad for the plane scheduled right ahead of us to take off. Watching the huge, streamlined bird gliding gracefully into the cloud and its signal lights blinkering intermittently until finally disappeared into whiteness elicited a rarely experienced feeling about "oblivion", of which we were fully aware that in another moment our carrier would become another dot disappearing into the whiteness, equally internalised by the sky and its embrace.

The transition is Malaysia was brief, yet for the first time in my life I walked into Starbuck along with other, and I ordered nothing since I forgot to change for Ringgit, and the "contingency exchange rate" offered by our suave teacher in-charge was too economically unfavourable. Still, I enjoyed a good time playing board games and smelling the brew of coffee from others' cups. Mosquitoes abound, even in McDonalds, so we remained mainly in air-conditioned areas. When finally we reported at the LCCT Airport, the news about our plane's delay instantaneously knocked us out. We were all so expectant of landing in Laos as soon as possible, to get out of the concrete building and away from all the artifice and luxuries in the duty-free shops.

Our wish was finally granted when a few hours later, peeking down from the small window of our airplane, we could see terraced land, meandering streams, houses with corrugated-roofs and people with shabby clothes draped on their body. Finally we were out of our world.

This new world was instantly to our delight. We were so dutifully acting as tourists when we took shots of everything we saw: English words "Welcome to Vieniane" with their gratifying effect on us non-Laotian speakers, customs officers wearing "army costumes" with stars and rungs on their shoulder pads, dogs crossing the roads, and the motorbikes.

Swim against the Tide

It has been more than one year and I still have the feeling that the phenix is yet to rise from the ashes. Many times I see people around me working harder, striving with fixed directions and bursting with exuberance and wonder when I can be like one of them, confident from within, the master of my soul. I keep my eyes on new hurdles and challenges emerging every so often, but the lethal drive for rebirth is not there. 

I am not completely my old self, the highly motivated and driven soul who acclaimed to the world at the end of every week:" Tomorrow, I will not be who I am today." I am improving in my tenacity and patience, although the result shows at such an alarmingly slow rate that my old motivated self finds unacceptable. I cannot escape the gloom of comparing with my peers, those who excel, who endeavour till the end, and those who keep reaching for the laurels. Being easily contented with my achievements is my foible. It hurts more when I see with my eyes that the reward for the humble is greater... 

One year to go before I can get admitted into my dream college, and it is a hard process to pinpoint my strengths, my passion and my uniqueness. I have always wanted to be unique, that is why I avoid the crowd and seek for experiences that distinguish my self from the masses. In Nan Hua, there is no match of me posed by the like of YC, but in Raffles, I have more than a healthy amount of matches who are driven, upbeat, and forward-looking. I sought alternative routes to define myself, becoming a Youth Ambassador, doing backbreaking volunteer work in Laos and Thailand, and tutoring kids in special needs schools. Maybe because I expect a lot from myself and thus face more setbacks when they do not materialise. 

The momentum for this year is really picking up. I can feel the heat burning inside every one of us. Being surrounded by geniuses is just one adaptation I am yet to accustomed to. Meanwhile, I should start finding my uniqueness that really distinguishes me as exceptional. Still waters run deep. Hopefully I can prove my mettle. 

Auspecium Melioris Aevi