une aventure sentimentale

like an epic of every great adventure, I began my own story... so long as I could remember, my story started when strings of musical notes streamed into my life at a young age.

Somewhere over the rainbow
Way up high
There's a land that I heard of
Once in a lullaby
Somewhere over the rainbow
Skies are blue
And the dreams that you dare to dream
Really do come true
Some day I'll wish upon a star
And wake up where the clouds are far behind me
Where troubles melt like lemondrops
Away above the chimney tops
That's where you'll find me
Somewhere over the rainbow
Bluebirds fly
Birds fly over the rainbow
Why then, oh why can't I?
If happy little bluebirds fly
Beyond the rainbow
Why, oh why can't I?

('somewhere over the rainbow' by Arlen-Harburg)

a song that still rings a bell from those choir days... what I didn't realise is the great significance of the lyrics... a time when discipline, strictly no-nonsense and stubbornness overruled a twelve year-old, with a desire to grow up & see the future.

like all surprises in life, I too became a creator of music... the symphony, melody and life of music touched me. slowly but surely, it called out a part of me that woke up my inner self...

from self-consciousness to self-sensitivity, I found traces to a path as intuition would find me.

at a time when all are susceptible to influences, I am grateful that I was not addicted to anything but radio. as the sequence of events afterwards would allow a naive mind to follow through that dream fantasy world of exploring the often-thought impossible, it took me on a journey like Alice in Wonderland. I met the rabbit who took me on an extraordinary voyage. times when I learned to be bold and outrageous and did things I could not have imagined. he taught me to believe. belief became a strong conviction in my life. To take charge and lead my own life. To trust and have confidence. a different confidence that I've had. one which taught me strength.

I fell in love in the most interesting manner. infatuation as people would have called it. but I went ahead with my gut feeling & experienced the most fruitful ride on the road of emotions.

and I thought I found my passion... something I would want to do, love to do and enjoy doing. so I walked on, on my own, to pursue the way. yet also a time when I felt lost and aimless... when I thought I wasn't me.

if I've found the greatest lesson, it's falling in love with life itself. where seeking happiness is my only fulfilment. to find joy in the moment of living. to live for the moment. breathing life into every moment...

we are blind

we are lost.

all of us are.

we are caught in a maze. trapped. stuck. lost. aimless.

all of us are in an identity crisis everynow and then. if you are lost, you are not alone. so many of us faced the same dilemma. been there done that. and we'll face it again. we walked through life as though we are blind, we can't see for sure what is ahead of us even though normal life has guided us and enabled us to predict, to forecast what is ahead. but in life, we are all blind. we can't see. we can't be sure. we don't know what is out there, up there.

what is real is the ground we are stepping on, the earth we feel running in between our toes. perhaps we aren't even sure where we are, what is around us. we are only sure of what we can touch in our hands, feet and on our skin.

the future is intangible.

then how are we supposed to move on? like all men who can't see, we got to learn to trust, to have faith and believe in ourselves and what we can feel. and it's often people like these who can sense life in a different dimension. feel. we hold on to something we believe in and follow that direction, that sense, that trust, that faith and belief.

like the blind man who don't know where the road leads him, we don't know where our paths lead us to. but as long as we have faith in ourselves and that something we held on too, we found a direction too. the destination is unclear. but throughout the journey, we had a direction, perhaps a goal...

the blind man may get lost, may fall but on his way... he held firmly to the rail and walked his every next step like he knew.

we may be blind but we gotta learn to trust.

finding peace

never confront a friend when you are angry or never write a letter when you are in a bad mood. heard that umpteen times and it's so applicable... I almost did at least one of the above before and yes... the previous blog I wrote, I have a huge urge to delete it right away cos I don't feel my frustrations anymore... at least for now.

well well, at all beauty pageants... we heard the two big words "world peace". those are still pretty empty words now. what I really want is to find peace with myself. not a good selection of phrase either for that can sound like an absolute but I don't mean it that way. it's like humans being humans, we find faults with many things... but the root of it all, we found fault with ourselves. discontentment being a very good reason. and to be simple in life is just to stay contented! and that doesn't sounds too easy either.

I remember telling my friends that we can all have a similar purpose in life but yet what makes up and defines the purpose differs from people to people. what does a sense of security mean to someone? what does happiness mean? our different backgrounds shaped our perceptions and thus our priorities... I deemed the simplicity in life is to be happy as a person. so I seek my purpose in life... finding that purpose... working towards it and making things work out that way. my friend thinks she is simple cos she said she doesn't seek out the different way in life... she just hopes to finish the studies, get a good job, get married, etc. but ultimately, isn't that the same? all we ask for is a simple and happy life. but we see it so differently. she thinks I'm complicated when I don't seem to agree. cos I'm only asking for the same.

then how do we define simplicity in life?

Gone

the sudden realisation of death. the word stares right in my face. as I was putting myself to sleep, I thought what if I should never wake up... like all those reports in the news. what if I should just go like that? without any warning.

I thought of how people around me would react.

I may plan alot, think alot, but what if I never get the chance to live it all. I'm fearful like everyone did. for its invisibility.

sounds like an exaggeration after a recent experience but you never know when that moment will be.

feeling so lethargic for the past few days.

that instant came, it was abrupt... orange pixels invading my vision, slowing filling up my field of vision. the surroundings seem to be deafened by a sense of unpeace. not really unpeace, I could very well give in and feel peaceful. I felt a force asking me to close my eyes and succumb to what will happen. my physical cell seems too weak to resist. unconsciousness sinking in. will I wake up again? in my mind, I cried out my will to carry on... I have to stay awake!

I wonder what will happen if I didn't pull myself up from that tunnel to the unknown.


"Everybody knows they are going to die," he said again, "but nobody believes it. If we did, we would do things differently."

So we kid ourselves about death, I said.

"Yes. But there's a better approach. To know you're going to die, and to be prepared for it at any time. That's better. That way you can actually be more involved in your life while you're living."

(Tuesdays with Morrie)

What-ifs

I have often pondered... my life is very much revolved around the world of what-ifs. It is often so that landed me into a self-dilemma that I couldn't pick myself up from, as if trapped in an abyss. As much as I hate to admit that this is a huge flaw of mine, I couldn't give up thinking about possibilities of what I can do different. Often driving myself into a puzzle. I screwed my brain. And how often I knew people around me are frustrated with my insistence, but to me, it is persistence.

Yet I lost some of the courage I used to possess, may be not lost, but somehow it faded away and I couldn't find it back. Sometimes how I hate myself for becoming someone I don't know, someone I don't want to become... losing my faith and courage. I had an identity crisis like some people did. Suddenly so lost and detached from who we really are. I used to think that is cos of a change in environment, forcing me to adapt and I did badly, for I lost myself in midst of the change. I looked back at in my younger years in marvel. I admired how I used to be... so straightforward and may be more happy too. The one I am today lost the nasty temper I used to have, whom my friends ten years ago would agree too. I do not detest this change but it seems to have taken much more... the more emotional and sensitive me. for the one you know today, is someone who has evolved over the years like everyone did, but I still believe that the original me is sleeping inside quietly, ready to awake one fine day.

Recently, my good friend asked me if she should follow her gut feeling, I told her, " yes, but..." And true enough, hesitations intruded my child-like mind over the years and made me more cautious, more wary.

Perhaps I have given too much thought to even the simplest decisions deemed by others. And because of my hesitations, I have seen some opportunities foregone. There need to be a sacrifice to everything in life; we take some, we lose some... this is a fact I found it hard to live with. And so I am still the idealist and perfectionist you knew in the past. I would try explore every possibility as though time would wait.

Now I couldn't.

My friend reminded me I can't have everything exactly my way. That is common sense but hey, people like me somehow don't always live well with common sense.

Recalling Tuesdays with Morrie (http://www.eclecticinspiration.com/quotes/tuesdaymorrie.html), the old professor had an optimistic view of a better tomorrow even though death was drawing near. I thought when people asked "How are you?" Do you reply, "life is good but could be better" or "life is good but can be better"?

I stayed by the latter as you always live with a positive possibility.

Yes... and because of holding on to this positive what-if ; over the years, I am able to ride on that every possibility of wild dream and imagination, and have done things I could never forget.

You can feel sorry for what you have done but do not regret for the things you never did.

Life in fiction

The world is how you see it.

There are endless things to learn about in this world. Nothing in this world is absolute; we are all subjective beings; everything is relative. Like what is one man's meat is another's poison. It is the biasness in each and everyone of us; the way we judge things and people, that affects our choices in life; big and small, and ultimately forms part of our identity... how different we are from others.

The world we were born into is a place of deception as humans seem to overtake and become the centre of the universe while the others are simply labelled "plants", "animals" or even the "aliens". Every other non-human beings seem to be the intruders or invaders of our environment. And so we have grew up in a world of human evolution, with trade and technology rapidly changed. And gone are the days of hunting, barter trade, etc. Gone are the days when humans are like animals too.

What is the truth? As scientists and researchers pursued on the trail of truth to discover about the origins of the world, etc. Not much was revealed but generations and generations went past without knowing why we even existed. We can live without the truth, we can live with ignorance all our lives.

The world is what we make it out to be. We don't need the truth. Decades after decades, great literary writers and poets described the world in beautiful words, the wonders of life and the idea of love and romance. We are charmed by those ideas and we never gave up searching for that so-called perfection, true love in life. We are intrigued and fascinated by this world. Yet science again reminded us that there's is no beauty in love as we have thought to be. We fell in love because of genes and hormones.(http://samvak.tripod.com/lovepathology.html) We are attracted to each other, all for some scientific reasons. We are blinded by love, yes, due to a certain hormone. This is a fact. And how we dread this fact, refusing to admit that we are animals too.

If each action we take is all answerable by science, life seems so predictable, straight-forward and lacked of emotion.

Like the whole controversy about the Da Vinci code, we don't like to be challenged on what we believed in. Romance idealists believe in true love, so don't tell them there's nothing like true love. We chose our own faith and our philosophy in life. We are biased. We refused to budge when people told us we are wrong. Though we couldn't be totally certain of what we believe in, we trust our instincts and allow ourselves to immerse in the grey.

"Big Fish" is a thought-provoking film about people who lived in their own fairytale. A man whom had lived an exciting life; filled with extraordinary adventures during his younger years. A story he would tell to everyone. A story he believed in. In reality, none of that had happened the way he described. His life was pure mundane. Yet this was the life he chose to live in; one full of ups and downs, mysteries and wonders.

We all live the way we live because of our beliefs and faith. Not because of facts.

It's our own perspective.

Déjà vu

Again. I felt this strange phenomenon happening to me. Like every other time when it happens. Here I am, sitting alone in the office, looking through the corner of my eye, through the glass window of the other room. Suddenly, it came. So familiar. And next, I was texting my friend on MSN about this weird feeling and again it was flooding back to my mind. so instantaneously. the sense that this is all so familiar followed a second after what is actually happening.

Eerie.

My friend told me that people called this "Déjà vu". And so I went on to read about it on the net. The word itself defines in French as "already seen". 'The experience of déjà vu is usually accompanied by a compelling sense of familiarity, and also a sense of "eerieness", "strangeness", or "weirdness". The "previous" experience is most frequently attributed to a dream, although in some cases there is a firm sense that the experience "genuinely happened" in the past.' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deja_vu)

It is always this abrupt and short-lived that sometimes I even forgot that it has happened to me. Sometimes I wonder if there is any meaning from this. Most of the time, these are just some insignificant events. Is there a purely scientific explaination perhaps due to some static energy in the brain or like what people have suggested, we are recalling things that have happened before. My fingers are trembling at the thought of this. How could we possibly find something we have never done before familar?

And this often brought me to the topic that I have once caught from a film. It said that we can travel on two different time dimensions at the same time. The existence of parallel worlds. (http://www.themarginal.com/dejavureport.htm) One is travelling on an earlier time dimension than the other. And so they explained a strange phenomenon will occur when both dimensions intersected. If one is from the more advanced time dimension, during this intersection, he will experience a sudden memory lapse which he himself may not notice and when people around him mentioned on a particular event/incident that has actually occurred in the past, this person fails to remember. On the contrary, if one belonged to the earlier time dimension, a fore-seeing or predictive ability occur during the intersection. That means one will be able to tell what will happen in him in future.

I often wonder if we do re-live the same lives over and over again without the ability to realise it. If it is true, then in the korean drama, they mentioned that one will meet the same people, do the same things and fall in love with the same person after many million years as a scientific phenomenon of space and time. (http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=61610). If this is a fact, we will do the same things we dread, we love all over again. We won't be able to choose to change any part of our history. And so true is the phrase, "what will be, will be". we need not worry about our next course of action if it is already decided. whatever our choice, it may be predicted afterall. all these processes of our life struggle may be a history itself. if so, I am thankful for all the good things that have happened to me over the past 20 years... the people I met, the things I have done. its nostalgic. and to think that perhaps, it would happen to me again a million years later, reliving all of it, is such a blessing. but like all things, think the opposite.

If these are all true, then million years later, I will write the same thing on this very same space on the internet. and you, will have to read the same blog of mine, which you will then again find so familiar.

Cast away

' discover the unforgettable journey of hope, courage and survival '

A story about how a cruel disaster landed a man in an extraordinary fate - a sole survivor of a fateful accident, isolated in a place not known to the outside world.

It was my third time watching the movie but it never failed to leave me filled with a mix of emotions and a rush of tears welled up in my eyes, and unexpressed emotions in my heart. Witnessing how abrupt an accident could occur and changed one's whole life... a harsh reminder that life is just so vulnerable. It is so true that we have no control to whatever that is going to happen outside us... perhaps it's fate. but we have total control of what is going to happen within us- our inner strength, hope, will and determination to live. Afterall, survival is not only about finding food, shelter and leading a comfortable life but also the things that kept us afloat in life - reasons to stay alive and where we drew our strength from.

Like Chuck Noland (Tom Hanks) in the the story, his plight was something none of us could ever imagine of - in a moment, he saw his world collapsed, in another, a fearful realisation that he could no longer return to where he came from, that he was all alone. He searched for means to survive... learned to find food, make fire and shelter. In the process, he experienced physical hardships and emotional turmoil. Day after day, he never gave up hoping for a chance to return to where he came from. In desperation, he found friend in a non-living object. After years of waiting, he finally returned to where he came from but it dawned to him that the place he came from seemed even more unfamiliar than the the island - all the things that he had hoped for, wished for, were no longer there. The world has moved on without him. Time brought irreversible changes.

He was cast away.

perhaps one of the greatest fear in life is to be forgotten - be forgotten by the world and loved ones and to return to a place that we no longer seem to exist or fit in. to live in a world where you are forgotten.

And the beauty of life is to live everyday in hope, wishing for that something. In the end, it doesn't matter if we have achieved what we wished for - it's the process of searching, hoping, attempting, that drove the purpose and meaning of life and our reasons for staying alive. Because till the end of it all, we have attained something more precious than the achievement itself.

What is your favourite childhood fairytale?

... a question I have not asked myself for a very long time. Perhaps growing up drowned the tiny details of our childhood, so much so that we have become numbed; immuned to the everyday life and failing to question ourselves on the simpler but perhaps more important questions in life. Are we happy? What do we want?

As I re-examined the question, I realised it's not that I do not know the answers but I have forgotten them. My favourite fairytale is not Beauty & the Beast, not Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and it occurred to me that it is something other than the good old Cinderella... the beautiful tale of Little Mermaid!

I remember my fairy tale stories... the colourful books of Red Riding Hood, Snow White as birthday presents from my pre-school teachers. And that two other green marine covers of the Little Mermaid given by my mum and aunt. It was a tale we all read about... Mermaid's love for the Prince and how she exchanged her voice to become human yet was tricked by the evil sea witch's plot to break up the pair. But as all fairy tales end, it was a happily ever after. I grew up with the tale, from the books, Disney animation to acting in my pre-school play as a small little star fish in that colourful world of sea. Probably that is why the fairy tale stands out the most in my memory.

Fairy tales are little girl fantasies but how real are our fantasies?

That silent desire and wish to meet Prince Charming, obtain true love and a happily ever after - just like all fairy tales. Though modern films have certainly evolved from the era of fairy tales, time and time again, besides the well-known stories of Shakespeare's, there are Titanic, The Lake House,and more recently, Korean dramas depicting the romance of Prince nd Princess.

So, fairy tales still exist today in another form and the reason for its continuation is that there are people who still believe in them. Reality and past experiences may be harsh but we never gave up searching, hoping all our lives. It is something that applies to all aspects of life; love and ideals.

Remember your childhood ambition? As people grew up, they have second thoughts and gave up their childhood dreams - it may appear less realistic or impossible to achieve. Yet I do still believe that is the most real dream one ever wanted to achieve in his/her life. How many of us is actually courageous enough to follow our childhood instincts? It is a reflection of something so true and deep inside us. As a child, we have not learned to understand complexities of the world but we already possess the most basic emotions in life - sadness and happiness. We cry when we can't get what we want and we smile when we get what we want. Isn't that the most meaningful and what matters in life?

Find back the child in you.