The Noise = To listen or Not to listen to

     

In the classroom we heard classmates chit-chatting about nothing. In a cafeteria we heard random strangers talking about everything. Some were gossiping, others were sharing their lives, and some other might be trash talking, or bitching about their acquaintances. Some are bragging. Some are whining. Some others might be declaring feelings.  Some were laughing. Some were crying. Some were smiling. Some were sympathizing. Some were just clueless and expressionless they didn’t know how to react. Some might be screaming nonsense just having fun with their folks. And I wonder what fun is.

Everywhere we go, we heard noises. We heard people telling stories those were not theirs to tell. Some others were telling other people how to live their lives when in fact; they did not even know how to live their own. Aren’t you tired of all the noises running through your eyes and ears? Don’t you ever feel tired of them? Don’t you think you need a noise cancellation device to wash them away? Shut them off your head?

Maybe what you need is refreshment. Somewhere quiet. A noise-free environment where you can clear our head. Stop thinking about what a judgmental and sentimental world we’re living in.

At some particular times in our lives, we all need to have a getaway to have a moment with our own soul. A place where only you and your soul can talk. It doesn’t mean there will be no noise at all. It’s just in this place we find it easy to reduce or even cancel any noises from out there and focus on ourselves. I, my self, prefer a beach or an ocean. Taking some time off with myself, just listen to the voice of the splashing water. It is calming, always have always will. Rob Wilson said, “More than just music, the splash of water or a lone footstep can put you in the moment”.

So.. what have you done with your noises?

Happiness: What is?

We often look at someone else's life and think of ours as suck. We always long for what we can't have, what others can. We tried as hard just to fulfill one dream, "happiness, like theirs". When will we realize that happiness is personal. What makes them happy does not always make us be. When will we realize what happiness is? Is it having all the money in the world to travel the world? Or is it having all the love in the world from every ones mean the world to us? When I hear happiness, I couldn't help but wonder, "What is?". There will not be any perfect answers for this question, because just as God created us individual as unique as we are, so did He make our happiness, "unique". So how about you? What is your happiness? Share your thought here.

Preferred Job Vs Present Job = Potion or Poison? Present or Prison?

When we were kids we always fantasize about our future. What we would be in the next 10 years. Most will fantasized about being a doctor, pilot, or may be astronaut. Do you remember what you fantasized back then when you were 5 years old? I remember fantasizing about nothing. I never thought about what would I be and what should I do. It kinda is funny and intriguing realizing myself as kid with no job to dream about. 

Just like the dreamer, dream itself will always change. Constantly. There will come times in our lives where we will have to move on to the next level, to the next chapter of our lives. From playground to schoolyard, from schoolyard to working field. And then suddenly, we would have to build a family. As we grow, our dreams evolve. We’re no longer thinking about those dream jobs we used to dream. We learn how to be more realistic than idealistic. Not by choice, but by natural adaptation and learning process. But the question is, were those dreams ever really “gone”? How long until those dreams catch up and haunt our lives?  

Ever wonder about what you do for a living and what you really want to do for living? Are they in a perfect harmony? Ever wonder how you ended up with what you are doing now? Me? Couldn’t stop wondering.

Confucius said, “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.” So if I spend every sunrises waking up hoping that day I won’t have to do the same exact 1440 exact things in each and every minute, is it because I chose the wrong job? Or is it because I have a wrong dream? And even if I ended up with a job I’ve been dreaming of. Will I ever feel content? Will ever be able to feel like I really am living my dream and not working my life?  

What if you take a minute and think… What is your dream, preferred, job? What is your present job? When it comes to “present” job, I couldn’t stop thinking… Is it a “present” or a “prison”? Is it a “Potion” for life or a “Poison” to life? Is it a “remedy” or “tragedy”?

Thinking about job and future is frustrating. And there will come a lot of times in our lives when even though we believe the sky is the limit, we just can’t fly any higher. When even though it is known since forever that mother earth is round, we feel like we are in a dead end, and we just can’t go any further. But never forget not to stop but to keep going. Because whatever we end up being are consequences of series of actions we took. And nothing we can do but to be responsible. 

Love and Pain = Circumstantial or Complimentary Essentials?

Every morning when I look at my window, there is this happy-hate feeling running through me. I’m happy because it always helps as an extra alarm clock in the morning. Beside, this full-wall of window looks actually nice, in the artsy kinda way. But I hate the fact it wake me a few minutes before I’m supposed to. Yeah, this window is pretty much everything I love about my room and everything I hate about it.

Isn’t it funny one exact same thing can bring about two different reactions, two different feelings, and not just different but a direct opposite? It’s amusing how you can love and hate something as much. Love and hate the exact same thing in a pretty much the exact same proportion.

Let’s take a minute and think of one of the most humiliating occurrences you had ever gone through. When you think again about it, does it still feel as humiliating? Or could it somehow be joyfully entertaining and funny? Could you somehow feel the wittiness of that? So… The humiliation and the uneasiness. Are the occurrences circumstantial? Or our feeling is?

“In Chinese philosophy, yin and yang describes how apparently opposite or contrary forces are actually complementary, interconnected, and interdependent in the natural world, and how they give rise to each other as they interrelate to one another. In Daoist metaphysics, distinctions between good and bad, along with other dichotomous moral judgments, are perceptual, not real; so, the duality of yin and yang is an indivisible whole.” – William Baxter

It got me thinking about relationship where there must be love and pain. I couldn’t help but wonder, is relationship is also like that? Love and pain coexist in the same proportion. Are love and pain in a relationship circumstantial? Or are they complimentary essential? Are love and pain = the Yin and the Yang of a relationship? Do we really need that yin and yang in a balance proportion to keep the relationship alive? Or maybe a relationship is a different dimension connecting the yin and the yang, the love and the pain? Relationship, is it a butterfly in our stomach? Or is it a pain-in-our-arses in disguise? 

Can we ever show love and affection without inflicting pain to the ones we care about? Can we make ones suffer such a pain without caring about them? Maybe we will always make someone smile and frown every once in a while. Smile and Frown, Smown. We make everybody smown.

Expectation = Double-Edged Sword

So today I met a friend, let’s name her Catherine. What Catherine said to me got me thinking about expectation. Expectation hurts. I know, you know, and everyone in this universe is totally aware of that. But how many of us realize that expectation does not only hurt, it motivates… It gives hopes.

Here is what she actually said to me, “You know I really did love him, don’t you? He was everything I cared about, I thought about. He still is, as a matter of fact. He was like the center of my universe. And if I were a star, my orbit is nothing but a circle around him, with super tiny radius. Like, super close. But why did he do all those things? He was supposed to love me back, he was supposed to treat me right, and he was supposed to be the best thing I’d ever had. But look at what the relationship led us to.” I couldn’t think of anything other than it was good for her that she came to the decision to break up. His ex couldn’t meet her expectation, meaning, their relationship was nothing to expect to.

This kind of expectation is the kind that come from a Catherine, a girl so full of herself she sky rocketed her expectations. And these expectations had nowhere else to go except to go down.

I couldn’t help but wonder. If expectation hurts and every ones were aware of that, why would they still expect?

Or maybe every once in a while we’ve found ourselves in the lowest state of our minds, we’ve hit rock bottom and expectation is the only thing keeping us in one piece. We never realize because we gave it another name. We named it Hope.

Good thing about expectation is it does not just hurt. At some certain points and circumstances, it can only be our only drive to keep going, to keep fighting. The thing is, in every war, as a soldier, we got to know when to keep fighting and when to surrender. Not to confuse taking a leap of faith and be blinded by mere expectations, or so called hopes. Because more often, things don’t go as expected.

So is expectation good for our souls? Or is it bad? 9.9 out 10 people asked about expectation and what it could do to their lives said bad thing about it. It’s like the word “expectation” itself has brought negativity out of everyone’s mind. Maybe we should rename it? Maybe we should call it “surprise”? That way we can never know whether the surprise will be pleasant or unpleasant. Or maybe we should just accept it the way it is. That it is a double-edged sword, it can kill the enemy, but it may kill the one who’s holding it.

 

Bad Relationships = Degenerative Diseases

“Trying to change old habit is like fighting a war in your head – a draining and exhausting skirmish that makes you wonder at your chance of survival,” – Richelle E. Goodrich

When trying to change is not only a war in your head, but a war in the other’s head as well, or may even be a real war, the one happens not only in your head. The one happens outside your head, through your little lips and handy hands. When a war for the relationship is a war for real, with your boyfriend/girlfriend.

Then it becomes a disease to the relationship. I think of unhealthy relationship as if it was a disease, a degenerative disease. It will become worse eventually, as time goes by. And nothing we can do to make it healthy again, nothing we can do to fix it. We can’t cure degenerative diseases, what we can do is prolonging the life expectancy, but not curing. Maybe increase the 5-years-survival rate. So did every doctors said in their highly sophisticated language. 5-years-survival rate. When it comes to relationship, is it also going to be 5 years? Or should it be 5-months-survival rate?

But then again, there is research, invention, or whatever we name it but someday we hope we’d find a cure. Through a long process of thinking and trying, of trials and errors. But somewhere along the process, will death precede? Which one will come first? The cure? Or death?

Then we wonder, will love ever be enough? To save our unhealthy relationships? Or will it just prolong the life of the relationship where it’s gonna face death eventually? Or should it just be dead and then we can move on and have another relationship, hoping this one is gonna be a healthy one? Should we wait and watch the death precede the invention of the cure? Or should we end it? Or should we keep our faith that the cure will eventually be invented?

The question is, “Do you still have faith in your faith?”

Life = Inception of Options

I bet we all are pretty familiar with the saying “Life is all about choices”. I couldn’t help but wonder. If life were all about choices, why wouldn’t anyone accept being an option?

When we’re feeling down and desperate we tend to do a lot of things without thinking enough about them. We started to look for answer or so we called it as. But what we actually looked for were excuses. Whatever those are calming. Not answers. We started to open our Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and so on. We followed all of those accounts providing us with a lot of bull shit words and sentences. But what it really did was to bury us even deeper in our desperation. We read about “Stop letting yourself be an option, we make choices. We’re not options”. Reading that we thought “Yes!!! Life’s all about choices and I’m gonna make mine and I won’t let anyone… Anyone positioning me as his option.” What we failed to realize was if every ones have to make choices for their lives. Then every ones are gonna be options for each other, aren’t they? It is like the inception of options. We are options of options. Options choose us among other options.

How about we forget about “making choices” and “being an option” as a singular event. How about we start putting those words together as one. The thing is not about us being options. It’s about us making tough choices and be responsible for them. And we let every other ones making their choices (where we are one of the options they need to choose) and let them be responsible for their choices.

This way we can be in peace, with ourselves… and with others. Only when we realize that we can only control what we do have power over and we stop craving of control over what we don’t, incredible things happen. Or so Steve Maraboli said, and I do believe in Him.

Sharing = Digging Deep

I have been waiting for this moment to come. Me… Having the courage to share thoughts about life. Taking the risks of being called whatsoever.

I wonder what people are going to think when they read an elaboration of thoughts in some pages long of words talking about life. Some may think “too much”, or “melodramatic”, or even “crazy”. Some may say that this crazy melancholy is just babbling, playing deep thoughts. But there is nothing simple about life. There are actually too many components that no one will ever have the capability to mention those constituents of life. Therefore, when we talk about life it will have to be deep.

Sharing about life is anything but digging shallow. It is all about digging deep. How far can you dig the depth of your soul and your thoughts? Up to the point where you are able to expose your vulnerability and let people spit everything in their thoughts in every words they want to. And accept that. That is “Sharing”.

From here on, I am going to try and write about everything happened in my life that I thought everyone would be able to relate to. Being in love, being cheated on, being taken for granted, being underestimated, friendship, success, being admired of, being looked up to, being great at whatever, and so on this page wouldn’t be able to handle that if I keep mentioning things. And of course, in no particular order. :)