I Will Follow

All your ways are good, all your ways are sure.....

Where you go I'll go, where you stay I'll stay.....

Who you love I'll love, how you serve I'll serve.....

Light unto the world, light unto my life.....

All I need in you alone.....

In You there' life everlasting, in You there's freedom for my soul.....

I will follow.

No easy task, it seems. But then, how can I give up on the One who had never let go of me?

Writing

It's already past midnight and I'm fairly certain to have caught the flu bug from someone somewhere, having been sniffing until I got that wonderful headache that comes from overdoing it. And to be honest, I should probably have gone to sleep earlier, to let the body rest up and all that. But in the spirit of the digital connectedness we've all grown so accustomed to, I decided to keep surfing for just a little while more.

My mind turned to one of the things that I used to put a fair amount of time in: my blog. I guess you know when something's going the way of the dinosaurs when you feel uncomfortable just mentioning it. Like Friendster. See, that left a nice, bitter taste in your mouth already, didn't it? :P

I kinda thought that my blog has become irrelevant. Jon was right, there was simply much more going on in real life that blogging has become inconsequential. I'm too busy living life to want to write it down for other people to see. Rudi was right, I was well on my way along his predicted 'steps-to-blog-abandonment'. Justin's right, no one ever reads my blog anymore, so why bother?

I was right, I shouldn't have bothered starting up this blog in the first place.

But (but of course) just an hour ago, I decided to revisit some of my friends' blogs and in one of them, I discovered that I had duly forgotten what I truly enjoyed out of blogging. I enjoyed the writing.

Reading my friends' musings, thoughts and the typical rants was for some reasons a strangely surprising experience. Having plowed through more academic journals in the course of my undergraduate studies than all the comic books I had ever bought (a lot), I developed a similar academic thinking style that lacked any form of emotional projections, even when squeezed to dry. Reading was for the purpose of finding important points, engaging in mental summarizing on the fly even as I could hardly understand what was being read. Thus it was a real joy to read my friend's posts and be able to glean so much more than just what was written. The way in which my friend wrote carried so many undertones and overtones of feelings, hopes, desires and dreams that I found it so wonderful to be engaged in this...this, form of communication.

Don't you think it's nothing short of astounding that the written word can embody abstract components such as feelings? The mind can work so efficiently to decode information and figure out what is being implied behind what is written, that when we are reading we actually read in our hearts with the proper intonations? Isn't it incredible that we can read text messages and say to others 'I think he sounded quite angry'? I'd like to think that many of us are simply not bothered to acknowledge the breadth of our what is really at our fingertips.

People can always go on about the superiority of a particular language and argue until their faces turn blue. If you belong to the group of people who believes that bananas like me are a shame to the Chinese people and culture, then please feel free to take a number and join the long line of others who want to stone me for it. But at the end of the day, language is for the purpose of communicating. For you to tell me how you feel. For me to tell you whether I care. Realizing again what it feels like to be able to understand a person's thoughts through the simple use of writing made me appreciate anew my ability to do the same.

If you are reading this, then I hope you caught at least a glimpse of what I was trying to get at. In terms of language competency, I have only the world ahead of me. But I relish the idea of being blessed enough to use language as a means to express myself and understand others. And at the end of it, be it English, Chinese, French, Swahili or any other language that man can articulate, the very fact that I am writing this is proof enough of just how amazing we really are as beings deemed to have risen from just accidental cosmic explosions.

Thoughts

I remember the days when I used to daydream a lot, perhaps when I was around 12 or 13 years old. Getting into the car usually meant looking out at the streets and appearing to 'zone out'. I wasn't zoning out of course, but rather engaging in examining random thoughts (which is why until today I'm so bad with directions I guess: I simply never really paid attention to the roads and buildings and signs). I can't recall anything specific that I always 'daydreamed' about, but for the most part I enjoyed it. I enjoyed the process of thinking, as well as thinking about thinking.

The 21-years-old me still likes to 'daydream', but lately I realised that actually a lot of things had changed and the Internet, I believe, is the underlying cause of these changes. Daydreaming now is no longer productive in ways that it used to be. The depth of my thoughts is seemingly getting shallower and shallower. It's almost as though my attention span is so short now that it is affecting even the conversations that take place between me and myself. I can't pay attention to myself long enough anymore to truly ponder and think about...things. Anything. Everything.

I blame the Internet because...well actually, I can't give any concrete reasons. But the Internet works in such a way that in-depth information processing is usually eschewed in favor of quick and broad scans, or 'skimming'. And so it is with the thinking style that I have come to adopt. Everything that crosses my mind now is simply 'skimmed' and glossed over. Decisions are made on a whim. Actions are taken as I see fit. I have become so shallow in my thinking that the word 'thinking' itself almost does not exist anymore.

If in any way you feel that I'm becoming more and more immature, I sincerely apologize. It's been so long since I used my brain properly. Many a train of thought must have fallen into the ravines over the years, given the increasingly haphazard manner in which I think.

Now if you'll excuse me, I fear I may need to practice 'daydreaming' properly again. I shall have to do a lot more....thinking. Deep thinking, this time.

Ip Man

Possible Spoilers Ahead :)

Ip Man, or otherwise known by his online person, I.P. Man; tells an amazing story in more ways than I thought the filmmakers could.

In any kung-fu flick, we all know that the hero/heroine would (eventually) beat the nonsense out of the last boss, whoever he/she may be. We have also come to expect that Chinese kung fu films would seem otherworldly if they didn't have to use the seemingly pre-packaged sound effects for punches and kicks that make them so believably satisfying. I like kung-fu films for their choreography, but with Ip Man I actually managed to see beyond the slick parrying moves and rolling punches to catch hold of what the filmmakers were really trying to express. Or at least, I think they were trying to. Makes my movie ticket much more worth it :P

Ip Man as a martial arts exponent stands for amazing because he is simply really good at it. But Ip Man as a man, on the other hand, stands for awe-inspiring because of the way that he exerts his self-control. The true mark of a man lies in self-control they say, and Ip Man showed that he has loads. Truckloads, probably. The way the film choreographers pit him against 10-20 people at the same time and yet have him show constant restraint while fighting clearly illustrates that . Many a time he would land several punches on an opponent, only to hold back when delivering the last blow in order to soften it. When he picked up knives, they were immediately turned to the relatively harmless blunt side. And even with his hardest moves, no one is really seriously injured. To me, that is the epitome of self-control: knowing how to exercise your powers and abilities with just enough conscious judgment tempered in to avoid hurting others.

He reminds me of characters like Kenshin and Superman. People who can kill in the time it takes me to blink. Both Kenshin and Superman know that they are powerful, but yet they strive very hard to never let it cloud their judgment. Too bad the same can't be said of many people in positions of power today.

In a world of relativity, Ip Man's strong personal principles offer an interesting contrast of how bad we have become at taking our stand on everyday issues like war and injustice. He stood for what he believed, and that was a stirring moment in the film for me.

Where I Might Have Been

Facebook is great for looking over people's photos, whether you are stalking someone or simply curious to find out what your friends had been up to. And although pictures may not tell the whole truth, most of the times the thousand words that we can read from even the most ordinary photos can tell us a lot more than what we can ask a person. I was looking over the photos of some friends (can't say who of course) and found myself going back to a thought that I used to mull over everyday: how each of us are brought up in different environments, and how sometimes these environments can be as separate and as distinct as night and day.

Life holds so much experience and diversity that I can often spend a lot of time thinking of where I might've been in life if I had been born in a different place, or maybe born into a different race, or family background, and the list of variables flow along endlessly. Would I have had been the same? I can't tell, really. Part of me thinks that I'll still be me in terms of core personalities (such as my introvertedness). But I could be wrong. I could be a fabulous sportsman dishing out pain to state players. Or I could be the stereotypical (pardon my stereotype here if it offends you) club-goer with a tattoo of a fiery dragon up my back. I suppose I can't change what's already happened. I can't change my parents (not that I'd trade them for anything) or change my birthplace. But there are still so many things that I have yet to come across, that it now seems foolish when I think about those moments when I used to feel apathetic or pessimistic (or both) about life.

Some people like change in their lives. Some of my friends no doubt had undergone or is undergoing heaps of change, and seem to be perfectly fine with it. Me? I don't know...I can't say I like to live an unpredictable life, being bombed while having dinner or something to that effect. I want to experience change, but yet I know that change can be both good and bad, pleasant and unpleasant. And so I'm hesitant I guess.

How strange actually, that even though I'm not born with any physical disabilities or serious mental retardation (maybe got, but I wouldn't know), I can still feel very much crippled at times. Crippled by my thinking, my emotions, my expectations. Life is brilliant like that I suppose.

Visual Spectacle

Yes, Avatar looked pretty. Half-a-billion dollars prettier than your standard films, in fact. But sorry Pandora, there's still nothing that beats waking up to the awe-inspiring morning skies here on good ol' earth. There's simply nothing that captivates me like the coat of blue on top of our heads that we often take for granted. No amount of visual reproduction in any resolution of pixels would ever match the astounding beauty of the giant canvass that the Almighty masterfully paints on.

Sky lovers, unite!

What This Is For

Time and again I had to ask myself if it's still worth keeping this blog alive. And for many of you who still bother to visit, you'd be perfectly forgiven to think that I'm just too phlegmatic to make any real decisions, and thus should be hung in the gallows of uncertainty and indecision. But please read with me through this one last post first before you do so :)

Hands up everyone out there who thinks that blogs are nothing more than avenues to win prizes these days. You see, I've grown disenchanted with the idea of having a blog, because social marketers were too quick to catch on with the idea of being able to disseminate free publicity without so much as to type out the word 'Contest'. I could see that as Marketing went up, Intimacy went down. Intimacy in the sense that you've actually put thought into your posts, in the sense that you mean what you say, in the sense that you are saying what you mean.

Oops, hold back your scorn for me first if I had offended you within just the first two paragraphs. I understand that I have no right to criticize what others choose to do with their own blogs, and I just want to make it clear that I'm not trying to diss anyone here. I'm merely making an observation, and whatever meaning you choose to read from these few lines is your own discretion.

Now if your hands are still up, you can put them down. Like I said, I could not see anymore reason to want to continue keeping this blog in existence. I don't post anything substantial anymore anyway, I thought to myself. But then I also realized that I don't always have to move along with the herd. The reason I got so bogged down was that I tried to write what others would want to read, and that probably gnawed away at my own intrinsic motivation to update the blog over time. I pondered about what the blog could be used for, and felt that it can still provide me with a means of self-reflection in reading over my own posts. And this self-reflection is unique because others can share in it.

So this blog would stay. If you had been reading from time to time, then by all means you're more than welcome to continue doing so. I appreciate your comments, and if it still applies I wish you a blessed and merry Christmas along with the customary Happy New Year :)