Saturday, December 15, 2012
Changing minds you hope to find
One more dream to remind you
What is lost can always be regained
Today I turned my back on something I always wanted.
I admit it was a strange feeling. It is something I wanted and it is something I've been fighting for all this time. And suddenly it just hit me that perhaps I should just stop fighting and it will all pass in its own time.
There is this indescribable emotion that I'm feeling right now. It's a tingling itch up my spine. It's a taste of sweetness from feeling a numbness that runs through your self. I don't know what it's called and neither do I want to know. What's important is that I know what it is.
Relief. The feeling of release.
I've been telling myself to let go for so long now. So long that I've almost forgotten. But I haven't.
This is all the past. Don't look back.
And even if it kills me I will never let myself regret giving this up, because for that one sweet moment that I have felt relief, I can feel eternity.
And now maybe that all this is over, I can finally take a breath.
I guess I'm finally learning to let go.
When it's over
When it's done
Let it go
Can you feel eternity? I like to think everyone can. What is eternity, anyway? A human's perception of eternity may not be the true answer.
But answers are only true when they are true to you.
The Buddha says all things are impermanent. So is this fleeting feeling. But for this fleeting moment of relief, I am content. Even if, deep down inside I ever regret giving up, I will never want anything to take back that taste of the sweet rush of release. Relief.
For that short moment, I felt eternity.
The mind exalts in letting go.
We hold on to things no matter how much they torture us only for the relief at the end. But, what if, letting go halfway is so much sweeter than what you'll ever have at the end? Likewise, sometimes you reach a juncture where you need to give up something important to reach that end goal. What if you find that it's not really what you want after that?
Giving up. To most people it's pointless. Working so hard only to give it up. No matter the path, there are no rewards. Depending on how you look at it, it could be either low-risk-low-reward, or high-risk-low-reward.
To me, it's a low-risk-high-reward way of living. Some things you can afford to gamble on, and whether you succeed or not affects nothing but your happiness, your pride, your esteem, perhaps even your future. Those are impermanent. Those are fleeting flashes in the short time we have. Those are but the smallest of small things.
When you gamble with your life, you cannot afford to take risks. And that's what everyone does - gamble with their lives. Life is your only asset. You are born with it. You enter the world ready to gamble with your life at stake. You are forced to take the gamble and roll the die whether you want it or not. If you won't, get ready to see your life being used as another's asset or wait for someone to take the gamble on your behalf.
I am willing to give up everything - my happiness, my pride, my esteem, my future - if it means I'll have another chance at life. Nothing is too much if my life is the stake.
This I admit - I am lazy. I am also a coward. I don't want to have to fight for things. I want things to come my way because that is the way they are, that is the way they are meant to be, and I don't want to spend any more than is necessary on anything. I fear loss.
Above all, I place myself above all others.
I am a conflicted person.
My conflicts define who I am. My conflicts make a person and not a robot. My conflicts make me me. My conflicts are me.
Posted at 5:36 PM
Saturday, December 8, 2012
Dusty pockets of memories in the corners of abandoned apartments
I ought to use an old film camera and take photos I can actually develop and keep, and not just digitally.
I've actually been doing some year-end cleaning these past few days. A couple of days ago we managed to find our old photo albums, and we were just looking through them and well, commenting. Because my family is just like that.
And then it suddenly hit me that one day our descendants are never going to be able to find any of that. They won't ever find old love letters. They won't ever find old journals or diaries. They won't ever find old photographs of us. All they will have of us will be only in their memories, and this vast ever-changing thing we call the internet. See, the internet needs to be new. It's one of the premises of it even being around at all. Everything ongoing, quick, fast, snap of a finger sort. There's probably no way anyone will want to keep around old photos. Even now it's all about space, usage, efficiency.
I wonder if I will ever be able to dig out photos of my youth one day.
I will probably never get the chance to say "I was thinking of you and then I found this photo we took together."
Perhaps if each photo was more expensive or took longer to develop/receive, people would cherish them more.
Sometimes I think my generation is sad, but each one has its woes. Appreciation is probably what's needed, but it's also the most lacking.
It's pretty depressing to not have something that people who don't really know of you can, um, know you by. Not know as in complete understanding, but the magical thing about little trinkets and writings and photos is that they can say a lot about any person. Sometimes the physical things are more important and more valuable than anything else.
Call me 虚荣 then but I would like to think that it's human. Everyone wants something, somehow, someway.
I just want to be remembered.
So anyway I had a very very strange dream. It was weird in a way, because I wasn't me. Not in the sense that I didn't look like me (not that I would know) but in the sense that I felt like it wasn't me.
I know, that doesn't make much sense.
It was a particularly vivid dream actually. The dream felt too real. No, it wasn't lucid dreaming, I can tell then difference. It was definitely a dream alright, but it felt real. Okay, this is vaguely difficult to explain.
Also when I say I didn't feel like myself I mean it in the way that although dream-self was thinking and doing things, they didn't feel like things I'd do. And though this can be due to the subconscious effect, I highly doubt that, because it's that dissimilar to my usual dream-selves.
Yes, I keep a diary recording the dreams I have. Seriously though I think some of them would make amazing premises for novels or short stories. And just saying the memories of the settings and proceedings of my dreams are usually very very detailed, so much that I can actually draw maps and write detailed outlines of my dreams.
The problem, of course, then becomes that of what exactly is the point/problem/plot of the dream.
Like everything.
Which very nicely links on to my next point that just suddenly occurred to me a couple of minutes ago.
I wonder why I read 言情小说, with one of the reasons being that I get bored very easily. That is strange, given that all of them are basically the same stories but in different settings.
But maybe that's what I like them for. The settings. The people. The characters. And no matter how overused the plot is the characters are almost always different and that's probably the most important thing. A story can go on with an overused or otherwise downright ridiculous plot, but the characters are what keeps the stories alive.
Which is why I am making a promise to myself, to never write a story for only a plot. If anything comes first, it must be the characters. That's what makes stories worth reading. It is the characters who in the end affect and even define what the plots are at all.
Unorthodox I know.
Also something I know a lot of people won't agree with me on, but I think I will stay my stand on this one, simply because this is what I owe my characters and my stories as a writer. The people come first. The plot comes later.
Posted at 5:49 PM
