Arbitrary

I came up with something during my night of baking a chocolate cake but unfortunately, I've forgotten it.

My life is sometimes just so random. Yet all the same, it's quite boring.

Said chocolate cake gave me a sore throat which hasn't recovered since Thursday morning (it's Sunday night now). I suppose it was my mistake to eat a spoonful of chocolate ganache (i.e. mostly melted chocolate and some other sinful thing) in a bid to waste lesser money. Heh. Then I cooked steak, and tonight was pork chop and rice. Rice was too hard though. Oops. Baking and cooking is fun, but its toll on my pocket is not so fun. I'm relatively broke as of now. And you get to realise how sinful most western foods are. Western, because I've not cooked anything else for now. Shall attempt Chinese or some other Asian thing soon.

Anyway, while cycling with friends one day, I realised that if Singapore would have lesser people staying in it in the future (regardless of the Government's current plan to increase population size - mine is long term), it's because we have diverted too much from nature. Imagine, a city where most nature is manufactured and simply aartificial. Then compare it to another place - it could be anywhere in the world - but the parks run mostly free; the sand is natural; the trees aren't imported; the river isn't fake or made into a sad little canal. I'd choose the latter any time. Sometimes, in the race towards extra greenery or anything else to tout being cosmopolitan, or trying to increase the population and neglecting every other side effect, we Singaporeans inadvertently shoot ourselves in the foot. This replacing of natural grassland and woods with buildings and concrete can be said to have happened for most cities around the world, in fact. And it can be compared to a human progressively getting new metal parts and turning into a cyborg. While the overarching idea is ostensibly for progress while preserving culture, we may, in retrospect, suddenly find that we are not who we once were. So where's the culture that we speak so proudly of? Or has it silently vanished into the background while we were focused on developing everything else? Was it really there in the first place?

Revive.

Finally, first post of 2013, and the first post in about three months. It's been a long time, and sometimes, I confess to missing the feeling of blogging, of typing words, as if the real world, Muggle form of Harry Potter's world where people tap the sides of their heads with a wand and draw forth a silvery strand of thought or memory. Technical wizardry will aid me, too. Translating ideas into legible pixels on a screen, for the world to read (not that many people stop by this humble blog, though).

A friend said that it would be useful to Google oneself and find any traces of things that were best erased from the cyber world. I tried; nothing much came out, besides Facebook. I am simply a forgettable person. Whither happens after death? People crying; an obituary in the papers, and that is about it. Perhaps throw in the sudden realisation that humans are just so much meat and bones physically; we are, after all, just animals. Perhaps too wonderment at what cremation does, leaving nothing behind but some discoloured, light bones. That is what our lives culminate in, eventually, for most people. Only some will become the stuff of legend or subjects of biographies and leave behind some semblance of legacy. No wonder people are afraid of dying; afraid of leaving nothing behind when they have had all the time in the world to change that future. But I digress. This friend said that childhood blogs would be best deleted, hidden away from the world. But why, really? Are blogs not snapshots of who we were in a certain period of time? Perhaps when we have mellowed one day in the future and these words are still floating about, waiting to be rediscovered, we would look back and think of who we were. A past self, open for introspection. Perhaps we would marvel at our radical views; no matter, because opinions change. And even if they were to stay a constant, the value of the blog does not change that much. But of course the world would judge. The world would point their collective fingers and condemn the blogger to hell and beyond.

Now this first post would be quite random since I've obviously went through quite a lot in three months. So random it shall be.

I've always wondered why people don't like to think. We have a mind for a reason - use it. We are human; keep the flame of curiosity alive, that which has always been around, which accompanied us when we were but babes. To think is the hardest thing to do, but why follow the wide and well-trodden when we can all go on our own journeys of self-discovery?
Of course, there is a value in doing other things. Take shopping, for example. To me, it isn't exactly the most enjoyable of activities. Why waste time taking transport to a location and spending valuable time and money on items? I wouldn't mind spending some time choosing things, but to be elbow to elbow with others, jostling along Orchard Road or indeed any other shopping district, is something I refuse to do (unless cajoled into it). Wasting a few hours of my life and some travel money to seek out a slightly better bargain is not exactly smart. Time is money, and vice versa; if we worked throughout, we would be better able to afford other things, no? I like to think of this as some kind of "frictional unemployment". Just that now this represents consumers searching for the best bargains. Some search for too short a period of time (me) and get fleeced. Some search for too long, but it's fine as long as they like it. And others are savvy and spend just the right amount of time. In everything, moderation is key - Goldilocks is much preferred everywhere.

I've finally taken the trouble to read my friends' blogs. It is said that birds of a feather flock together. Having been in top schools has given me the privilege of knowing smarter people. Personally, I'm really quite stupid. It may seem like a joke to others, but one knows oneself the best, sometimes. So I've had the privilege of encountering philosophical blogs. Oh, to blog is a joy. To cook is likewise a joy, and I've been cooking quite a lot, I must add. Too many hobbies and interests, too little time. Or perhaps it's just me as usual, squandering my time away. But anyway, what I've read confirms my state of learned-ness. While others embark on journeys of self-discovery, of wonder, of apprehension, of learning about things that deserve to be learned, I've been doing nothing. Absolutely nothing. Sometimes I wonder how I can waste so much time doing nothing. It gets to the point when I loathe myself for being so very slothful - the biggest sin of mine, out of the traditional seven. That, I learnt from my secondary school.

Reflection while blogging - sometimes, it gives one a certain sense of calm while letting the mind wander. Willing sentences to form on the screen; where there was but white, now black is painted over it. Sometimes, a pure white canvas is beautiful and pristine. Other times, words are much preferred. To paraphrase another friend, sometimes when a blank canvas is all that is facing us, we dread doing anything to it. We would rather let the status quo remain than take that first step. Yet putting the brush to the surface is indeed half the battle won. Let your heart take you wherever you want to go; find your place in the world and turn the blank slate into an artwork. Live.

Yet, what have I done?

The A levels have ended; I've went to Cambodia and back, Australia and back; took the SAT, finally got an internship (starts soon). What have I really learnt? That I am adept at wasting time? That I am, as I've feared, pretty much useless? What else am I to learn when Chinese come up to you and ask you for recommendations of places to tour at night and you cannot reply them in what is supposedly your mother tongue? When you want to teach but end up being taught and passed over in favour of other teachers? When you see the night sky, the real one that is not obscured by the artificial lights that beam out, and see the sea magnificently crashing against the rocks? When you know that you are at the mercy of adults who dispassionately look through your wannabe CV, with no leadership accomplishments whatsoever to speak of? A tiny, tiny drop in a vast ocean. The thought is scary, yet oddly comforting at the same time. And it spurs me on. Onwards, forever onwards. Marching to my own rhythm. Trying to garner accolades to make myself feel better. Trying to amass knowledge. Trying to live every second well spent. Trying to become someone, something more significant than a little grain of sand on a beach, or a drop of water in an ocean. Give me willpower; give me strength.

And at the same time, I am simply humbled by my lack of mastery of English. Granted, I know a little more vocab than the average guy, but that is all. My grammar is horrendous. The SAT proved that time and again as I suffered defeat after crushing defeat. Defeat at my own hands, determined to learn grammar well enough to get a higher score. Yet always, the practices revealed to me my utter lack of learning. Again, and again. I thought my ego was impossibly small; then it got buffeted, pounded, crushed mercilessly. Yet I still blog, I must blog. I want to blog. I need to blog. Such is the relief from being reflective once more, though this mirror of mine tells me nothing more than my lack of depth. Some tell me that yes, I am deep. Yet I don't find myself so. And indeed, one finds it hard to match up to others when our lives have all taken such divergent roads, always getting further and further away from each other. Wherein the similarity?

What else is there to life other than thinking? Thinking, creating things we have built up, "standing on the shoulders of giants". Leaving a legacy behind to get others to do the same. Isn't that what we have been doing all along, for each field of study, each aspect of life? Even movies get us to think (hopefully). I watched Les Miserables and Cloud Atlas, and I must say that Cloud Atlas has got to be the best or at least one of the best movies I've ever watched. A fluke brought me to the theatres. Rarely have I ever been so glad for a fluke. May do a movie review the next time.

And, I thank my friends for their blogs and for them being who they are. Will continue fighting the entropy that dictates that relationships will slowly expire and get forgotten once people seperate and continue along their respective paths.

Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war.

Begin.

The rain 

Falling softly 

Tears gently landing upon 

A wreath of flowers 

For one never to come back

Piles of study stuff

Like the Hulk; like a venerable mountain
Multicoloured, rising
They rise from the great brown plains that is the floor of my room
Each a challenge
Each waiting for me to scale

A drop 

Trickling down

Merging with another

Playfully lingering on the edge of a precipice 

Then plunging, at breakneck speed

Down, down to the bottom of the abyss

More on religion

The following will be my personal view, reiterated once more, since I do believe that I've typed a post on it before.

I am, as what I've said for a very long time, a free-thinker who believes in everything. It's probably about 50% Christian/Catholic/branches that worship Christ, God and associated saints, and 50% every other imaginable faith... because I've mostly only stepped into churches, and because I agree with some parts of the faith, and yet I don't agree with others.

I abhor proselytising.

My take on things is this:
I live in a multireligious society, Singapore. So perhaps somehow, the messages got through to me and I'm a truly multireligious person. I pick up things I like from everywhere. I believe in Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism because I am Chinese, and behind me is a very long history of Chinese people and their culture. I believe in not sticking my chopsticks and spoon in a bowl of rice to avoid attracting spirits and ghosts, because that is the culture of us Chinese and my best friend in primary school once scolded me for doing so. After all, better to be safe than sorry, no?

I believe that ghosts exist, yet I believe very strongly also in Science. Sometimes, when people walk past alleys at night, there is the tendency to rush and get into the safety of their home. This is quite normal; according to science, our ancestors learnt to fear the dark, with its norturnal predators that posed a severe danger to them. Science says that the ghosts we perceive are in fact brainwaves. Yet science also cannot explain everything.

How do you reconcile science and religion? Dan Brown, in his many books from the Da Vinci Code series, explores a little. One books says that the soul does indeed have a little weight; at the final point of death, when the last breath is exhaled, the body becomes infinitesimally lighter. Perhaps that's real research; perhaps it's fiction. Perhaps that's just the weight of the last ounce of air leaving the body (not very possible). What is certain is that both science and religion seek to explore and define our surroundings. Did man not invent gods to define what they saw as supernatural? Religion tells us that the wind is to some a god; it comes and goes at a whim, sculpts and shapes landforms. Science says that it's due to hot and cold fronts clashing to bring us weather patterns like storms and even bigger hurricanes, tornadoes, cyclones. They may differ, but to some, God is up there, and has created the world. We seek to understand His greatness through science; we worship for the moral values to apply to science so we do not go astray.

How do you reconcile religions in the context of the special type of free-thinker like me? I'm not an atheist; I believe in God(s), a devil, heaven, hell. What's all this to me? What is common, really, to all religions? Do not all religions teach morals? Religions let us believe in something greater than ourselves, mortal man. Religions put our faith in someone higher than us, someone who has transcended our beings, who has the ability to shape our lives. God(s) go by different names: God; the Egyptian sun-god Ra; Quetzacoatal (I don't know how to spell this); Buddha; Allah. Men of God preach to congregations and tell them to be faithful to their spouses; to rid themselves of sins and evils; to rise above Evil; to be loyal to friends; to love their children; to be filial. Hence, do religions not have a common goal? Whatever people believe in, they find real. I simply respect people's wishes because their religion is real to them; I have no power in deciding what is real or false for them. I may present them with my viewpoints, but if they want to adopt a different style of thinking after, then that is up to them. I will be glad that they have changed their religions if they do because they have found their route to walk; not because they have switched to something superior in my biased eyes. To me, all religion is equal, because all religion teaches values, except in different phrasing. If one interprets holy texts like the Bible and the Koran/Quran without twisting the words within for their malicious own purposes, then is not all religion similar?
Hell and evil, too, have different names for different religions. Dante (not a religion), in Dante's Inferno, has his view that there are circles of Hell and the devil lies in the icy innermost ring. The Chinese have their 18 levels of Hell. Other hells are infernos, with fires kept burning eternally. Hells are generally places of suffering where people who have sinned are judged and atone for eternity. Some hells, too, contain a nicer area, analogous to the heaven found in other religions.
Evil goes by different names. The Devil; Beezlebub; Saturn; a fallen angel. What all this means is that evil comes to you and whispers in your ear and sometimes wins over an angel of good from your other, better nature - think of the classic paintings and cartoons of a person with a devil and angel on either side. This simply represents the frailty of man - that nobody is perfectly good or evil, be it whether one believes that one is born completely evil or completely good. There is always a battle that rages inside of us. Religion personifies this, and helps us to find the good in ourselves. Buddhists believe in doing god deeds and altruistic acts - so, too, do Christians, who donate to their Church, to the society they live in. To give is to receive spiritual fulfilment.

What, then, do I not agree with?
Some religions practice barbaric acts, such as the sacrificing of people to appease their god.
God says to go to war, and he will help the Israelites win and triumph. I'm very much against war.
Perhaps I may not have read the Bible throughly, because at a young age I read that and decided that such a God went against my principles, but that has stuck with me. Perhaps I may have unconsciously formed a biasedness without realising it. But until I touch a Bible again, that shall remain.
The Bible also states, at one part, that Man is above all animals because he alone has something called spirit; the self-awareness to want to seek God, something you can never imagine any other animal doing.
But is not the duty of Man, who is self-aware and smarter than any other mammal, to not proliferate so much so that one endangers everything else on this Earth we call home? Is our duty not to live sustainably, among Nature, to appreciate other living things and landscapes for the beauty that they bring? To want to conserve the genetic biodiversity that is so evident, even on a single humble plant that you pass by every day and perhaps endanger through vehicle exhaust?
Why must we pillage and crave for so much? To see the destruction of other species while consuming as much as we can as something that may even be endorsed by the religion we believe in? Have we not gotten out of touch with our roots?
Why must religion contradict and refute empirical evidence that Science brings forth? Who dares to dispute the fact that we share a common ancestor as other primates when it runs in our very DNA? Are we not, perhaps, slightly smarter hominids, a product of evolution? Are we choosing to be blind in this case? Is such a religion, then, falling short of what we aspire to be?

My strategy is to pick the things I agree with for religion and indeed, life in general. From everything, there is always something to learn, be it good or bad. I pray to whoever is higher than me, a mere mortal, when I am in need - and hopefully someone listens and helps. I seek the help of friends and older people, when I see that I aren't imposing too greatly. I try to help myself, because whatever change has to start with the individual - who will help and what will change if we don't help ourselves?
I pick out points I agree with and try to stick to them as best as I can. Perhaps I'm still an immature person, but I have gone a long way since secondary school.

Perhaps I really am doing everything wrongly.
Perhaps there is a God above, punishing me now for the wrongs I seek in persisting in. That I'm abhorring proselytising. But how would I know? Have I been wrong thus far? Am I on the wide path that a pastor has recently spoken of, not the straight and narrow?
Indeed, is there even a heaven above, and a hell below to go to after death? Or will we perhaps be reincarnated into different animals based on how we have led our lives, in a complex circle involving life and death?
But for me now, as long as I have this strong moral compass within me, and singing songs to give me the spirituality I crave, is that not my religion already? To believe in Science, to believe in religion and the inherent tendency of humans to do good, to seek spirituality through singing. That is good enough for me, because as long as I have no regrets (I do), as long as I have dreams and goals towards which I work towards honestly, then to me, this is a life well lived.