And so 4 years have passed. It is really a mere coincidence that I chanced upon this blog today, which is about exactly 4 years since my last post. I thought it would be interesting for me to write a post here and take stock of things.
I got to this blog again because one of my friend mentioned that it would be a good idea to google your name just to make sure nothing too embarrassing turns up. I guess this blog has got to be one of the more embarrassing things that exist of me in this vast expense of the internet.
It is kind of weird writing here on a public platform knowing that people can read what you express here. Though no one would probably come across this blog unless my name is googled, yet publishing a post online bears this possibility. Not that I write anything that is outrightly obscene or inappropriate in my diaries, but well just got to thread on more carefully. Also to ensure that 4 years on when I look back, I don't look too much like a clown.
Many things have happened in these 4 years. I finished my A levels, went to army and commissioned as an officer, got posted to a slack unit, got the HDB scholarship. ORDed, worked at Innotrek for a while. Joined Buddhist Fellowship Youth and Tiong Bahru YEC, and am currently in the last month of my 3-month internship stint at the HR department of HDB. Am also currently awaiting the commencement of my university studies at NUS, Civil Engineering.
I think that to a large extent, I have done pretty well in this path laid out for me. It is actually quite an arduous path and doing well isn't easy at all - but it is also a very predictable path that countless have trotted through ahead of me. Do well in studies, got a scholarship, go to a good university, graduate and accelerate through your career with a good headstart and just keep on racing on and on and on. I think that it is easy to find worth in being busy, but it is a very shallow kind of satisfaction. I hope that in the rush of all things, I can still maintain my inner peace and calm, and have a true comprehension of the things that really matter in life. Something that strikes me recently as I go to and return from work at HDB, is that people around me are always rushing. Rushing to go to work, then rushing through stuff to clear work, then rushing to go home. But I think that home is a state of mind - completion is a state of mind as well. Our external universe will never be perfect, but our internal universe can. And often it is after we have straightened ourselves out, that things outside us will align properly as well. It always starts from ourselves.
"The Kingdom of God is available in the here and now - the question is if we are available to the kingdom. The greatest miracle isn't being able to walk on water or on air - but to be able to walk with our feet on the earth. We don't have to die to enter the Kingdom of God, in fact we have to be truly alive to do so."
I have worked hard for my achievements, and there is much work laid out ahead for me as well. But just as a fruit bore by a tree cannot take full credit for its very existence since it is but the small end result of the gigantic task of growing the tree, I am who I am today only because of the grooming by my parents and the conditions that I enjoyed when I was young. This reminds me to always remain humble, and to pay it forward - provide the supporting conditions for others to succeed as well.
But what is success? I think life is a pursuit of happiness, and we are all doing different things are chasing different things only because our definition of happiness is different. There are many things that make us happy, but not all happiness is the same. The more conditioned the happiness is, the more inferior it is. Inferior in terms of the quality of experience, and the sustainability of the experience. The greatest form of happiness in my perspective is one that is based internally, when we understand the tendencies of our mind. When we no longer pursue coarse forms of emotions and ride the roller coaster of feelings, but rather understand the true nature of life and that knowledge will allow us to rise above mundane forms of happiness. I think that is the ultimate pursuit, and the only worthwhile pursuit in life. I am doing most things in life only because they act as platforms for me to live out these ideals.
Yet my intellectual understanding of the above is still running ahead of my internal grasping of it. I claim that I should seek higher forms of happiness, but am often still tempted by lesser pursuits. But this is a gradual path, and just as we discard the boat after riding upon it in a one-way trip to the opposite shore, we use these lesser pursuits only as a bridge to higher ones. This however bears with it the risk of us falling down the slippery slope where we keep excusing our lesser actions, hence the need to be constantly mindful and brutally honest with ourselves. Ultimately as long as the direction is right and I keep on moving forward, I will get there. And I will certainly fall, and I have fallen hundreds of time in the last 3 years or so since I really got myself into the whole endeavour. But as long as it is forward-falling, I'm doing well.
NS was really hard for me. From BMT to OCS, it got progressively worse. It was because I was struggling with a lot of mental issues, questioning life and our existence. People often ask me what I was struggling with. The following are some examples:
1) Consider the hypothetical scenario where you are stuck in the paradigm of thought that "living is bad". Hence you try to reason your way out, yet each line of reasoning and cognitive thought is living itself. In this way, the solution is weakened by the problem. Trying to reason things any further doesn't help.
2) Living is experience, hence how do we confirm the existence of the external universe?
3) How can we be sure that the past exist, and not that we just started existing a second ago and we have memories of the past only because they come with our existence?
4) How can we define the different aggregates of living when we are using "living" as a tool? The eye can't see itself.
5) How can we confirm absolute truth when we are confined in our sphere of living?
6) etc...
These have been going on for 3 years, and are still going on now. When these problems arise, I am sucked into them and they consume my entire sphere of thought. This inhibits my ability to perform well - conventionally well that is. It also makes me uninterested in interacting with people. This severely affected me in Foxtrot, where instructors thought that I wasn't interested, and my Wing mates thought I was anti-social. And when these impressions are built up, it is hard to escape and the way they treated me conditioned me to feel inferior and hence act poorly. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy. But it really isn't their fault, or mine. It is just how things are, cause and effect. I started the whole thing and they responded in kind, naturally. It was hell, but I should let it go.
It isn't the content of the questions that matter. Rather when I grapple with them, gain other things. I understand the tendencies of my mind, am more appreciative of normal living, and I see the nature of things internally, for example the workings of karma and the cyclical inevitability of life. I also truly recognise the greatest torture and happiness that we can experience - and these all stem from the mind.
Sometimes I look back at the past 3 years, and I question why I try so hard for. It is really hard, tiring, and torturous. A lot of times I feel like I am in limbo. I am not that well practised to achieve this lasting inner peace, but I also can't bring myself to just indulge in conventional forms of pleasure like TV, clubbing and all. But I believe all this is part of the path, and there is still a long way for me to go. I bear faith that it will all be worth it, and I just got to trot on each moment.
I didn't go to an overseas university because I am scared that the problems will resurface when I am there, and being far from family may make things harder. Aside from that, I feel that the greatest journey one can take is inwards, and not outwards. Finally, I believe it isn't about doing extraordinary things in a normal fashion; it is doing normal things in an extraordinary fashion. It is never about what you do, but how you do things that define the quality of our life. I believe that even with a local education, I can still have a fulfilling time learning and living.
There are many things that I can write about, but really I have written about them countless times in my own diary entries and it just doesn't interest me to write them down here. In my own diary posts, I force myself to be brutally honest with myself on the true intentions behind why I do stuff - be it to make myself look good, to build my ego or what not. It is just weird to write the same here though, and I think writing them here isn't going to serve much good because my intents will just morph to another state.
I think that most things we do online are done to make ourselves look good in the eyes of others. It's a narcissistic thing. It's the same for facebook as well, I think that what is portrayed out there of me isn't much like the real me at all, it's just an image. And I suppose that's the same for others too. So it is a game of masks, and when we treat others based on such, I think it is unfair to them. Playing this game also means that we peg our self-worth to how fanciful our mask is and how people like what we portray there, and isn't intrinsically driven anymore. I think that's drawing away self-empowerment and we are pegging something essential to things outside our control, building up the conditions for future disappointment.
And then we romanticise the disappointment and the pain itself becomes something we crave for in a perverted fashion so to speak. It's like break-ups and all, that we sing about it and get all emotional about it because honestly we think it's cool. We just swing upon this pendulum of emotions from one end to another, and we claim we are happy when things are well, and sad when things aren't. But underlying these is just a desire for these excitement.
We all want to be happy, successful, for things be well, but few ever invest in the causes and conditions to make these things happen. You want your house to be clean but you don't want to move your ass to pick up the broom; we want others to treat us well but we don't invest care in them; we want to be peaceful but we flood our senses with 9gag and facebook and all. And then we complain about external circumstances that have caused us to be like that. That's not skillful.
"You are not stuck in the traffic. You ARE traffic."
We blame society, but we are society. Change always has to start inwards, and by changing ourselves, we are one step closer to helping others change for the better too. Complaining about things don't change anything. Yes it seems like slow progress, that we have to start one person at a time. But as long as the ladder is leaning on the right wall, it doesn't matter how slowly we climb, we will get to the top eventually. We can build an escalator on another wall and run up at top speed, but if it's up the wrong cliff, it's still slower progress than the ladder. Right view is the forerunner of all things.
So Sze Yuan, strive on. :)
01-05-2014 22:55pm
