Connecting the dots

Today has been a rather philosophical day for me. I dont know if its the after effects of monkey man, or just because I've genuinely got a lot happening up there, but yeah... I've been thinking a lot today.

I met up with Dominic after my tabla rehearsal with the ICG folks in school. The plan was to have lunch then head down to brewerkz. Dominic asked me a rather intriguing question. We were sitting down at the hawker centre, having our lunch, and random people kept coming to our table, sitting down, having a drink and leaving. I looked at those people, they were all old and they looked like the kind of simple people who were happy with, or at least accepted what life gave them. They were the kind of people who seemed happy to go down just for a cup of tea, and then pick up their heavy bags and go on with life. Dominic asked what I saw myself doing in the future. Something I have been asking myself quite often. Whenever I look at myself, I want nothing less that being successful. But then I ask myself what is my definition of success. Money? Fame? Making my parents and those around me proud? Pursuing law? Pursuing drama?

I dont know what I want out of all those. I want to conquer all of them. I want to get a law degree, I want to become a lawyer for a while and then give it up sometime later for drama. This is what I want to do now, but in life, what you want isnt what always transpires. Sometimes you just have to accept and believe that whatever unexpected twists occur in your life will somehow help form a greater you. Of course, as Steve Jobs said you can only fully appreciate these unexpected twists when you are ahead in life, looking back at it. Like for me, I didnt do very well in my PSLE and I went into the normal academic stream. Of course when you are in there, most of us accept that we will end up doing the courses, which are not too stringent when it comes to admission criterias. when I was in sec 5, I believed fervently that I would end up doing a course in IT or something related to that. That was until I met my sister's boyfriend and hung out with him a couple of times. He recommended that I check out the diploma in Law and Management. I never knew that existed. For the last 7 months of my final year in secondary school, I wanted to get into that courses really bad. I would wonder at night if I was good enough, whether they would take me, whether I was good enough to compete with the express students. I made it into the courses and I cant think of a word that expresses the feeling I had when I received the letter of acceptance. Looking back, I dont think I would have made it if I had gone into express. I guess when it comes to subjects like maths, I need more time and that extra year was exactly what I needed. Back to Dominic's question, I dont know what will happen from here, but I guess I have to trust that the dots will eventually join in the end.

This leads my to my second topic. Fate. What exactly is it? When something happens to some people, they just sigh and say it is fate. I suppose that is a good way of dealing with things because you learn to accept what has happened and accept that there are things that are beyond your powers that will happen, upsetting whatever you planned. But it is another thing to go around waiting for fate to come lift you off your feet and bring you success. I was just thinking about it on my way back in the bus, and I feel that fate, luck, god, or whatever else you would like to call it, does help you in your quest, but in order to receive that help you have to take a couple of steps forward first. I guess these external forces have a way of sniffing out the relentless tryers. I feel that if your goal was a kilometre away, in a straight line, you just have to keep taking steps towards that direction and fate,luck,god will take steps towards you to help pull you the rest of the distance when the two meet in between. So we just have to keep taking steps, and trust that one day you will get to the in between line, and hopefully luck will take you the rest of the way. Someone once asked me what is luck? He said that perhaps another word for it would be a coincidence, a coincidence is when two incidences happen at the same time. Its just two things that have a low probability of happening, happening. In the same way, it is possible to replicate that, it is possible to create your own luck. And how do you do that? By taking steps I suppose.

The third thing I want to talk about is being yourself. Very often I hear people saying, just be yourself and everything will be fine. I often ask myself who am I? I find that my personality switches when I meet different people. But why does it have to change? Very often I ask myself which self should I be? In psychology, I learned that the human mind consists of three... levels or layers, if you will. The first is the Id, which is the natural instinctive part of the brain that seeks the primary needs of humans, like food and sex. The third layer is your super-ego (will get to the second in a bit). That part strives to become the ideal person one would like to be. Like a loyal husband, with a perfect family and career. The second layer is your ego. Thats the rationalising part of the brain that balances the two. People might be more inclined towards a particular level, and therefore this defines their personality. My question is at which level should one be? We all have needs, we all have ambitions, is it wrong to pursue them? Is it right to keep rationalising? They are always drawbacks, if you are overly rationalistic, then you will be too afraid to pursue your dreams that you secretly wish for. Where should one be? The only answer I can come up with is to find the right balance for ourselves. Everything in life has to have a balance and I suppose it is up to the individual to find his balance. I also believe that success is achieving what you desire without pushing anyone else down. Im sorry if the last bit of this post is a little bit all over the place, I just am too lazy to go back and edit, and rephrase my thoughts. Goodnight

PS: Munah is hot.