Category: Muse

Caveat: A random grossly sappy scribble below. Granted, this is partially meant for the silly attention-seeking purpose, but more of capturing what I feel at this moment for future reference.

 

I’m about to leave the city in which I was born and raised, and unlike previous cases, I am yet to know when I would be able to come back. This should serve as an excuse for getting nostalgic.

Looking back how things came about so far, the only consistency in my life has been inconsistency.

My fickleness and the lack of tenacity to stick it out, surely contributed to the spontaneity in my life.

Basically, I have let my life evolve as it drifts and the justifications for my decisions have been mostly concocted in hindsight.

Along the way, some people came into my life and many of them have walked away.
The reciprocal nature of human interactions doesn’t allow us to engage in every social connection that we have forged to the same degree.

My disinclination to sever social connections clearly exists, but my curiosity to explore things that I have yet to encounter is also real, at this another juncture of my life. The problem is they are inherently conflicting, if not incompatible.

I view a life is to strike out the balance between these two.

The growing sense of detachment and aloofness is not pleasant, but more often than not, my stupid laziness or external expediencies (under the pretense of being hectic) prevails over the effort to stay in touch. I should have put more effort in holding them tight and vivid.

However hard I try to defy, hypocrisy has been my survival instinct. It’s so entrenched to the point of making it impossible for me to ditch it. Because of this insecurity within, it usually takes long time for me to genuinely open up my mind to others, and the chances are that I would probably not be able to forge genuince social ties with others in the future (given how spontaneous I have become).

I recognize the self-aggrandizing effort of dramatizing my petty existence is negligible in the eyes of others and worth paying zero attention.

My tiny universe has been evolving around me, not anyone else.
The obsession with myself and the paranoia associated with will probably be around as long as I care to engage in the world/society under which I operate.

As a caveat, this might be just another transient reflection of my skewed perception toward life, and by no means organized or designed to get across any sensible messages. I just want to capture exactly how I feel before it fades away, and make it as my benchmark when I have to face similar circumstances.

 

Getting over the loss of someone close is always a challenge, especially because I’ve been fortunate to have only few experiences in this regard yet.

 

That happened to be my birthday this time. After having spent a cozily busy day, I logged into Facebook, expecting the inundation of birthday wishes with which I would have been ready to reply one by one otherwise, even knowing that’s just another tedious task for both sides (who sends and receives wishes). Utterly, out of the blue, it only took several messages before I stumbled upon a news of the tragedy that had befallen to my friend.

I don’t quite remember exactly how I felt at the initial moment, but skimming through the following messages with the same news, the hazy realization gradually sinks in.

 

It was and has been surreal. Recognizing that a person I had spent a memorable time with no longer exists, but it doesn’t feel any change had happened to my daily life, which continues to be characterized by slight ups and downs. This may be because of the geographical distance and the inversely proximate SNS presence, for good or bad. Particularly, I don’t like the fact that I have been quite functional in putting aside personal tragic news from my daily concerns that often nudge me to preoccupy myself with fulfilling time-sensitive agendas. Even after the night-long recollection of her upon the initial notification in the midnight, my life started as usual next morning except for the sleep-deprived mind. I was pretty much able to function normally, which seemed as if I hadn’t been unaffected at all and added up my self-disgust for prioritizing my daily agenda over a brief moment for commemorating the departed. 2 weeks has already passed since the news and I have been more and more consumed by my daily such and such, letting the memories fade in my mind.

 

Given the memories and inspirations she had bestowed upon my life, the loss should have been devastating, but there seems to be part of me who puts my day-to-day concerns above the loss. Simultaneously, knowing that at a certain point I have to get over, I don’t know when it should be, or whether I should “overcome” in the first place.

 

After all, the tragedies are so rife if I take a second to glance; all the while there are people dying out there for no apparent reason as well as insurmountable injustices that are beyond our control. Since the more proximate and emotionally invested the affected person is, the greater the loss is felt, I cannot deny that the loss of a person I have shared a greater time with evokes more emotions and commemoration than unidentified masses passing away across the globe everyday. Probably, this is because they are the ones who enriched my life more directly/visibly, thus my perceived gratitude and sense of loss should be accordingly greater. However, what bothers me is; after a while even the loss of someone close seems dwarfed by my daily preoccupations. No matter how hard I defy, “Myself” has been and will continue to be the prime concern for me, giving less regard for the deceased as the time progresses.

What I’m writing here might be just a disguised justification for sucking it up and moving on.

Granted, the sense of bereavement has been gradually ebbing, but I still have a feeling that cherishing silly moments of my life should be refrained. Perhaps, funeral is the threshold after which people might feel ok to move on, but being unable to attend it for the first time, I need some contemplation to replace the shared moment of commemoration.

 

I happen to be fortunate to have encountered only few losses, especially considering my age, but the chances would only grow as I get older.

It’s despicable to think that I might end up getting so accustomed/numb to seeing off the departed without paying the deserving tribute to them, but it’s likely that the loss felt for each pass-away will likely to diminish as I will have to face them more and more.

 

However over-sentimental and self-righteous I might be pretending to be, this is how I’ve been used to. Contemplation is futile when no action is accompanied, but that’s exactly what I excel at. And again, even in the face of bereavement, there is me whose preoccupations are centered around myself.

To alleviate this internal resistance, I will attempt to frame the concept differently, even though it is anticipated the egocentric view toward life would always stick around (what I’ve been dumping here is primarily for the sake of myself after all).

Since I am one of the privileged who have been relatively insulated from the miseries of life, and spending my life comfortably despite trivial grievances, there have always been nagging doubts against shrugging off others’ miseries and moving on. However, I seemed to have been too obsessed with not “shrugging off” others’ miseries just for the sake of making myself appear highly moral.

Given the irreversiblity of one’s death and pervasive misfortunes, getting caught up with what cannot be undone to the point of being unable to move on, is itself a miserable state neither side wants.

There is just so much that is out of my control, but I can still make things better incrementally. Simultaneously, it’s also true that at this moment I have little idea how I could take my part in giving back to the people who shaped me, nonetheless.

One thing I’ve been getting clearer is squandering opportunities by indulging in excessive reminiscence is not the optimal way for paying the tribute to the ones who have lost access to such opportunities.

The better alternative should be; embodying what they have inspired me by living my life to the fullest.

Leaving the definition of ‘fullest’ aside, this seems a much better way for commemorating and paying the respect for the departed and underprivileged whose presence had given me inspirations and remembrances.

 

As anticipated, It might have ended up becoming a pragmatic/feigned/incoherent justification for getting over the tragedy of others, but I firmly believe taking time for commemoration and condolences is something we should dedicate ourselves to when one passes away.

 

I did not want to let the mere passage of time to heal what has been emptied by her loss, so rather I dared to chronicle what I feel at this moment, and I hope this could serve as a reference point at which I can come back and keep myself going in the face of tough times so as to pass on what I’ve been inspired by her.

・Healthy dose of face-to-face interactions is a must, especially everyone else is in a festive mood.

・Spending a disproportionately huge chunk of time with parents during such period makes you feel somewhat pathetic but worth cherishing, revealing the refined sense of how to engage in filial piety in the near future.

・All the while, I have been rendered more aware of how old they’ve become, and how little time left for me to be a sensible grown-up. I’ve been an uncle for 2 months btw ..

・Improvising 3,500 words in a day over 14 hours was not a good idea.

・Unintended byproduct of pulling an all-nighter in the genuine sense: staying awake more than 24 hours, for the first time in my life.

・In quality-wise, it was disastrous as highly anticipated, but the degree of devastation was even more accentuated when reviewed after submission (rather there was no minute for revision); mere repetitions of incoherent nonsense on a lengthy scale. It was like vomiting out whatever cropping up my mind and type them spontaneously.

・This was not a required assignment, rather voluntary one. Deducing from the fact, I might have been ingrained with a bit of Kiasu mindset in Singapore.

・Later getting notified that the assignment was 5000 – 10000 LETTERS, instead of words, was such an enlightenment

・Reminiscing upon 2011 and later extending the nostalgic sentiment all the way back to my childhood, as I was converting pictures into digital form and ditching many of them.

・I’ve been aware of this for a long time, but once again I got reminded that I have a strong disinclination to throw things away.

・And this disinclination seems to be in proportion to how much time and emotions I invested upon the stuff; e.g. However shabby and wornout it looks, I feel emotionally attached to the school bag that I had been using all along the high school.

 

——reader discretion advised, I seem to have got into emo mood——

・An analogy can be drawn from this rather obsessive reminiscent sentiment that I seem to adore

・Translating this sentiment into how I interact with other people

・Recognizing every encounter in life has its end, most of which are either imperceptible or just be forgotten, I somehow manage to nurture some of social encounters to the extent that I call them as friendship or the like.

・But at certain points in life, it becomes too difficult to handle all the connections I have to the same degree, and consequently it is inevitable to sacrifice some of them, and regardless of how much emotional connection I have developed, the eventual disconnection will invariably come anyway.

・Having drawn this analogy, this inevitability of prioritizing-one-over-other and eventual disconnection seem to have been the source of my reluctance in placing myself in genuinely engaged relationships (not necessarily confined to romantic ones), sensing that all the time and memories shared will turn into oblivion in someday.

・After having purged so many stuff from my room, I became more disinclined to put things in my room for fear that I would have to deal with more of my grossly sappy inner conflicts.

・If I apply this logic to how I interact with others, then I would be supposed to prefer getting myself secluded, rather than daring to place myself in human dynamics. And it would also mean that I should be picky in selecting people whom I interact.

・This is the exact opposite of what I have been conducting myself upon, and counterintuitive to the degree that I cannot embrace

・So, rather than attempting to capture human relations as some tangible manifestation, I will just let them transcend physical frameworks and continue to be an obscure notion to me, which calls for perpetual trial and errors, as they have always been.

 

・Getting confused by myself..

・My room hasn’t been organized, and I will probably continue to get my room messy, combating my inner emotional resistance each time the space gets too overloaded.

・but that’s fine and the same should be applied to human interplay, I think.

・After all, life is not about chasing or chased by efficiency

・In retrospect, I have also been benefited from what I had to lose each time I was forced to make a choice, whether I was aware or not at the point of decision.

・The recognition that I am constrained by innumerable factors is what makes me further appreciate what I already have at this moment, and that is also what gets me look forward to new encounters that are yet to come.

・Given the somewhat flippant attitude toward my life and future, I am likely to get a huge slap in my face, especially as my first career will be determined this year

・But as it has been always for me, whatever path I end up taking, I just suck it up and it will be fine anyhow

 

・Once again at this point, I hereby pause for once and embrace what I have found and lost

・However winding and inefficient, this is how I get myself moving forward, and probably it will continue to be.

・The end of self-contained contemplation

 

・Disclosing this soliloquy is merely intended for attention-seeking purposes, as you might have correctly guessed by now

・Finally I would like to express my sincere apology for those of you who have been spammed and annoyed by my upload binge today