Storms; Freedom

I just slept for 14 hours, from 7pm to 7am. I remember having had at least two dreams, one involving some kind of secret operation and the other involving my uni friends. I may have had more, but I'm not sure now. 14 hours of real-time is a lot of time in dreamland, according to Inception.

“And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. when you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.” ~ Haruki Murakami

I've been dreaming a lot lately, and it feels like my anxieties have been trickling out a little through those dreams. The past few months have been filled with uneasy sleep, guilt, and constant worry and self-doubt, all because I tried to accomplish more than I knew how (or was able).

I had tried to deal with a false dichotomy; I had believed that you have to choose between pleasing people and achieving bigger goals some times, so I did what was not natural to me, and it made me feel lost and directionless inside. But in reality, such a division does not exist. You can still respect people while trying to achieve goals that may not please everyone at first. You can still wait and listen to people (including your self) while you figure out the best way to accomplish something that's best for everyone involved.

Ultimately, goals are about people. They are about the people who benefit from their accomplishment. They are about the team that executes them, the spirit and the motivation that the people inside it have. They are not abstractions that you should make blind sacrifices for.

In hindsight

God gives you a talent so that you can do your best to make the best of it, not so that you can insist that you're the best.

It's easy to say that, but practicing what you preach is a different matter. Often, experience is the only thing that can teach us lessons that we cannot learn through mere recitation. Experience is the only teacher that helps us to go beyond a mere intellectual delight in ideas; it brings us to understand the things that will make a real difference in our lives, and in the lives of others.

Experience will show you the best and worst things that lie within yourself.

We can never depend on ourselves to see where we've gone wrong in life. It doesn't matter if you're a decidedly rational and objective person, or born under the Libra star, or given authority by man to pass judgment over others. We are all imperfect, ill-shaped things, and we cannot see it, just as our physical eyes cannot observe our entire body on their own.


When someone decides to hold a mirror up to you, and call you out on all the things you cannot or will not face, you will get the chance to revisit your understanding of compassion. Is compassion always sweet, tender, and accepting? Perhaps, sometimes, it means hurting people and forgoing healing (in the basic sense), so that growth can begin anew.

Enough fear will help you to avoid doing evil. Enough shame will motivate you to pursue good deeds. Too much of either will paralyze you, making you unable to do the right thing, and rendering you incapable of having the right motivations. I'm sure that we've all had times when we were so ashamed that it was hard to go out and face the world... Sometimes our failures feel to heavy to bear... But I believe that we can accept our shame; we can accept that it has its place in our heart, not just as the emotional recognition of what is (or has been), but as the indicator for what can and should be. You can see it as the mark of personal inadequacy and shortcomings, but you can also come to recognize that it is a sign for you to go forward and improve yourself.

If you can come to see things in this way, then shame will no longer impede your willpower, but fuel it instead. When we reach that point, I know we'll be able to do bigger and better things, both for ourselves and for those whom we care about.






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The Vietnam trip is turning out to be more beneficial than I'd first imagined. It's an opportunity for us to revise our language foundations and to iron out all the dislocations and fractures that have gathered during the years.





Compassion
–noun
1.
a feeling of deep sympathy and sorrow for another who is stricken by misfortune, accompanied by a strong desire to alleviate the suffering.



“What you are comes to you” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

"People who complain weaken their Ki. Those who understand the power of language speak less." -Kushinada Chikage, from "History's Strongest Disciple Kenichi".

Happiness

Recently, just a few weeks back, I overreacted to something and treated a friend wrongly. Even after two days had passed, I did not apologize. All I could feel was indignation.

One more day passed, and though I still felt wronged, I wanted things to be normal again. I asked a friend for advice on how to make amends, and her advice was to offer a simple apology- no explanations, no justifications.

At first, I figured that this friendship mattered enough for me to apologize without meaning it. Then I realized that if I apologized without meaning it, it would demean our friendship. I tried thinking about things from her perspective. In the end, I texted her and apologized, and she accepted my apology.

What I did not admit was that I wasn't completely sorry; I knew where I'd gone wrong, but there was still a little part of me that expected her to apologize back, even though I wasn't sure she'd done anything wrong. My final decision was based on the fact that ultimately, the larger part of me felt remorse and had accepted that I'd made a mistake, even though there was still a little part of me that was disgruntled, seeking vindication.

At the end of the day, this is what I took away: If you're truly, completely sorry about a mistake you've made, not one bit of you will be looking for the other party to apologize back.

I had thought that observing the lives of people in Cambodia had helped me to gain perspective on life. I had thought that coming to terms with all my recent mistakes was helping me to learn humility. Recently I found that some of the things others did which used to irritate me, weren't affecting me anymore. I thought I'd learned to not sweat the small stuff, to not lose sight of what was important.

But now, somehow, writing and re-writing this entry, I'm not sure I know if what I'm feeling is maturity or numbness, or if the two are even mutually exclusive in the first place. Lately, I've been reading a book about offense by John Bevere. It talks about how Satan can use our feelings of resentment and hurt to separate us from others, and ultimately God as well. It reminds us that God's path for us is one where we lay down our judgmental attitudes and learn to forgive.

But as much as I try to understand, as much as I try to accept my mistakes, I still feel angry.



... And I was going to go on to wax lyrical about how this world seems to intertwine good and evil (conflate, is that the word I should be using?)- love with lust, brotherhood with deviance and indulgence. I was going to lament to myself how difficult it is to maneuver through all this moral ambiguity.

But it really is time to move on, and deal with it.

get on back to the falls of truth, you'll pull it out like a wisdom tooth

These past few months, I was blessed to overcome circumstances that I thought were insurmountable. I experienced new joys and got through difficult times together with my friends.

I also made mistakes that I never thought I would. I was careless and hurt people in ways I never thought I was capable of.

Only on the basis of truth can we see ourselves, where we've fallen short.

Lately though, I've had the hardest time facing some ugly truths. That I'm self-destructively lazy, especially when people aren't watching. That I'm not the harmless little saint I quietly thought I was. That I can bear resentments and remain bitter for unreasonable amounts of time.




If I've learned anything these past few months, it would be these 5 things:

1) If there's something you think you will never do, chances are that you're wrong.

2) Friendship is a privilege, not a right.

3) If you are fueled by neither quiet confidence nor rushing adrenaline, do NOT say aloud the edgy, provocative joke you are thinking of in your head.

4) Small mistakes have big consequences.

5) There will always, always be gorgeous and unattainable women, wherever you go. So no rush. Failure will always be an available option.



Also,

CARRIERS HAVE ARRIVED.