Saturday, August 14, 2010

On the Strangness of Life

Life sure is strange. You can never get what you really want from it, or figure out what it wants from you! It’s just a whole mess. Day after day. Day in day out. Comes and goes. Passes and ticks by. And you haven’t a clue what’s going on. You just ride the wave. Go with the flow. Events and decisions (not all yours, matter of fact most of them aren’t yours) and other people, that’s what makes up your life. It all comes together and produces this mixture, sometimes colorful sometimes colorless, but either way you accept it and learn to live with it. Or just let it be. Sit tight and watch it manipulate your life, your mind, your time. Some might call that fate.

Do you know how many times I’ve been carried off the playground at school? Seems that I always get knocked pretty bad, been happening all my life. Sometimes I'd be crying as some classmates pick me up and take me to the principal’s office, and I would sit and wait for mother to come for me. All dirty and sweaty and eyes filled with tears. No matter how many times I got hurt playing, mother always had that same concerned look on her face when she found me.

I’m just waiting. I’m letting the decisions be made for me. I’m running along. That’s what I always did all my life. It’s never up to me alone to decide what to do; actually no one can make a decision solely on their own.

There are always powers and sources interfering, guiding or leading you to make a decision. You’re never in control of your own life. It’s not your life alone, no matter how much you think it is. People and events around us make up our lives, without them we have nothing. Things will always happen in the end. Its the choices you make on the impulses you get in one particular event resulted by a decision that would draw up your recent future till the next decision is made up for you. And then you’re faced with another set of choices, and even then it’s not entirely your choice to go for whichever choice you tell yourself so hard to believe that is right. Tomorrow is just another day, just like today was just another day. Sometimes I feel like there is no past and no future. There is only present. There is only now. So that days aren’t bulks of time anymore, they are just symbols of something, some place, to be in. We don’t move forward. Days, they come to us. We stand still. We wait.

I remember my granddad (from my mum's side) he used to make us laugh so hard, he'd jut out his denture and start clattering them against each other and make these funny noises with them... or he'd take them off and give us this huge toothless smile! It was silly but when you're little anything like that makes you laugh. When he died, I remember how bad mother took it. She was very close to him. And somehow he used to hold the whole family together (after he was gone everybody get further apart and lost contact). Everybody loved him, he was such a character.

Funny all the time, even at the worst moments and situations. I remember that night I heard he had died, I sneaked to the back of the house and started crying silently, alone. I don't know. I just didn’t want anyone to see me cry, for some reason. I missed him that night more than I did afterward. I used to keep his thick black sunshades and his old, rusted ring... the glasses have disappeared since, but I still have that ring.

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