A Sower of Seeds

A Sower of Seeds

After spending the last week-and-a-half on the road in Bangkok and Jakarta, I'm finally back to my cluttered room in Subang Jaya. I still have a big chunk of my report to finish up and I'm hoping that my next project doesn't come until next month. Hopefully my next trip to Jakarta is solely for pleasure and not business.

This last trip to Jakarta was a quiet one for me--I kind of sneaked in without telling many of my friends like Marlyn, Wiwie or Titi. I wanted complete isolation to concentrate on my work. But I did manage to meet my old friend Gunawan last night and we had a good dinner at Pecenongan.

And for old time's sake, we paid a short visit to some of our favourite nightspots in Kota. But I guess we are not accustomed to the loud music anymore. Things have changed a lot since we first met eight years ago; Gunawan even reads Osho these days.

How much have I changed over the last eight years? A couple of weeks ago I met an ex-Singaporean colleague here in Jakarta whom I've not met for at least four years. He told me that I looked exactly the same as he last saw me. Well, I'm not sure whether that's good or bad.

Maybe physically I've not changed that much--I still maintained my weight, my hair has not turned grey. But mentally, I think I've undergone a great deal of transformation over the last five years. A lot of what I write on this blog is an attempt to rationalize what I've experienced during this period.

So many things that I've read during my teenage and university years which I did not really understand then, over time revealed themselves to me in crystal clarity. These are the Tetris moments that I talked about.

I consider myself lucky that when I was younger and my reading appetite was voracious, I wasn't bothered very much by things that I did not understand. I just kept on reading. The mental soil might not have been right for the seeds to sprout but the important thing was that the seeds were sown. They are never wasted and will always lie dormant, waiting for the right moment to germinate.

There are a lot of things that I still don't understand. Books are not my only teachers; friends and even strangers that I meet everyday--they all have something to teach me. It is what keeps me going. I'd like to think that I wake up every morning a better person compared to who I was yesterday. That to me is the only thing that matters.

And I look forward to sowing more seeds (not wild oats :-)) tomorrow.