The Natural Effulgence of the Soul

I'm feeling very relaxed today, enjoying my coffee and bagels at The Coffee Bean outlet at Nu Empire, Subang Jaya. I'm planning some of the activities that I will pursue next year, when I'll be completely free from my daily grind of work. It feels a bit like the long year-end school holidays that I used to look forward to as a kid.

Holidays to me do not necessarily mean a vacation to some exotic location. That's what most of my friends and colleagues do: trips to China, Japan or Europe, Northern Lights cruise or scuba-diving in some remote island resort. I'm no longer infected by the travel bug as much these days, even though I would not rule it out completely from any of my future plans. 

As a kid, I was interested in painting, especially in oils. My school holidays were spent happily immersed in some landscape or portrait project. But that is not a hobby I would want to revive for now, at least. I used to sketch a lot too, but having not done so for most of my adult life, I feel that I've lost a lot of my artistic spontaneity with pencil and pen. Calligraphy was also one of my childhood hobbies. I am toying with the idea of reviving these activities since I do have a large collection of fountain pens. It's a great excuse to put them to good use.

What I definitely crave most is to be able to play the piano again. My digital piano, back in my Cyberjaya apartment has some dead keys and I hope to get them fixed. I'm certainly no virtuoso on the keyboard, but I'm a pretty good sight-reader, a skill which thankfully I've not lost. I keep a collection of sheet music in my library too--the piano sonatas of Beethoven, Chopin's waltzes and nocturnes are among my favourites. I dream of caressing the keyboard again, trying my hand on some of the modern pieces too like Astor Piazolla's famous slow tango, Oblivion, Ryuichi Sakamoto's The Sheltering Sky and maybe Morricone's Love Theme from Cinema Paradiso.

I'm happy that all my favourite pastimes do not cost that much money to pursue. One of the joys of the internet is that sheet music for any of your favourite music are easily downloadable for free. I remember the first e-commerce purchase I made in the mid-nineties over the internet, before Amazon or even Google was a household name, was the sheet music for As Time Goes By, from that famous "play it again, Sam" scene from Casablanca. I remember that moment as almost miraculous--sheet music, in a pdf file, a digital good, delivered instantly to me on my computer upon payment. The dot-com era had truly begun!

These days, music--the food of love--seems to be flowing in my mind again, as if I'm in love. Yes, I am in love--in love with life, with all the simple pleasures that it offers; I'm filled, even bursting with gratitude for the little blessings that I receive everyday as an adherent of secular spirituality. When your happiness is not subject to outward appearances and the approval of others, you are unassailable. When all the petty little attachments of life are discarded--swept off like dirt on your car windscreen, what's left is simply Love. For Love is nothing but the natural effulgence of the soul.