Many New Days maketh a New Year

As always, a blog post before the year ends. A brief moment of reflection, a breather and a respite, an opportunity to reconstitute myself to face the challenges of another year.

How often do we look towards a new year with hope and optimism. We make resolutions and vow to be a better person. We dive gloriously into the new year, only to be sucked into its thick currents of turmoil and challenges and then emerge at the end of it, panting and bruised. We take a deep breath, and the whole cycle repeats again.

I've always had this resolve to be a better person today compared to who I was yesterday. Every day brings fresh experiences to us which shapes us closer to perfection. That is the paradigm that I choose to view life. Life is a gymnasium for the perfection of the soul.

A new day to me is more significant than a new year. We should be celebrating New Days everyday, so that we don't have to wait a whole year before we seriously reexamine ourselves again. What a miracle it is to wake up every morning and to find that we are still alive!

There's actually no guarantee that we'll be able to regain control of our mind and body again once we succumb to sleep. Yet we conduct our daily affairs, making appointments and such with the confidence that we'll wake up the next day alive. How strange it is!

Every night we die and are reborn again the following morning. So be grateful for the "reincarnation" that is granted us everyday. There is no reason why we cannot wake up and do better than we did the day before. We already have the lessons of yesterday fully digested and we wake up with the accumulated wisdom of an entire life behind us.

The New Year is nothing but a fresh series of New Days. If we falter for one day, we can pick ourselves up again and continue afresh. Dive into the New Year like you always do: with hope, with joy, with wonder and optimism. But remember: take it a day at a time. And celebrate each New Day like how you would this New Year.

Tales of Survival

Two full meals a day is just right for me: brunch and dinner. My ideal routine for the day would be: wake up early in the morning to kick off the day with some work, then take a break during mid-morning to run errands and do brunch, before resuming work in the afternoon and early evening.

The early morning work session is great--it allows me to put in 3 solid hours of work before other people even begin their day. I reserve this 3 hours for "real work"; this includes any task that require a high degree of concentration, such as writing, analysis, coding, researching and planning. Thinking work. The rest of the day, I know I'll be constantly occupied with phone calls, meetings and e-mails--"regular work" or work that does not require deep thinking.

My ideal daily routine is broken whenever I have early morning meetings in town. Then I'd have to start off early to join the rush-hour procession of cars to the city. Usually I'll use the one-hour drive to enjoy a good audiobook or listen to my favourite podcasts.

Driving is never dull when I have my iPod with me. My current "read" is Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage by Alfred Lansing. This is an exciting account of Sir Ernest Shackleton's famous expedition in 1914 to the Antartica, to attempt an overland journey across the icy continent. On their way there, their ship, the Endurance was trapped and crushed by the frozen sea. It is a nail-biting (frost-biting?) tale of survival in the harsh sub-zero temperatures of the Antartic seas, a gripping saga of men forced to stretch to the very limits of their endurance. Even when I was trapped under the hot KL sun in a traffic-jam listening to the audiobook, I shivered and froze together with these men, as they overcame every obstacle that Nature threw at them--blizzards, stormy seas and treacherous ice floes--to rescue themselves from one of the most treacherous and inhospitable places on Earth.

Tales of adventure and exploration like this are such wonderful reads. A couple of years back, I read an exciting account of Magellan's journey to circumnavigate the globe--it was a satisfyingly thick hardcover book which I had lugged together with me during one of my projects in Bangkok. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I recently found an audio version of the book and so I intend to "reread" it again soon.

These tales are also very inspiring; they demonstrate to us the strength of the human spirit in overcoming seemingly insurmountable obstacles. We sometimes think that we face similar situations in our lives too--intractable personal problems that bother us day and night. But tell yourself to find comfort in the fact that no matter how difficult the challenges are, it is nothing compared to what these explorers had to face.

In fact, hardly any of the challenges that we face in our humdrum middleclass existence is a matter of life and death. I haven't heard of a yuppie starving to death before. Most of the time, it's just the ego that needs to suffer a bit of bruising. Compare that to losing a leg to frostbite.