Walking Each Other Home

It's that time of the year again--the eve of a new one. I left the office early today to do some banking in USJ. Then I decided to linger at the Starbucks nearby to finish off some work. After that, I went for an early vegetarian dinner and set off home.

Now I'm back in the sanctuary of my room to reflect on a year that just passed. It felt like I had worked the entire year without taking a break--which, in essence is quite true. I certainly did not take a holiday and I did not have any boondoggle trips out of the country. As a matter of fact, I did not travel out of the country at all for the entire year.

Overseas travel has become such a commonplace affair these days; everyone talks about their foreign holidays, as if it is another trip to the neighbourhood store. The usual destinations are of course Korea, Thailand and China. Since I did not travel anywhere, let me recall what has been significant to me for the past the year.

These days, I do not yearn for new experiences anymore. What I seek to achieve is to internalize good practices that I've been meaning to put in place. Perhaps the most significant thing for me is to reestablish a blogging habit--at least once a week. This I've been pretty successful in maintaining. Monday is both my vegetarian and blogging day now.

For the past years, I've also treated my work as a kind of 'workout'. It is like going for a walk everyday. Work is simply exercise for the mind. It keeps me mentally sharp. Work need not be such a turn-off if we know how to portion it and not to place too much importance to its outcome. You give your best to each task and move on to the one. The important thing is to continue learning and sharpening one's saw.

On the audiobook front, I think I sat through more hours of lectures than the average undergraduate. 2018 has been a year of history for me--I wanted to give myself a firm foundation on European history. The good thing about knowing history well is that it helps you to put so many other things into perspective. Everything you read suddenly becomes so much clearer.

I've also been meditating on a daily basis. I consider meditation an act of mental hygiene. As physical exercise is to the fitness of the human body, so is the practice meditation to the mind. Work, exercise and meditation are the triple medication I take regularly to maintain my physical and mental health.

As for my relationship with others, I do not aim for grandiose gestures. I only help people I'm close to and within my small sphere of influence. And over the years, these relationships have been both educational and rewarding. It is heartening to see people grow and change for the better.

For the country, 2018 has been a momentous year. A lot of people has expressed disappointment over the performance of the new government. But I beg to differ: I think we have over-achieved. Being an observer of the politics in this country ever since my school days, I know the solution to many of our problems cannot come overnight. Good things take time. But we humans are not known for our patience and perhaps understandably so, for our lifetimes are short.

And with the passing of each year, we become more conscious of our own mortality. Life is fragile. The impact we make in this world, for most of us, is hardly significant. But every one of us is significant in our own ways, in our small spheres of influence: a father, a mother, a friend or simply a helping hand.

Everywhere on social media, you see people's desperate need for attention and acceptance. We are all doing the best we can in the only ways we know. Everyone's path is different and each of us has, outward appearances notwithstanding, our secrets hangups and neuroses.

My wish for the coming year is that we see each other as fellow human beings who are all seeking to understand ourselves better. Let us all be kind to each other, for as Ram Dass so eloquently put it: We are all walking each other home. Happy New Year.

Seeds Across Space and Time

New Year's Eve is a good time to review the year that has just gone by and to peer ahead a little to see what's in store. I timed my year-end in such a way that I was able to finish reading my last book of 2017--Zaid Ibrahim's Assalamualaikum, which was recently banned by the government. I've had the book in my possession for a while but had no inclination to read it until I was reminded of it by the government's inexplicable move to ban it.

I have a huge array of books lined up for the coming year. The difficulty is always in deciding what to read. For 2017, surprisingly, my most enjoyable read was a collection of stories by Joseph Conrad "The Eastern Stories", which includes his short stories set in the Malay archipelago like Youth: A Narrative, The Lagoon, Karain: A Memory, The End of the Tether, Because of the Dollars and The Secret Sharer. And what great tales these are!

I actually bought this paperback volume back in 2001 at a bookshop in Nouvena, Singapore and have not gotten to reading it, as I found Conrad's prose a bit too ornate and convoluted for my liking. But I suppose our tastes change as we age, what was tedious about Conrad's writing then now seems so satisfyingly rich in atmosphere, memorable characterization and heart-wrenching emotion.

I have many books which I've bought but have not felt the inclination to read them yet, but I know their time will come. Books are like seeds that lie dormant, each one will have its time to sprout and grow in my mind, when the conditions are right. And as you grow older, you have a better sense of timing--what is the right thing to do at each moment in time. Every book will eventually have its day.

There was once a time during my youth when I had lots of time and not enough books to read. Now, I live in an age of information overload--there's simply too much content and way too little time to consume them. So I have to prioritize things wisely. Books are nourishment that one feeds to the mind, they provide maximum boost to the soul when ingested at the right time.

The anthology of stories by Joseph Conrad had to wait exactly 16 years before I was ready to appreciate the beauty of its writing. Books are durable supplies which we carry along with us through the journey of life, providing us the right nourishment at different way-stations along the path. And what wonderful nourishments do they provide!

One thing that has been constant all my life is my love for books. Thinking back, I've been an avid reader ever since I was a child and this habit did not let up even when I started working. 20 years ago, when I was working in Singapore, I spent many happy nights reading in my small HDB room in Bishan; I had spent long flights to US, engrossed in the collected works of Vivekananda and the autobiography of Isaac Asimov; I remember cold nights in Californian motels poring over books on the Mutiny on the Bounty and fond memories of myself sitting at a park in Geneva, reading The Horizontal Instrument by Christopher Wilkins; Yes, I was reading Sukarno's biography on one of my many happy train rides to Bandung; And that magical year 1995, spending hours reading Yogananda's Autobiography of a Yogi at the Kai Tak airport in Hong Kong, while waiting for my flight back to KL.

To me, part of the pleasure of travel is the opportunity to read. When you sit down at a cafe or a park at some foreign location, you get to slowly absorb the local rhythms of life. Travel is not simply shuttling from one tourist distraction to another. Travel, at least to me, is diving deep into the soul of a place. No better way to do that than sitting at a public place, with a good book and simply watch the world go by, as your attention dips in and out of your book, in between sips of freshly brewed coffee.

There's no greater joy in life to me than reading. Perhaps that's why I'm a reasonably happy person--because I have an endless supply of books to read! As I close the last chapter of 2017, I am opening another delicious new book: 2018. I welcome the new year with the anticipation of an eager reader, ready to dive into another new tome of adventure filled with thought-provoking ideas and wonderful leaps of imagination. Life is great simply because there are books and because there are readers and writers who partake in the ecstatic joy of the written word.

As I look back at all the books that I've read throughout my life, at various locations that I've been to, at various points in my life, I marvel at the many works that have enthralled me and influenced my thinking--seeds that I've gathered across space and time, seeds that have germinated in my mind and made me, for better or worse, the person I am today.

Let's now turn the page and dive into our new book: 2018!

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.

The Cycle of Creation

A moment of reflection before the year ends. Stop. No cliche remarks about how fast time flies, please.

That shall be my New Year resolution (if any is needed at all): avoid cliches. It is difficult to be fresh and original everytime in whatever we do or say. But it is the nature of life to be constantly reinventing and regenerating itself.

Life is defined by regeneration. The old withers away to be replaced by the fresh and young, sprouting from seeds of hope. The universe is creative. On one end of the spectrum, it is creativity at the physical level: reproduction and procreation. On the other end, artistic and scientific creations.

To cease creating is to die. To work is to create. Everyday I strife to create something new. The mind continues learning because it is like a tree that draws in water and nutrients from its surrounding to produce new branches, leaves and flowers. Nature is constantly creating and recreating itself.

It is our duty to continue learning and creating. The businessman creates new opportunities for material wealth to manifest; the poet puts new combinations of words and imageries to evoke deep thoughts and feelings; the engineer imagines new structures, to be shaped out of matter and energy to accomplish ever more challenging tasks; the painter fuses colours and forms to unleash fresh visions of the world.

We honour life by creative work. All work is creative. The housewife who cooks and sweeps the floor is an artist whose masterpiece is a harmonious household, filled with happy kids and a loving husband, brimming with a love that is like sunshine.

We welcome the new year, like an artist welcomes the sight of a fresh canvas. Smell the fresh paint on the palette, pick up your brush, mix your colours and apply the first stroke on the blank surface:

Let there be light.

A Moment of Poise

It is always great to be able to blog on a New Year's eve. It's an opportunity to reflect on the year that's coming to a close, and to look forward to the coming one.

Life has been quiet for me these past few years. 2010 has been a year where I sought to find right balance--between work and leisure, spirituality and materialism, art and science, indoors and outdoors, the mental and the physical.

I've mentioned elsewhere before that balance is the key to everything life. Wisdom can be defined as the ability to find the optimal balance between the polarities. The Buddhist state of mind called Equanimity is also a state of balance where one maintains one's composure in the face of life's ups and downs. Balance is everthing. The constant striving for balance is the essence of life.

On the eve of a new year, one is consciously aware that one is poised between past and future. We sit down to reflect on what has passed and we make resolve to do better in the coming year. But the fact is that every moment of our existence is a moment of poise between past and future. If we can consciously remain 'poised' all the time, we will be living in the present. We are never leaning over unnecessarily to the future nor being weighed down by the burden of the past.

Being present in the moment means doing the things that need to be down now, with focus and attention. There's a right action at every moment in time, and executing that action brings us into harmony with the forces of the universe.

This is what I strive to do everyday. To allow every moment to come to its fruition through right action. One moment at a time. One action at a time. One can't do any more than that. And along the way, we'll enjoy the fruits of our past actions; they always come at the right moment--with wisdom in its bitterness and humility in its sweetness.