The Odyssey of a Child

I'm back in my abode in Cyberjaya, feeling relaxed and far from the busyness of a typical week-day at work. The soft strains of a Haydn sonata in the background makes me feel right at home, transporting me back to my childhood days.

So much of our personality is just born with us. As a kid, I enjoyed playing on my own, trampling through the undergrowth in jungle, being close to nature and its many mysteries. The world was simply a playground to be explored. Even then, I've always felt I was continuing an on-going adventure that is life.

So many of the sights and sounds felt familiar to me. I was a child of the universe, as much as I was the offspring of my parents. When you are young and unburdened by the cares and hard realities of life, you felt like you could conquer the world. Nothing was impossible. You felt confident that even the greatest of mysteries are penetrable.

I read, because that was what I thought everyone did. Reading was to me, a mature activity that adults do. I couldn't wait to be able to stick my nose into thick tomes written in a language that I was still struggling to comprehend. My limited vocabulary did not deter me from poring through every page and sentence from cover to cover. For books were the emblem of adulthood and I couldn't wait to become one.

I did not know why a love of classical music came so naturally to me. It was as if I had known all the great composers--Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin--all along. I was just getting reacquainted with old friends. Their music seemed like a part of nature--emanating from the trees, the leaves, the sky and the stars that decorated the night. And wondrous nights they were, filled with the magic of moonlight, the incessant hum of insects and the serenade of nocturnal birds.

Little did I know then, adulthood was like the expulsion from the Garden. And then all subsequent passages of life, are but attempts to return to that lost Eden of childhood.  But Time, in its all-knowing wisdom, sets us up in unexpected ways, turning our odysseys into rites of regret and reconciliation. We become adults, simply by trying in vain to be children again.

But all we could recover were glimpses of that immortality. Nature made a pact with us, turning us into fathers and mothers of children, as a consolation for lost innocence. Though nothing--as Wordsworth so eloquently put it--can bring back "the hour of splendour in the grass, glory in the flower", we resolve to be strong. Thus we grieve the quiet grief of adults, hiding our despair in the vanity of worldly pursuits. 

And in our quiet moments, echoes of those childhood laughter still ring in the mind, coaxing us on, for they seem to lie ahead and not behind. And so we trudge on, with the faith that had been forged in our hearts, that adulthood is but a brief sojourn, and in the end, we shall all return, to reclaim our glorious Garden, as rightful children, born of heaven.

A Child of Christmas

Festive holidays are a great time for philosophical reflection. It is time for another one of my rambling posts on...whatever that pops into my head at the moment.

It is raining outside, and rain usually brings a certain feeling of nostalgia--I remember the fresh smell of the wet grass in the garden of my childhood home, the cacophonous croaks of frogs somewhere in the distant, the dark looming foliage of rubber trees, all wet and damp under the incessant patter of raindrops, and especially on nights like these--Christmas Eve--a certain feeling of peace and contentment envelops the night.

On nights like this I feel forever a child, and even at my age, I feel as if I've never outgrown that childhood sense of wonder and beauty, of carelessness and curiosity. It is a childhood innocence that is at once naive and noble.

This Wordsworthian conception of childhood has always been a part of my soul. Even when life plunges me into depths of despair, I would stare into the abyss, and see the child staring back at me. It is what gives me strength. It is what reaffirms life. It is what keeps me out of the abyss.

Newton famously said that he felt as if he was a child playing on a shore, engrossed in the beauty of pebbles and shells while the great ocean of truth still lay undiscovered before him. The great man knew how little we know about our universe, how much there is to learn, how humbly small that we as humans stand before the great immensity that is space and time.

It is the knowledge of our smallness before a greatness, a greatness which some reverentially refers to as 'God', that makes all children. And it is this enchanted child within all of us that saves us from the dreariness of everyday life. The saviour has always been within us. No one sees more awe and beauty than the child. And as long as we do not crucify the child within, we are the Messiah of our own fate.

Returning to the Oasis

To write again in this blog is like going home again after a long absence. I can't believe this is my first entry for 2012! Where have I been all these time?

I started blogging, I believe, in 2003, which makes this blog almost ten years old. I was enjoying my time in Jakarta then: I remember blogging from an Internet cafe in Sarinah, disciplining myself to an hour of blogging everyday (They charged 5000 rupiah an hour).

Those were certainly great times. Life in Jakarta was filled with discovery and possibilities. I wrote, I read, I explored and I made a lot of friends. I was freer than a bird.

And how I'd read: I had a book with me all the time and any spot that would allow me to sit quietly and undisturbed would be turned into a reading nook: on trains chugging my way across the Parahyangan mountains, in rustic Sundanese restaurants drowned in their hypnotic strains of gamelan music, at street corners after hearty meals of bubur ayam, serenaded by the ever-present buskers (pengamins), in my happy hotel room--half-watching BBC News on TV--after another satisfying day of wandering all over Jakarta.

Not only did I blog, I also wrote longhand in my journal: one page a day for 2 years, maintaining a habit I had started when I was working in Singapore. I had a maxim then: If something is not written down, it did not happen. One writes to live. Only through writing, life's events are thoroughly absorbed and assimilated into one's soul.

I have been doing a different type of writing these past years in KL: programming. Writing computer code is in many ways, a simpler task than writing prose. The vocabulary of programming is much smaller: everything is precise, deterministic and logical.

Prose writing, in comparison is a struggle--there's always that dreaded blank page, with the ever-blinking cursor mocking you from the computer screen, and there you'd sit alone searching, waiting for that elusive word or turn of phrase that would capture in perfection that thought you have in mind.

After years of wandering in the desert of computer code, now, or at least tonight, I stumble onto my old familiar oasis of a blog--the sweetness of its waters feels like balm on my soul.

Citadel of Trees

I always think of my childhood home, the place where I grew up as my "citadel of trees"--a place perched on the slope of a hill amidst dense foliage and innumerable trees, a safe haven where I can always find peace of mind and comfort.

Yes, there used to be a lot more trees--the rubber trees loomed majestically in front of my house; it was my playground, my magical forest in miniature where I had imagined all sorts of characters from Grimm's fables dwelled happily in rustic existence.

The rubber estate is sadly gone now. Ugly two-storey houses fringe the edge of hillocks where my elves and fairies had played. My childhood friends have all left to chase the dreams of adulthood; the mornings no longer bustle with the chirping of birds and the tinkling of pianos.

This is the sorrow that every generation has to suffer, coming to terms with the passing of time and the vicissitudes of life. We were too eager to grow up not knowing we'll spend the greater part of our adulthood trying to recapture the happiness that we once had as children; children who had believed in the birthright of their dreams.

I remember a fragment of a poem I wrote as a child, an ode to my beloved trees, inspired perhaps by Shelley and Wordsworth: "from them my dreams nourish, and in years they shall flourish".

Whither those dreams?