The paradox of existence

After a recent conversation with my mother, my mind was confounded by three concepts – Fate, Prayer and Personal Responsibility. I spent the last couple of weeks obsessing over these three concepts and how they relate to one another. To me, these three concepts are almost mutually exclusive, and personal responsibility is the only one of the three that I subscribe to. However, I realize that people around me have varying degrees of faith in the other two concepts that I rejected. So, I wanted to walk through my head and open my current beliefs up to challenge and see if I would change my attitude after some reflection.

I do not believe in predestination. There is no Que Sera Sera in my belief system. I was brought up to believe that God had made some plans for all of us. Very often, I used to hear that “whatever is fated to happen, will happen”. I was never totally sold on that. I saw life’s events as coincidences of the conscious actions of myself and those around me. I saw forces of nature as additions to this equation rather than the generators of this equation. It is tempting to attribute life’s fortunes and misfortunes to fate. It is convenient to use fate to make sense of life, especially during hard times that we don’t think we deserve. However, for control freaks like me, sharing responsibility for my life with something as abstract as fate is not at all easy. I like to keep a tight grip on the relationship between my personal will and the events in my life. The notion of fate actually distresses me, and I feel reassured only when I tell myself that there is a logical explanation for what is happening around me instead of letting fate account for everything I can’t explain.

I do believe in prayer. It’s just not the same kind of prayer as prostrating and reciting verses to appease God and to make Him willing to grant my wishes. I do not believe that telling God what I want has any bearing on whether I get it or not. Prayer means something totally different to me. It was the song “Vaedham” from Salangai Oli that first made me realize what the true meaning of prayer was. The theme of the song is the selfless dedication that the dancer has to the art. It has lyrics that loosely translate to “The melding of music and dance is a penance” and “The Vedas are embedded in the sound of the Salangai”. In a broader sense, I believe that prayer is anything that is done is done with such a deep level of dedication and sacrifice that a person gives up his body, mind and soul for something. To me, that is where the magic really is. I believe that there is no greater prayer than a student’s dedication to learning an art, or a parent’s dedication to nurture a child. I “pray” by displaying grit and determination and by sacrificing certain things in order to attain the things in life that are truly important. That is the kind of prayer that actually works.

If life is a matter of predestined events and answered prayers, where does personal responsibility come in? In my opinion, personal responsibility trumps all cosmic activity. I do not lead my life believing that I am a pawn in the grand scheme of life and that I am leading a life that has already been chosen for me by a higher power. I believe that it is my choices that shape my life. Good or bad, I hold myself fully responsible for how my life turns out. I never blame my misfortunes on fate or on God for not listening to me. This attitude of mine gets me in trouble sometimes. For example, I have many homosexual friends and I love and respect them the same way I love and respect my other friends. However, there is one fundamental thing that we disagree on. I believe that homosexuality is a lifestyle choice instead of an orientation. I don’t think people are “born homosexual” any more than they are “born to prefer apples to oranges”. I applaud my gay friends for choosing an unconventional lifestyle, but I tend to disagree when they start saying things like they were “born that way”. Well then, if I don’t even let something as scientific as DNA overshadow personal responsibility and choice, why would I ever let cosmic events do so?

I am unable to find a way to stomach the concepts of fate or prayer exactly like people around me do. I have many, many questions, and no satisfying resolutions. One fine day, I went straight to the source of the confusion. When I next spoke to my mother, I asked her how exactly one could believe in predestination, pray for a good life, and hold people responsible for their actions all at the same time. This is what she told me. Apparently, our lives are determined by fate. However, people have the power to divert fate if they are intelligent enough. (Vidhiyai mathiyaal maatralaam.) That’s apparently what people pray for – the intelligence to be able to change their fate. Very cute, but not quite enigmatic enough to sway me.

I do not question the validity of what other people think about this matter. I still believe that we’re all looking at the same thing from different angles. My own beliefs, however, don’t seem to have changed as a result of this exercise. Not yet.

23 and wiser - Part 2

Now, I have spent a little over a year out of formal education, and in what I consider to be “the real world”. At first this “real world” scared me, as there were suddenly so many lifestyle options available to me. I was suddenly under so much pressure to make all the right choices. Because of the pressure, I was still shying away from exploring new things and, instead, confining myself to the familiar territory of my job, my apartment, my family and my friends. I felt like a safety net was removed from under me the minute I graduated. On many occasions, I would have given anything to crawl back to my college life, where things seemed much simpler. Today, I finally put my finger on why I was feeling this way.

All this while, I had been treating my present as “investments” in my future. This is why I felt the need to “invest” my time wisely in actions that would ultimately lead to a “good future”. At first, I thought I just hadn’t gotten out of the “investment” mindset yet. Maybe that explained my choice of activities. This mindset is actually a valid one, and I have no reason to pull the stops on it. It is good to channel energy into solid ambitions even after starting my first career. However, it would unfortunate if that kind of resolve translated to constraints on which of my dreams I should pursue.

Just when I thought I’d never figure out what it would take to get me to try out things I wanted to do without worrying about whether it would be worth my time or not, I discovered another reason for my hesitance. It wasn’t entirely the notion of “investment”. In fact it was also the notion of “reverse investment” that was stopping me. In my eyes, I had entered a stage of my life in which I’d “invested” all along. Now, I was reluctant to do anything that I had not “invested” in. I felt compelled to live out my earlier investment and only my earlier investment. I didn’t think I deserved to explore any other skills or lifestyles I hadn’t prepared for earlier. So wait – I made sacrifices in my academic career to have this professional career, and now that I have this professional career, I can’t have a life outside my professional career because of those sacrifices? It makes no sense whatsoever, but that’s apparently what I’ve been thinking all along. This mindset, I have absolutely no problems quashing.

Once I get that personal obstacle out of the way, I hope to rekindle old passions and discover new ones. I do not want to live each day just to sustain myself. I want to learn new skills. I want to reach out to people beyond my circle of family and friends.

The “rest of my life” has already started. If I ever want to accomplish my goals and realize my childhood dreams, now is the time. All this while, I had put my life on hold to focus on immediate goals. Now, my goal is no longer to do well in the next exam or to graduate from the next school. My goal is to make my life as full and as exciting as possible. I should start living one day at a time instead of living one semester at a time. I am glad i took the time to figure out what was stopping me.

There are several clichés I could use here, but the bottom line is – This is my life. This is my chance to be who I want to be. I should no longer dream of doing certain things in the future. This is it. This is my future. Whatever I want to do, I need to do now before it is too late.

23 and Wiser - Part 1

This is your life, are you who you want to be
This is your life, are you who you want to be
This is your life, is it everything you dreamed that it would be
When the world was younger and you had everything to lose

-This is your life by Switchfoot

And that, my dear friends, is this year’s birthday theme song. For the 4th year in a row, that honor goes to a Switchfoot song.

Every year, on my birthday, I wake up with an existential crisis. I ask myself questions like “Who am I?” and “What is my purpose on earth?” and try to make sense of my life’s events. This often leads to a plunge in self esteem when I realize how insignificant I really am in the grand scheme of things. I also think about people my age (or younger) who have accomplished more than I have. The Wikipedia search tool has made that easier and more humbling. Not that I will consider myself “significant” when I get my spot on Wikipedia. Nevertheless, the significance of my life was the center of this year’s existential crisis. What are my goals in life? Are they going to make me “significant”?

When I was still in school, my goals were well defined. These goals were, by default, whatever would determine the next immediate phase of my academic career. My number one priority was simply to do well in school. I needed to do well first to get into a good secondary school, then a junior college, then a university. Even my extra-curricular activities in school were just another paper chase. There was a brief period of time in which I actually did explore my interests outside school. I learnt to sing, dance and play the flute. I educated myself in graphology. I embroidered several pieces. I even had some writing projects I tried to get off the ground. There was BE(A)WARE, an online newsletter in which I wanted to involve students who were branded as “difficult” in school. In yet another project, I went as far as publicly soliciting short stories about Singaporeans who studied abroad. There were plenty more attempts to break out of the education system to find out what else I was capable of. However, it was only a matter of time before I realized that this was a luxury I could ill-afford while I was still in school, and these projects and hobbies died out one by one. I do not blame the system. I am fully accountable for my inability to keep up with myself while I was still in “the system”.

College was a different beast. On one hand, I definitely had more opportunities to develop non-academic skills. I capitalized on those opportunities, and enjoyed every minute of it. I tried not to be too afraid of aligning my academic life with the rest of my life. If I would compromise my GPA while spreading myself thin, then so be it. I wanted an education, and not a paper chase. However, only one layer of constraints was removed at this stage. Although I felt free to pick up jobs and activities that did not traditionally complement my curriculum, I still only chose work that I knew I would be able to do well. I only had time to hone skills I already knew I had. I did not have the time or the motivation to break this invisible barrier and to explore other things. With all my time commitments, I could not risk spending time on something I might not be so good at. I now ask myself why not. Why did I feel obliged to only take up projects that I knew I could be successful at? I would hate to think that my job search had anything to do with it. After all, I made sure I did not turn my extra-curricular college education into a paper chase. If I did that nevertheless, then would the second layer of constraints spontaneously peel away after starting my first job out of college?

To be continued...

Forsaken Mirage - Part 2

Maya has yet another pitfall. The line between my life and my imagination is very thin as a result of my belief in Maya. I have made a habit out of conjuring alternate realities in my head whenever I don’t like my physical reality. I delve into the “what if”s only to get me through tough times, but I am on thin ice. It usually takes me a lot of effort to will myself back to reality. In my mind, the only difference between fantasy and reality is that my fantasies are my personal Maya and reality is merely the Maya I share with other people. The only thing that drives me to maintain the physical reality is my belief in Karma. I feel like I have a moral responsibility to feature in other people’s Maya. As ambiguous this logic is, it has been effective in keeping me rooted in reality.

There were times when I thought there might be something wrong with me. After watching Girl, Interrupted, I wondered if I was a pathological liar. After watching A Beautiful Mind, I started wondering if I was a borderline schizophrenic. I have also thought about bipolar disorder. By no means am I qualified to draw the line between some indulgence in dreamland and a mental disease, but that doesn’t stop me from wondering if in my mind something is really twisted. However, I realize that if I try to justify every one of my quirks by finding conditions that force me to act the way I did, I would be creating another alternate reality in which I was psychotic. Fear of this Catch-22 situation has kept me from spiraling into this delusion of mental illness thus far.

Maya is one of my few “quick fixes” for anger, depression and anxiety. Just like telling myself “this was my choice” uplifts me after setbacks, I feel better about losses once I tell myself that “it wasn’t mine to begin with”, and that “it was just an illusion.” I will never truly know how to weave the concept of Maya into my life without being a stone wall devoid of emotions, or a nutcase. All I know is that my belief in Maya is an integral part of my character.

Forsaken Mirage - Part 1

The concept of Maya was crystal clear to me long before I actually recognized it as Maya. Mother Goose preached it to me when I was a child. She pretty much sold me on the fact that life was but a dream, and all I needed to do was to row my boat gently down the stream. Boat schmoat, stream schtream, but my mind latched onto the last line – “Life is but a dream”.

As I came of age, my innocent belief morphed into spirituality. When I was old enough to question religion, Maya was one of the first concepts I readily accepted. Maya liberated me. It validated my tendency to seethe about a problem until the next morning, when I would wake up wondering what the fuss was all about. It validated my indifference towards wealth. It validated my liking for change. I did not shed a tear when I said goodbye to my friends and family when I left home. I was more than ready to let go of one illusion and embrace the next. As such, my belief in Maya was my source of strength.

One more thing that Maya validated was my reluctance to allow people to get though to me. After certain events in my life, I took care not to get emotionally attached to another person in order to avoid having to “wake up” from the illusion and get hurt. There are many people with whom I could form meaningful relationships because they never asked me to give my heart up. That barrier I put up acted as a filter. The friendships I developed despite that filter were the ones that transcended the superficial levels of closeness and turned out to be the most meaningful. There is, however, one person who has tried very hard to get me to lay down my arms and be vulnerable to love. On one hand, I almost feel like Zach Braff’s character in Garden State who discovers the “beauty in the breakdown”. On the other hand, this is where Maya meets its match. My staunch belief in transience has prevented me from building bridges between myself and this person. I am so scared of emotional attachment to a supposedly illusory element that I am failing to recognize the very special person in front of me. I am still trying to find that balance between having a fulfilling and enriching worldly relationship and not succumbing to this worldly reality and losing all perspective. Right now, I am clueless. My botched attempt to partially open my barrier is not only crippling me little by little, but it is also hurting the feelings of this special person.

To be continued…

Bitter medicine

I have not blogged for a couple of days because I have been trying to work on a personal statement for an online Master’s program application. At first I felt that I should channel all my writing “qi” into that essay. However, before starting to write, I needed to do some soul searching on where I am in my life right now, and figure out why I turned out the way I did. Unwittingly, I reopened several wounds in the process during my trip down memory lane. Needless to say, I have been so distracted that I have not made satisfactory progress on my essay despite my several attempts to put the brakes on my emotional roller-coaster. Time for Plan B. I decided that I would gain some closure on my feelings if I wrote about them instead of trying to deny them. I’m writing this entry about healing. No, I am not talking about how to heal. I am more qualified to write about how to juggle chainsaws. I want to explain (to myself, mostly) why I chose not to heal.

The soul-searching process took me back several years when I was someone I can now hardly recognize as myself. Then I started to relive the bittersweet transformations that I made at various points of time. That was when I caved in to my emotions.

Now, everyone has a past. Everyone has had growing pains, and everyone had made life-changing transformations. Most people do not harbor as much pain as I do because they choose to heal, and rightfully so. However, I find it hard to let my pain go. I spent too much time trapped in this pain for me to simply walk away from it.

The biggest reason I have trouble letting this pain go is that I can’t bring myself to forgive the people who gave me that pain. People who know me know that not many things offend or upset me. It only takes a little of those few things, however, to tip me over the edge, and that damage is usually irreversible. That is one of my biggest flaws, and I agree that I should work on that. However, for now at least, I am unable to forgive. I have never confronted anyone with how I feel about what happened so long ago. I see no reason to do that. So I guess no one even knows that I’m still holding them accountable for certain things. Some are even proud of what they did. Maybe the lack of closure is what’s killing me, but is closure really worth it? Everyone is at peace with themselves and has moved on. Who am I to spoil that? These are such wonderful people that I am talking about, and I don’t see what good could possibly come out of hurting them.

Maybe I should try the forgiving thing then. After all, what didn’t kill me only made me stronger. Besides, If I don’t want to confront my demons, I should try to peacefully escort them out, right?

However, I feel like I need to keep my angry thoughts close by. Until last May, I was living in a different “world” in which I could chuck my past away in the bottom drawer and start fresh. Now that I am out of school, I see myself being sucked back into a world that bears a faint resemblance to my past. I fear that if I don’t remember why I was so miserable in the past, I would find myself living the same life that I ran away from. This is when I need my anger as a defense mechanism so that I don’t get hurt again. Now that lessons from my past are more relevant than they had been before, I need to harness my anger so that it helps me make the right choices instead of clouding my vision. I am proud to say that I have never shown any spite towards anyone from my past. This means that my anger is in check. In fact, I am on very good terms with everyone, and think they are great people. However, I refuse to stop holding them accountable for my past.

In short, I do not want to drive my demons away. I believe that these demons make me a better person. They help me to understand myself and appreciate my emotional growth over the years. I don’t even mind when I feel anger as a result of these demons. I like the fire in my belly that gets kindled. I believe that spiritual giants get formed this way. I just want to control these demons and prevent them from shaking my confidence and self esteem like they did this past weekend. I guess healing is not for me, and now that I have told myself that I made a conscious choice not to heal, I’ll be okay.