Life should be about finding out what we can do, and doing what we can. Sadly, the average Joe only knows what he wants to do, and does what he wants. Worse still, sometimes he doesn’t even know what he wants, whereby he does nothing worthwhile.

How true is this? If using this life model, then the ideal life scenario would be to find out what we can do, discovering that what we want to do coincides nicely with our capabilities, and getting the best of both worlds. The world is crappy because almost everyone does only what they want, and those caught in between the onslaught are manipulated into doing what others what them to do. The worst scenario is to find that what we can do and what we want to do are polar opposites. I should think that doing nothing is a safely neutral option, but to live in such boredom kind of defeats the point of living in the first place.

Fortunately, I should think that most people are able to do what they want. The problem is that often people want too much, and are unable to do as desired. The resulting frustration is echoed by millions everyday. People frustrated with school, people frustrated at work, others frustrated with families, friends, maybe a few frustrated at the state of society and at the state of humankind. What we want and what we can do often don’t quite match up.

Sometimes, finding satisfaction is merely a matter of changing our own expectations. How often have we heard this? Easy to say, but not so easy to practice. It is all in the mind, but changing your mental prejudices are like trying to lift yourself off the ground. It cannot be done consciously. It is something I have given up trying ages ago.

So, what do I want? I want to experience, to travel the world on my bike and observe the distances pass by under the wheels. I want to study, to learn, to understand. I want to achieve something that has meaning to me within this lifetime. But above all… I would like to love again.
21:07
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“If (IQ tests) were true, the emotional and worldly satisfactions in store for the intelligence tester would be very great. If he were really measuring intelligence, and if intelligence were a fixed hereditary quantity, it would be for him to say not only where to place each child in school, but also which children should go to high school, which to college, which into the professions, which into the manual trades and common labor. If the tester would make good his claim, he would soon occupy a position of power which no intellectual has held since the collapse of theocracy. The vista is enchanting, and even a little of the vista is intoxicating enough.”

-Walter Lippmann

After having nearly lost this quote, along with all knowledge of its origins, I think it might help if I were to write book reviews on this blog. Anything that can help crystallise the scraps of important knowledge floating around is very much welcome to me right now.
20:32
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“… I was worried that either or both of us had changed so much that we would not be able to get along as well as before.

“But my deeper fear was the opposite scenario: that neither of us had become very different, and still there would be nothing to say.

“There would be nothing to say because our friendship was not as strong as we thought - that it was largely contextual, a product of the time and circumstances we were in.”

This is a quote from a Straits Times author, written some months ago in relation to Facebook as a useful social networking tool. It summed up the emotions I was feeling at that time, the fear that close friends I used to know have drifted so far that I didn’t know how to reach out to them anymore.

Now I look at it and another meaning comes to mind: aren’t all friendships contextual? They originate in the coincidence of time and space and circumstances and character, separate, and come together again. Friendship is not an entity in itself, it is a pattern laced by the four factors, and collapses if one is absent. The comings and goings of friendships, while lamentable, is not one we can do much about apart from attempts to pivot circumstances to our advantage.
20:29
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There are times when I think all this time we spend living is all about finding out more about ourselves. We experience, and both shape and discover our inner self at the same time. We hunger for experience due to our lack thereof, meaningful experiences hinged by the beliefs we stand so strongly by. So many things in this world are mysterious and unknown, and the fire of youth burns fiercely in its passion to learn. Eventually, there comes a time when this fire burns out, when unknown things are no longer so mysteriously important, when we look upon ourselves and all appears well and right. We will one day hunger no longer; the eyes which once had dwelled upon the earth with curiosity and desire, these eyes will then stare out instead, in indifference and weariness.

That is my idea of what death ought to be like. It shall be a death of life fulfilled not by purpose or satisfaction, but by the quenching of incomplete dreams and fantasies. It shall be a death of life that tires of life. A life completed finally by apathy.
21:35
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The more I read C.S. Lewis, the more disgusted I become with his snobbish attitude with his past. In his autobiography, he kept impressing upon the reader how lowly and childish his past was compared to the present in terms of beliefs and decisions and so on. It was as though his theological present is high and mighty compared to his atheistic past, and if he was an intellectual prig in middle school, he certainly appeared to be a chronological prig at the time of the writing.

I don’t know about other people. Myself, I greatly value my past wholesomely, both the mistakes and the successes. These are the key components of my present self, without which I would not be who I am today. While I may have been able to better myself without those regretful moments, it is exactly those moments that I have undergone that forged me, more so than the happy times. Oscar Wilde was spot on when he said that the only things one never regrets are one’s mistakes. It is essential that we glorify our past, or we will be defiling our present.

I have to admit that I am living in the past. The present is usually hateful and confounding, the future is always hopeful but transient, and only the past is concrete and comforting. People who claim to live wholly in the present for its pleasures are merely immersing themselves in an illusion that the present is all nice and pleasing, without the troubling ugliness. They see the silver lining but are blind to the clouds. Maybe I am just unlucky or my outlook is too pessimistic, for we can always claim that it is because of the clouds that we have a silver lining to behold. Many a times, I do see that silver, but its getting quite infrequent, for the storm is often too potent for its quiet contemplation.

I envy people who are still schooling. They have a safe, controlled environment where reality is kept at bay. When you finally come into contact with the real world, your illusions about the present will be shattered. Perhaps you can create illusions upon illusions to preserve those illusions about the present. That is how some survive anyway, that is how some find meaning in their lives. Living it out in illusions.
21:53
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