regret

We could only have done what we have done, and nothing else, because if we could have done things differently, we would have, but we didn't.

Perspective

Perspective always comes with time, although for some things, I am still waiting. And for others, it comes too late.

proud

It would be nice if, instead of being dead proud of our jobs because of its salary, or power, or influence, or achievements, that we be damn proud of our contribution.

culture

What is culture, if it's not about living beautiful and harmonious lives with ourselves, with our bretheren, and with our earth.

Ginger

Once again death calls our game. And exposes it for what it is. A game. A charade where, like five year olds, we play house or work or cooking, or even husband and wife. Death breaks our illusion of immortality. And for some of us, we treat life in such high regard that we will try our utmost to stop death in others, as if it will somehow keep our nice and comfortable and happy game of life kosher. We save other people's lives in order to save our own souls. And when we fail, the sense of guilt that we could and should have been able to do something to save that person's life is more a reflection of our own insecure immortality, not the grandiose feeling of being an omnipotent demigod.

So now we know. And we are yet again reminded. That life means death. And death means life. And that this reality is by far the hardest fact of life to live by...

In memory of ginger who passed away peacefully in my arms yesterday morning.

C'est la vie

Doi Aung died in his sleep yesterday. young, passionate, unaccompanied, and seeking refuge in my country. C'est la vie...

and a hop and a skip

One of lifes lesser known pleasures must be skipping down a street, or less embarrassingly, down a flight of stairs. Everytime I do it (and I don't do it often enough), my heart too skips with joy and is gloriously unburdened of its hard egotistic shell...

time stops

Watching a bee going in and out of 10, 20, 30 flowers in a bush, until finally, with a flourish, he rises up in the sky and heads home.

bigger better

It seems that man is afflicted with this desire to be somehow better than the other. If, for instance, by pure stroke of luck or good upbringing or through hard earned experience and introspection, he is not racist or religionist or nationalist, ie not putting people of his own ethnicity or religion or country first, then he will most probably succumb to other methods of superiority. That he be better because of where he lives, who his father is, how he talks, what he does, his income, where he goes for holidays, what he buys and wears, his cultured upbringing and morality etc. whereas it may well be near impossible to teach morality in children without a sense of what is right and thus superior, the fact is that most things in life are neither good nor bad, wrong or right. But for the most part, we forget this...

cousin

Its only when I am face to face with a vulture... Eye to eye... 20 inches from each other, that I realise the common ancestry that we must have... For their eyes, ears, nose, mouth and for that matter, wrinkled forehead, are positioned in exactly the same place ... just like ours... And I look, not into the eyes of a bird.. But at my distant cousin.

progress

you know, sometimes i wonder how much we have actually progressed over these past few years. and going to the new low cost terminal at our airport has given me a whole new perspective on the steel and wood wonder that is KLIA or the Kuala Lumpur International Airport.

how much progress have we made, you ask? well, we have traded a short walk on tarmac exposed to mother nature to a half hour train and moving walkway ride. a few glorious drops of rain or rays of sunshine to walking past countless duty free shops eager to recoup the construction costs. a stuffy, cramped, claustorphobic and complex mechanical and hydraulic sky bridge to a simple bridge pushed around by a few blokes in orange overalls. a labyrynth of conveyour belts that manages to spew out your luggage onto a huge rotesserie after another half hour, instead of a simple short and straight belt fed by hand on the other side of the wall with your luggage in five because the plane is just a few metres away.

so this is progression. making things more complex and more expensive because we can. and progressively losing our connectedness with the world around us, and of lifes simplicity.

saying yes

sometimes, people say "yes" not because they agree with you and what you are saying, but because they haven't the slightest clue of what you are going on about...