wouldn't it be easier if you had someone to blame
hi blog...
i have always had a problem with writing... i mean having thoughts is one thing but being able to precipitate your thoughts coherently and transferring them onto physical medium is another matter. there is always a gap in the matter of thought and what i am able to convey in words. i guess that is why i stammer or pause incessantly sometimes when i speak. it gets worse when the listener is intimidating but i guess i have learnt to ignore that now. oh well... but that is not what i am going to talk about.
i have had the luxury of spending the entire morning browsing through the sunday papers. 2 articles in particular caught my attention. one of them, the cover story of the life section, reported about this cancer stricken former rgs/rjc girl and the other about a former kpmg chief executive who lost his battle to cancer last year. two articles, two contrasting moods, hopefully two different outcomes. the former is full of optimism, about how splendidly the school and all those involved reacted to raise funds and hope for the catholic girl. she writes in her blog about how determined she is to fight. we see how her friends rally around to take care of her even through her tantrums in hospital(i would throw a few too if i were in her position) and we wonder if our friends would do that to us if the same thing happened. the latter article is an excerp from a book he started but did not finish. his wife wrote the final chapter. he wrote about how he never took time out of his busy travelling and working schedule to spend with his wife and daughters. when his cancer approached the terminal stages, he took time to draw "closure" with the people around him, starting with 1000 odd people in his outermost social circles with emails, before proceeding with the people in his innermost circles and finally, spending a "perfect day" with your family. sometimes you wonder what a "perfect day" is. well someone close to me cheesily remarked that "only fools deal with absolutes". arguments can go on until the cows come home but i believe the only thing that stops us from having a perfect day everyday is the expectations of perfection we harbour for ourselves. these expectations make things imperfect in our lives, make us strive for better things and ultimately pushes us to try again tomorrow, for we assume we have all the tomorrows in the world we can ask for. that man had a limited number of tomorrows and probably eliminated that element of expectation, for just spending time with people whom he wanted to spend his last days with was "perfection" in itself. i tried to imagine myself in his position but i guess being able to fathom his predicament is impossible. one can only sympathise, unless he is terminally ill himself.
well all that thinking about how i would handle this and what i would have done made me realise that the natural instinct for anybody is to think about himself first when he engages in anything, be it just listening to a heart wrenching story or witnessing and accident. as cliched as it may sound, it really is sad when we can only find time to spend with our loved ones when something bad happens. we think about ourselves too much. thats how consumerism works i guess? love yourself to death.. because you're worth it...
198 days to freedom...
tcy
i have always had a problem with writing... i mean having thoughts is one thing but being able to precipitate your thoughts coherently and transferring them onto physical medium is another matter. there is always a gap in the matter of thought and what i am able to convey in words. i guess that is why i stammer or pause incessantly sometimes when i speak. it gets worse when the listener is intimidating but i guess i have learnt to ignore that now. oh well... but that is not what i am going to talk about.
i have had the luxury of spending the entire morning browsing through the sunday papers. 2 articles in particular caught my attention. one of them, the cover story of the life section, reported about this cancer stricken former rgs/rjc girl and the other about a former kpmg chief executive who lost his battle to cancer last year. two articles, two contrasting moods, hopefully two different outcomes. the former is full of optimism, about how splendidly the school and all those involved reacted to raise funds and hope for the catholic girl. she writes in her blog about how determined she is to fight. we see how her friends rally around to take care of her even through her tantrums in hospital(i would throw a few too if i were in her position) and we wonder if our friends would do that to us if the same thing happened. the latter article is an excerp from a book he started but did not finish. his wife wrote the final chapter. he wrote about how he never took time out of his busy travelling and working schedule to spend with his wife and daughters. when his cancer approached the terminal stages, he took time to draw "closure" with the people around him, starting with 1000 odd people in his outermost social circles with emails, before proceeding with the people in his innermost circles and finally, spending a "perfect day" with your family. sometimes you wonder what a "perfect day" is. well someone close to me cheesily remarked that "only fools deal with absolutes". arguments can go on until the cows come home but i believe the only thing that stops us from having a perfect day everyday is the expectations of perfection we harbour for ourselves. these expectations make things imperfect in our lives, make us strive for better things and ultimately pushes us to try again tomorrow, for we assume we have all the tomorrows in the world we can ask for. that man had a limited number of tomorrows and probably eliminated that element of expectation, for just spending time with people whom he wanted to spend his last days with was "perfection" in itself. i tried to imagine myself in his position but i guess being able to fathom his predicament is impossible. one can only sympathise, unless he is terminally ill himself.
well all that thinking about how i would handle this and what i would have done made me realise that the natural instinct for anybody is to think about himself first when he engages in anything, be it just listening to a heart wrenching story or witnessing and accident. as cliched as it may sound, it really is sad when we can only find time to spend with our loved ones when something bad happens. we think about ourselves too much. thats how consumerism works i guess? love yourself to death.. because you're worth it...
198 days to freedom...
tcy
posted by tcy at
9:32 PM
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