i remember a particular day back during my national service, when i asked myself if i had an over-rated notion of freedom and basically expected too much from ord-ing. i doubted the vision i had. it was a perfect notion of absolute freedom and enjoyment in that limbo period and beyond that, school. i also had a vision of how perfectly different and how contented i would be to finally get into uni, to go through orientation, have an enjoyable time and finally start school. it was idealistic. i found myself slightly disappointed, not because i regretted spending that time the way i did, because i don't at all, but because it fell short of the bloated expectations that i had formed during those days in national service.

i began to wonder if it was the mentally oppressed state of mind that i had which forced me to form that "perfect" idealistic notion, or whether it was simply human nature to expect something to be perfect. we all know through personal experience that nothing can ever be perfect, that the best achievement one can ever have from anything is overwhelming success and not perfection, simply because it is impossible to quantify perfection. so if it was the latter thought which was true: that humans simply form "perfect" notions of events or things which they long for in the future, even though we know that it probably wouldn't play out exactly to what we envisioned will happen, then are we all not doomed to fail right from the start?

i began to trouble myself with that thought... of why we were made that way, of why expectations of perfection can never be fulfilled, of why we were destined to be disappointed to various extents... well a straightforward way to tackle this thought would be to tell oneself that things just happen that way, that maybe God made us this way so that we would know that there is only one source and one entity that could be perfect or make things perfect. maybe if i tied my hands down and forced that thought down my throat, everything would make "perfect" sense (pardon the pun). but i couldn't.

now please don't start making conclusions... i haven't lost my faith. i pray that i never would. i have already accepted the fact that solutions to open ended thoughts like these, of perfect notions and how things unfold can at best, lie almost parallel to "perfection" but never reach it (very much like an asymptote in an exponential curve). they can never be resolved completely (or perfectly, if you would).

if we took it to the other extreme of the spectrum: that is, to not have any expectations at all, would things actually become better? well i strongly doubt so. we would simply lose our drive, and life would be meaningless, very much like what what was written in the book of Ecclesiastes. also, there would be no objective with which we could make any sense of our short time spans in this world, no direction. as a friend of mine used to tell other people, it would be like playing a football match without goalposts.

what this means is that we now have two ends of a spectrum, and we all have no choice but to plant ourselves somewhere in the middle, because the absolute ends are either unattainable, or undesirable. but what now. where should we place ourselves in this spectrum? what is the best position for us, and how is this going to play out?

i guess there can never be a perfect answer to that.

thanks for reading this if you have come this far. sorry for not updating in such a long time. school sucks the life out of you and the funny thing is that we keep going back for more, and sometimes we smile and tell ourselves that we are enjoying it.

tcy