In the face of Death, you wonder why.

In the face of Death,
you receive other peoples’ worry.
You might receive pity, even from Death himself.
You receive support.
You learn, still.
You receive love.

In the face of Death,
all unnecessary material wants are vain.
All luxuries are vain.
Sometimes, everyday worldly stuff becomes a luxury.
To you, who can worry about things like what to wear and where to shop.
In the face of Death, he envies you,
In the face of Death, you, become too out of reach.

In the face of Death,
even if you are unfulfilled,
you were able to live your last moments happy,
will you be satisfied?

In the face of Death,
you will know what’s truly important.
You might not know how to fix things just yet but you will know what to fix.

Death says:
“I don’t care how you come to me or in what condition you are when I come.
I am here to claim you.
To take you away from this material world.
And take away your social connections.
Your suffering is non of my concern.
I am here to claim you.”

In the face of Death,
you smile and you say:
“Come to me some other day.
I’ll be ready to meet you in time.”

In the face of Death, you still live and you live on.

Some people, they fight against the world. 
Some fight for money and some for attention. 
Some fight for excellence. 
Some, they fight for rights and peace. 
Some fight for love. 
Some fight for opportunities. 
Some fight for their lives.  

Then there some who do not fight. 
For them, It is not necessary anymore. 
It is not worth it. 

Do you fight?
Why are you fighting?
What do you fight for?
Or maybe more importantly, just maybe – who fights together with you?

Often when we see people with disability, we would think of the immediate consequences of the disabilities. And then we stop there. We stop short thinking about what it actually means. What kind of inconveniences they actually experience is what we can’t truly understand. 

How do you want to be looked at?

Do you want to look like a princess and looked at as one?
Do you want to look rich and be looked at as one?

How do you look at people with disability?

Do you put on a poker face?
Or do you express your sadness and pity subtly?
Do you scoff or scorn them?

Would you even think twice about how you will look at a normal person?

A disabled person may hate being looked at simply because of the way they are. 

A disabled person, in the early stages, might even hate the way he/she looks and thus hate being seen. Therefore it is really not hard to imagine why they avoid social interaction in general. 

While you may move about freely; live your life with little restrictions; pursue your aspirations with fewer obstacles than those who are disabled, can you understand their aspirations? Can you understand their wish that they hope to be normal, even if it’s just a little?

They might not even envy your wealth or your academic achievement, they envy your freedom. In this respect, it is hard because we can’t give easily what they seek. 

We have much to be thankful for. 

Have you ever say thank you because you are not having a flu?
Or when your hand can move perfectly?
When you can walk across the park with ease that some others cannot afford?
When you can learn without impairment?
When you can bend or and touch your toes?
When you can tell a friend that you are in good health, honestly?

Essentially, each of us can only live our own lives. 

But…
Can you fathom the lives of others? 

Can you live a different life?

First time listening to Hwanhee. I really like the song, love Hwanhee’s tone and depth in his voice.
I wanted to play this on the guitar but I couldn’t find any chords or tabs on the internet so I decided to tab it myself.

Standard tuning
Capo first fret

Intro(relative to guitar nut):

This might not be entirely accurate but it sounds alright to me. Feel free to use this and do let me know of any changes that will make this sound better!

Note: Lyrics are obtained from this site.

Say if I am staying in that time indefinitely, I will wonder how will uni life be, I will ask myself how will it feels like to be out there in a different country etc. Contradictory, as always.

While moving on seems like a good prospect, doing it is nonetheless daunting. Life is in a way like a bus stop. We spent a lot of time in life waiting and waiting for something to happen or perhaps hoping for something to come by. For some of us, there is this intrinsic fear that the bus will come late, just like how some people hope for the best but expects the worst.

At the bus stop, we can spend our time reading, fiddling with our mobile phones or chatting away with some friends. Alongside with some positive thinking and luck, all these represent the effort we put in towards a goal, for this case the bus. The goal always sounds grand but surely enough it is just an event that is almost always short.

The bus ride is analogous to our journey of life that it represents change. We leave a place and head towards another for whatever reasons. We leave a phase of life and head towards another as a natural transition. When we arrive at our destination, it starts all over again, only thing that this time, its a different bus stop.

Originally posted on: Monday, 25 January 2010

PS: I don’t know if I am at the bus stop or on the bus now. As usual, I am asking myself too many questions, with too few answers available at the moment. At least, I know my destination.

’21st April 8.15 am
Here I am at the train station waiting. Unlike what I have expected there are lots of people. I had purposely came early to the station, grab a seat and type away but that is not to be with the seating area overcrowded with people.’

What happened at the station was that I did not reach all that much earlier and I was trying to get inspired by whatever that was happening around me while checking the screen to see whether my train has arrived. The beach plan did not happen either as the beach was too cold, too misty, too windy and slightly smelly on that day. I guess I was just too idealistic, all the while forgetting that it is still spring outside of London.

I might sound silly but what I was trying to do was to get inspired as mentioned in a previous paragraph. People talk a lot about trying to see things from different perspective and I wanted to do exactly that by just observing my surroundings and think. Back at home in my room, I will occasionally sit in a random spot and look around my room. From each spot, my room looked different, that to me is perspective. Once, my brother took a photo of my bookshelf from a little distance away and when I saw the photo, I went: “where is this place?”, that to me is perspective.

We were all told to think out of the box at some point of our lives, what does it mean? If thinking is ‘defined’ to happen in a so-called box, then should that not mean that thinking is ‘undefined’ outside the box? Ok I was just being geeky. A simple google search returned ‘About 7,020,000 results (0.15 seconds)’ and I suggest you read this to get an idea of what the box looks like.

The way I see it, there is no way to teach somebody how to think outside the box; one can be good at it but no one can teach it. I am not sure how I came to see it this way but just to reassert my point, don’t expect somebody to come along and tell you his secret to thinking outside the box. To able to do that, you will need knowledge and experience, like everything else, and also the willingness to take your mind to places where you normally wouldn’t go, in other words, to really see things from different perspectives. The easiest way to get a headstart is to physically go to a place where you will feel comfortable, observe your surroundings and/or think away. Make your surroundings a source of inspiration, generate thoughts one after another, coherent or incoherent it doesn’t matter, they will come together in a nice way one way or the other. Over time, what you want to achieve is to conceptual link the ‘right’ thoughts together coherently in a shorter period of time, i.e. think faster.

Hmm, I feel slightly ironic now because I might have just tried to teach you how to think outside the box. Oh well, I guess my thoughts got a little carried away.

Think outside the box buddy, there might be a woman in there.

P.S: It also helps if you see things as if they are new and fresh, like this little girl here.

Quite a lot happened in the last two months: Chinese new year, anime, birthday celebration(s) and more recently earthquakes and radiation. All these events and incidences aside, there is something that happens everyday – in fact almost every waking second of our lives – that is decision-making. We makes decisions from the moment we wake up, for example the decision as to whether we actually want to wake up or not, whether to brush your teeth before heading to the toilet or the other way round. Fortunately decisions like these are simple and we make these decision almost involuntarily in a sense.

Of course, in life there are also many other decisions that require much more effort. I’m sure you can think of many. What I really want to talk about is the implications of certain decisions and the decision to change what was originally decided. I do realise that the circumstances in which we make decisions differ from case to case, so I am going to illustrate my point by putting it into context. I am going to talk about something that is relevant to me that choosing a university and a course.

First of all, lets talk about how we make decisions. Simply put, we base our decisions on what we want and we want what we like and we like that things that make us feel good. For example, money allows a person, P to buy Apples, for instance, which makes him feel good and so he likes money. Knowing that he likes money, he decided to pursue a course that will guarantee good returns. However, there has been research that shows that we do not always know what we want, in the sense that what we actually choose is not necessarily what we THINK we like. This research result will come into play in a later paragraph.

OK, so what about choosing a university or course? It is not uncommon that most people do not really know what they want to do as a career. However, the process of university application requires us to choose a university and course that will more or less determine one’s career path, ironically at a rather young age of around 17. Some of you might argue that 17 is not really that young but I would say it is when it comes to deciding a career. I dare say most seventeen-year-old do not know enough to make a really informed decision about they career choice. Then again, choosing a course does not strictly mean choosing a career.

Picking a university and/or a course can be a dilemma for some people because of the notion that one has to then work in a field that is relevant to the chosen course. But of course there are a lot of flexibility nowadays especially true for people doing science or engineering courses where they are “most welcomed” into the financial field. The mentioned ‘notion’ and flexibility can be summarised as the future prospect. So, making a decision is a balance between interest (what we like) and future prospects (money, power, women…).

Fortunately, university applications make you think about WHY and HOW you came to pick your course. In a sense, if you want to go to university, you have to think and do some self-reflection, so this is one decision made for you already. Then comes the usual stuff, accepted, rejected, orientation and so on. And here comes the question what if you do not like your course? Do you stick with it or do you make a change? There is definitely not a clear-cut answer to these questions. We were all told often enough to learn that if we do not like something we make a change. However, at this stage, there are some practical reasons as to why people tend to avoid changing. Firstly, you lose time and money. Secondly, making drastic changes are often troublesome. All in all, it is possible as long as you can accept idea of second chances and the key is to take on the challenge whether you make the change or not.

Lets take this in a different direction. Do we decide based on what we like or do we (learn to) like what we choose? The question is not very clear but I do not know how to phrase more properly. A very simple answer is yes to both as we have definitely experience something that can attest to that. However, as mentioned in a previous paragraph, we do not always know what we actually like or want. This can lead to the case where people make decisions based on feign interest. They feign it so properly that even they themselves do not really realise it until they come to a point where they finally be honest with themselves which brings them to the previous paragraph.

The thing is, are we truly deciding for ourselves and do we always get to decide? Sometimes it seems that we make one decision and it leads on to something else and so on such that it feels like we are not making any ‘real decision’ but just going with the flow. And along the way, we feign interest or we nurture real interest or just doing it for the sake of doing it. Maybe fate has a hand in all these or a leg maybe? Well, you can see that this is getting a little philosophical. I just find it a little funny how we make a decision and then we follow through, expecting no change whatsoever, and then again to pick something out from so many choices when we do not know enough about all the choices and then the whole process starts again. What bugs me at this moment is how we make decisions even when we do not know enough. But how much is enough? I might be able to answer myself on this one but not without contradicting a few points in this post. I have this idea that we should choose based on what we want/like(as mentioned before) and not based on what we do not like. We can start gathering information on what we like and move on from there. I would say this answer is good enough if we forget that we might not always know what we want.

This post is inspired by my recent and on-going decision-making process. My thoughts on these issues are rather half-baked, but then I have decided to blog about it, which means putting my thoughts in a coherent manner which in turn requires more decision-making. Oh well, you can tell where this is going.

I recommend this book “The Paradox of Choices” by Barry Schwartz. It talks about the problem that arises with a plethora of choices and about making decisions.

I end this piece by leaving you with a thought – you have to make your own decisions, but you don’t have to do it alone.

Coming back to the pigeons, I am sure there were times when we all wanted to be a bird, or at least to fly in the sky like a bird or something along the lines. On a seemingly disconnected topic, we hear about people trying to take their lives when things get really bad. What we don’t really hear from people when things get bad is that they want to be something else, say an animal, a pigeon for example. Well, what I am trying to say is that, why do people think of taking their lives(even though some people will never actually do it) instead of telling themselves, say ‘I want to become…’, I don’t know, ‘a poodle hanging out with other poodles in a dog spa’?

In a sense becoming something else and dying both takes the problem away, why do (some)people tend to think about committing suicide? One answer is that, humans are smart, we know all too well that killing ourselves is possible whereas becoming a pig is impossible, or is it? It is always interesting to think about human’s thought process, why this and not that.

Returning to pigeons, I must say they make the most disgusting sound ever. I hear them everyday and it sounds like people having sex with their mouths taped. A pigeon just flew past my window.

The truth is, I was tempted to actually blog daily for at least a few seconds. I mean, hey why not? All I have to do is to answer questions right? Like “will you do the experiment to prove the grandfather paradox and how will you do it?”. Just kidding. While I truly laud wordpress’s effort to get people to blog more regularly, but for me, I find it rather artificial to just feed off the inspiration that wordpress provides just for the sake of blogging daily. I’m someone who values originality(I do when I have the strength to) which partly explains why wordpress’s announcement didn’t really appeal to me. That might partly explain why my blog still lack substance. LOL.

Ok enough of self criticism. Before I end this piece I just want to say thank you to wordpress for inspiring me to write this(I have a strange feeling that I slightly contradiction myself some way somehow).

P.S: I am blogging from my iPhone! You will see me stop typing post messages like this one once my enthusiasm for my new phone dies out.

I thought I should do some testing before I blog more seriously from my phone, so ya, this is my test post, currently blogging from my uni study room. This is my very first smartphone, so I am actually really excited about mobile blogging. Having an iPhone certainly does give a very big nod to mobile blogging. Wooah!