Daily (w)rite

Having the time to write, to photograph, to think and doodle at your own fee will is surely worth something. I do not know if I can live in cramped confines like this man, but there is surely something to the idea of limiting your physical horizons so you can look inwards.

I did not have the time or the energy for the 1000 words yesterday, I did not put my writing on priority, and I am missing my writing class this Saturday. So, Good Morning World, and 2000 words, here I come!

When it comes to poetry, I admit I am a little cynical. I write poems, but they are not really things I’d rather put up on a blog.

Rick Mobbs, who is an artist by profession, but a painter and poet at heart has asked me more than once to share with him the fiction I have been writing. Uh, I thought, why not poetry? Maybe go the whole hog and make a complete fool of myself?

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I do not know how often this happens to you, but it happens to me some mornings.

I become, well, a nightingale. It is as if a song in my sleep continues into my waking dreams.

I can’t stop singing, humming, whistling, and invent a whole new repertoire of tunes that seem to have just been born. I half-listen, half-dream. In bleak winter or scorching summer, I can smell spring. I thinks of smiles in color.

Sometimes the songs last through the day, seeping through the things I do, the grins I just cannot keep in, and the non-stop banter with no-one in particular—–crazily enough, sometimes even with the ceiling!

Sometimes they don’t. Don’t last, that is.
At other times they just hum and whisper in my heart, warbling close to my ear, and make me go quiet, joyous.

Today was one of those other times. Happy quiet, quiet happy.

So, how was your day today?

This was a post I had done ages ago. A cherished few of you, who used to visit my old blog, might recognize it. I am posting it today (with an update) because I cannot forget dear, dear Sam for more reasons than I care to count.

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Writing has been the least of my priorities these past few weeks, so it is with an almost unfamiliar fervor that I pick up my blog again this week.

As some of you know, my family went through a recent bereavement.

I come back to my life as it was in many ways a changed person.

I knew it all along, but this recent experience brought home to me with all the force of a sudden punch in the gut how fragile human life really is, and how transient.

One day you are here, smiling, talking, breathing in the crisp spring air and the next your lifeless body is carried away in a car, a van or a truck, never to come back again to those who love you.

It is a sobering thought, one which needs to be remembered….
…… while we bicker about trivial things (things which really won’t matter once we are gone),
…… when we stress the negatives in our lives over the positives (life is too short to focus on negatives alone),
……when we put off all the things we want or really need to do (as if we had all the time in the world to do them in)
….and the list goes on.

I suppose a life on which the shadow of death hangs all the time wouldn’t be much of a life, so it would be mad to think of the day we die ALL the time.

But it couldn’t hurt to remember from time to time the irrefutable fact that I am a perishable creature, especially when my ego comes in the way of my happiness, or when I am too lazy to do something or too driven to take a break, or too shy to speak of my love.

Keeping in mind the fact that I am here for a limited time could only help add that little bit of much-needed perspective.

It would help me live with an added feeling, a tangible poignancy: not to just exist from day to day to day, but to live each day to its fullest, beautifully and with meaning.

It is a tough call: to accept or to fight? When life hands you a raw deal, what do you do? Fight, of course. Fight and let consequences take care of themselves. But what if no matter how you fight, what you do, and how much you strive, the situation will not change: when everything is well and truly beyond your control?

I vote for fighting. I am a fighter, and the religion of a fighter is to fight, fight till the last breath, till the last drop of blood. 

Acceptance is not for me. 

In the middle of one of the important scenes of one of my stories, the protagonist decides to thumb his nose at the death of his friend, and does not accept the passing. He slowly descends into depression, and finally madness. I am very tempted to give the story a different ending, to give the hero a sense of acceptance, of wisdom beyond death, but I finally think I will not.

Most writers write for professional reasons, but then there are an overwhelming lot of people who dabble in writing due to personal reasons. Writing for them is a catharsis, a purging of pain from the soul, a detoxification of the spirit.

There are times when a professional writer may be forced by a crisis of the soul or of physical circumstances to resort to writing as personal catharsis. The results are sometimes masterpieces of creative art or incoherent rantings.  I suppose the quality of the cathartic product depends on the quality of the writer!

Sometimes when I am tempted to rant, I give in to it. I then preserve what I write. It is interesting to read them after much time has passed. Some seem hilarious after a time, other puerile, and some still move me to tears, even after years have passed.

It is the last which have the potential to inspire  for some true writing.

I can see the park by the bay as I write, and it is so amusing to see all the joggers early in the morning. There are those that amble along, dragging their feet, barely awake. Probably been dragged out of bed by unforgiving spouses and shoved out of the house to jog for health reasons.

Then there are those who would jog bare-bodied, no matter how puny their bodies, heart monitors stuck across their chests and on the arm. ( A lot of Singaporean men are undeniably puny). And when they pass a woman they puff up their chests, oh, just a little. I know this because I have seen them in action when I used to be a regular morning walker myself.

There are also the athletic types, who  probably run marathons, in their very fancy nike and adidas, both men and women, their ipods letting them set their pace. They look different, even from a distance.

And it is with them that I see the most interesting dramas played out everyday.

There would be one casual jogger or another who would be running along while these chiseled marathon types effortlessly passes him or her by. Most take it cool, but there are some that take it as a personal affront. (Women somehow never seem to take it personally, perhaps because they are not as naturally physically competitive?)

Then they put everything they have into their run, and cross the athletes with a superior look. After a hundred meters, they are huffing and puffing, and have  to stop soon afterwards. The athletes pass them by without a second glance.

Not unlike in school or office, where I have seen everyone always running for the first place.

Running to win is all very well, but it cannot be done in a day. The athletes did not peak their physical condition in a day and nor can anyone else.

But this is a truth we often forget, I guess, not only while jogging, but in life itself.

I went for a walk today, because had to make a call and the phone gave up on me. It was early, and people were out to get their bit of exercise, sun and companionship. As I sauntered along, I saw this rather serious looking old couple, straining to keep pace with each other, both actually walking very slowly, hand in hand, both definitely past their seventies.I do not know the secret to their success, I do not know if they thought of it as such a success, biding their time one day after the other, hand in hand.

But there has to be a secret. And I knew I had to write about it, if only because writing it out would sort out some things inside my head.

I thought about my parents, the things they tried to tell me, the stories they passed on. But by the time we begin to realise that our parents were so right in some of the things they said, we have our children already who disagree with what we have to say. That is the way of the human race, I suppose, of our evolution. But I wish there were certain recipes we all learnt, as unbiased, axiomatic truth.

I wish we learned that there is no replacement for human compassion and understanding, and ultimately, love. I wish we learned how to put others before us sometimes and not always think of ourselves alone. That, being human, we all need a tangible expression of the love people bear us. That all of us need consistency from others and the only way to get it is to be it.

I somehow cannot imagine love being born. To me, it is like an endless river flowing into itself.

All life forms drink from it. All of us drink from it, and some of us do so in excess. Becoming drunk, we want to flow with it. Some of these drunken spirits become Christ or the Prophet, and some Romeo and Juliet. But the human frame of body and mind is not capable of handling the excess, so we crucify Christ and let Romeo and Juliet perish.

I realize that intense relationships have to mellow down with time or are else unsustainable. To survive, they have to end in parting or as in the extreme and well-cited cases end in demise of one or the other.

A mating of souls does not allow the bodies to survive for long as these are used up as candles to the flame, and the flame is never stronger than when the candle is at its shortest.

So we cannot all have intense loves in our daily lives; not all of us are bestowed intensity and that is good for the survival of human beings as a race.

Imagine all of us being twenty-one and killing ourselves for love!

We cannot survive it to our eighties and still be madly in love, without the aid of some form of tragedy or deprivation.

So what do that bent old man and the upright lady beside him feel as they walk side by side?

Is it a form of habit? Is it getting used to the other person as one gets used to one’s favourite armchair? I would love to ask, I but am sure there are no correct answers that hold true for each one of us. We have to inividually work out our answers, our desires, our ambition, our wishes, our fondest dreams.

For me, I for sure hope I get to walk with someone I have cherished when I am eighty and the sun on my back seems younger than I am.