In the absence of a clear cut map in achieving my existential purpose, I resorted to piecing together fragments of advises people have been throwing at me since Day 1 of my sensibilities. I guess, our memories can be faulted for being so emotionally programmed - retaining only bits of information that have managed a strong impact on one's person. Seems that for most times, little life lessons get washed away into the big, deep ocean of our minds. Retrievable through extensive excavation, but with no guarantees of success. Other times, people's philosophies overlap into a confusing debate of what's right or wrong - the goods and the bads - the blacks and the whites - and safety of the grays in between.
In a fairly recent discourse with my dad, we've managed to touch on several issues regarding my life and future. And as much as he has given me his thoughts on matters, his wisest action (though not very relieving)is to leave the decision onto my hands. Pontius Pilate.
Again, I would live to delve into the concept of everyone going through a "solo flight" through life. Sometimes I wish I can find the auto-pilot button somewhere. Despite how our choices would ripple out into our web of connections, the most important consideration is "what makes you happy." Dad, though not outrightly pointing it out, implied how he can give me a set of limitations and corresponding penalties for all my "wrong doings", but despite those hindrances, it is my will that will set me out if I intend to strive and attain what I want. Parents, people, laws can only set out the guidelines and the consequences resulting from deviance, but life itself has no rules. The game of life is as exciting and varied as you want it to be.
Reading George Martin's Game of Thrones and Ken Follet's Pillars of the Earth, one gets thrown out of their comfort zones into absorbing behaviors that are grotesquely barbaric, but completely feasible and frighteningly understandable given the period. They're not right, but in those times, what does it mean to be "right"? What is "right"? Quite often, I find myself floating back down into Milan Kundera's world of "The Unbearable Lightness of Being". How comforting it is to be understood by someone who can pen down your feelings into paper.
Society dictates the status quo, the norms and the proper etiquette and habits, but we know ourselves too well to know what is best for us. We can either fall in line, marked with a batch number and dispatched for public consumption. We can opt to go left and right, winding around some dangerous road and disappear from worldly knowledge. We can rocket ourselves to the moon and find the hidden Transformers space craft. We can start a war, or preach peace, or become a solution. We can struggle to survive or survive to struggle. Live to love or love to live. And in the end, it is a mere question of what would fulfill us, as a person.
What makes you happy?
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