:-)

"Everything in your life must have happened in order for you to exist - every single, little thing. You would not be the exact same person if any of your past experiences were different. Even the littlest, most unpleasant things have a way of shaping us into the individuals we were always meant to be. The greatest moments of clarity in your life will come when you look back at your journey and conclude that it was all necessary and that it's all beautiful." 

This quote is so comforting as we inch closer to the end of a tumultuous year. I am only squeezing out a little bit of time to post this quote, which I feel encapsulate the entirety of my feelings towards wrapping up 2014, and I have to go!!!!!! WILL DO A PROPER REFLECTION AND RESOLUTION POST SOON! And also to update on my absolutely mind-opening BKK trip ahahah. 

Have a good year ahead you!! Hope you find comfort in the quote too :) 

Miracles

Stay (you don't hear me say)

I had wanted this blog to be private but I decided to put the link up on my social media profile. People who bother clicking on it to read about my life are probably interested in what I have to show and tell anyway. So if my words and pictures can inspire you someway, I'm glad to do so. 

This post is not gonna be smooth..I have so much to say but head and heart are unusually heavy now. I didn't think I was capable of feeling this affected by the 2nd missing plane of the year. I guess it's the anticipation of ending the year on a good note for everyone (like literally everyone in the whole universe) that hit me. 

I remember when I was younger, my one goal in life was to make everyone around me happy. I have been a people-pleaser ever since. But as I grew older, I became more selfish and was always obsessing over somebody - one person at a time of course. There is a void in my heart right now and I guess it's a healthy kind of void, because I am no longer caught up with doing things for only that special someone and have more time to work on myself. I was such a possessive, selfish and obsessive asshole..I hate to be so myopic again. Now I'm slowly learning to distribute my care for my loved ones more evenly. And I am starting to look at the bigger pictures in life, caring more about the big big world I'm living in. 

I pray for miracles to happen. May QZ8501 be found. 

Moments of impact

Chanced upon this screencap on twitter and I couldn't help but to rewatch this beautiful movie 

Whoever is reading this entry, I'm just going to share a few of the quotes I find meaningful from the movie alright. Haha. 

1) The vow, of course. 

"Paige: I vow to help you love life, to always hold you with tenderness and to have the patience that love demands, to speak when words are needed and to share the silence when they are not, to agree to disagree on red velvet cake, and to live within the warmth of your heart and always call it home. 

Leo: I vow to fiercely love you in all your forms, now and forever. I promise to never forget that this is a once in a lifetime love. And to always know in the deepest part of my soul that no matter what challenges might carry us apart, we will always find our way back to each other."

 2) The moment when you realise you have done everything you can to salvage and it's time to give up trying and let nature take its course

"Leo: How do you look at the woman you love, and tell yourself that its time to walk away?"

3) When you want nothing but the best for the person you love deeply

"Paige: Thank you. 

Leo: I didn't do anything. 

Paige: You did everything. You accepted me for who I am, and not for what you wanted me to be.

Leo: I just wanted you to be happy. That's all. 

4) About love and giving selflessly

"Paige: I hope that one day I can love you the way you love me.

 Leo: You figured it out once. You'll do it again." 

5) About forgiveness

"Paige’s mom: I chose to stay with him for all the things he had done right, and not for the one thing he had done wrong.  I chose to forgive him.”

And, what I love most about this movie is how the lead emphasises on moments and little things.  

"Leo: Life's all about moments, of impact and how they changes our lives forever. But what if one day you could no longer remember any of them?"

"Leo: The moment of impact. The moment of impact proves potential for change. Has ripples effects far beyond what we can predict. Sending some particles crashing together. Making them closer than before. While sending others spinning off into great ventures. Landing them where you've never thought you've found them. That's the thing about moments like these. You can't, no matter how hard you try, controlling how it's gonna affect you. You just gotta let the colliding part goes where they may. And wait. For the next collision." 

Do go watch the movie if you haven't before. Watch it again even if you did! I always believe that experiencing the same thing can inspire you in a different way. It brought tears to my eyes..and I am not the kind of person who is easily moved.

This link works and the movie is HD :) Enjoy!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5_kJafUdRg

 

Magic

Finally, I got the closure that I sorely needed. Yeah, I do feel liberated. No more waking up to and going to sleep with the same boggling questions in my head. Well, that doesn't mean I've stopped thinking about it. People always say "don't look back" but I guess humans are wired in a way that we tend to look into the past for answers, to seek for peace and to remind ourselves of how we've gotten to where we are today. It's inevitable, nobody can totally move away from their roots. But. I do feel much better and am ready to move on to embrace new memories.

Recently I read a young adult fiction novel called "Let it snow" and a few lines inside struck me. One of them goes: "You have to take a close hard look at yourself, change what you have to change and move on." Most of us are always so wrapped up in our own problems, looking elsewhere to blame during times of misfortune and only thinking for ourselves. We fail to stand in the perspective of other parties and let our own thinking become the "gospel truth". As much as I believe I am an introspective person, I am guilty of convincing myself sweepingly with my inchoate parochial thoughts rather than looking deeper into myself to find the true cause of my feelings.

Then again, to what extent do we truly understand ourselves? How can we ever explain and justify our feelings perfectly? This brings me to the conversation I had with tricia before where we solemnly agree that nobody can ever understand each other completely and even themselves. "All the kinds of understanding of oneself are just induction rather than deduction because we can only explain after we have felt and not the other way round so like how transient and ungrounded are all these understandings." I guess, there's no point in justifying feelings because you can never identify that one sole cause of your feelings and it has to be a combination of societal, personality and body chemical factors at a particular timing that gives rise to your feelings at that moment. This is just the way we are. So my question is, just how much control do we truly have over ourselves? We can make decisions on where to go and what to speak but do we ever have a say on how fast our hearts should beat? There there. 

Also, from this closure, I learnt just how important trust is. Yeah, trust. When doubts creep in and you let them dominate your mind, you'll begin to assume things based on your own past experiences, and insecurities. Trust is what makes you want to walk a mile in the shoes of the other party to understand what's his or her world like rather than jumping to conclusions. Yeah I do think that trust has to be earned and sometimes things are presented to you in a way that guide you to naturally form a certain interpretation. We will all have those initial questions, but if you had really placed your faith in the person, you wouldn't have dwelt on them and let bad thoughts grow roots in your mind. The only possible way out is to talk it out. Communication. It's so very important. And at the end of this whole thing, I realised that even honest communication can never build complete trust. And the problem does not lie with the other person but ourselves. It's not that he or she is not trustworthy like they haven't been there for you or they are dishonest. It's simply because of our own insecurities, that we are afraid of putting our heart on the line and trust someone with the whole of it. Because we are afraid of getting hurt so we can never let down our guard completely and let somebody go under your skin. Because no matter how amazing that other person is, you'll feel uncomfortable with the invasion of your privacy, space and sovereignty of your mind. The other person can only come that close. And many relationships are jeopardised when we let our trust issues get in the way. Yup we all have trust issues on the scale of foolishly gullible to eccentrically cynical. And they are not something that can be "fixed" readily and easily. It's not easy to allow someone to point a gun at your head and trust that they will not pull the trigger. Yeah this expression is dinosaur age-old but still mother relevant.

Well, I have never really asked myself how easy it is for me to trust another person. Sometimes I share things with people whom I barely know, because that moment feels right. It's always about the moment. Like what I have mentioned earlier, the combination of societal, personality and body chemical factors all fall perfectly in place for me to feel that way. Also, like what most people feel, it's always easier to share things with strangers because they aren't there to judge your past. I guess, that's why I did what I did, not with a particular motive in mind I mean that's just sick right. I don't consciously make the effort to filter information or stop myself from disclosing "more than enough". I don't exactly pause and rationalise in the process of a moment that feels right. Yeah in retrospect, it's a mistake but you only know something is a mistake after the consequences show you that hey buddy, that is a mistake. And sometimes when you realise it, it's too late. So you just have to let it go. 

Letting someone go means letting go of whatever the person once meant to you, letting go of the meanings you associated with the memories you have with and of the persons, and letting go of the burden and baggage that had dragged the relationship downhill. Time will make it happen. But that doesn't mean to reject the possibilities of forming new feelings of and memories with the same person in the future. Once you have let the baggage go, there is no need to keep in mind on the distance to keep or restrain yourself simply because you don't feel that way anymore.

I know this may sound naive but I always believe that people whom I have lost could always manage to find their way back into my life somehow, no matter how long it takes. I don't mean that they consciously make the effort to connect with me again, but rather, miracles happen and fate works to pull us back to each other's life. It's magical. And I will keep believing in this magic while I move on to work on myself and become a bigger and better me. 

花心

Tumblr-inspired. Not fantastic, but pretty okay for a first attempt no? Heh.

What are your favourites?

"It got me thinking how true it is that we look for people in the things that they love. We always try to find out the favourite things of the people we care about, and just maybe we could gather something personal about them we don't know of. Songs, movies, books, anything they love. Why does he/she fancy this? Is there something he felt connected to from there? What about it? etc."

"because....... just maybe.... they'd understand why I am the way I am without having me to explain to them." 

Cycling (mis)adventure

On Thursday, Hyung and I finally went on our cycling trip that was supposed to happen during summer. Not the best time of the year, definitely. The weather in December isn't the most ideal for catching beautiful sunsets (which was our main aim) - cloudy, grey skies and lots of rain. We rented bikes from Pasir Ris Town Park, where we had to tread a long way in, because the one at the entrance of coasta sands resort was closed. Still, all's fine as our mood was not dampened, our spirits kept high as we talked about the impending scenic views we were about to witness. Nothing can go wrong when you're with Tricia, really. This girl has a way of turning unfortunate events into a fun-filled misadventure.

here we were just beginning, at a traffic junction just past the interchange! 

Having participated in TH night cycling last year, I vaguely remembered the route we took from Pasir Ris to Punggol, and it was pretty straightforward and short. The rain was just getting harder when we took off but we braved through it anyway. Silly Tricia brought an umbrella instead of poncho..like how was she gonna carry it and cycle at the same time right?! HAHA. I was smarter ;) 

We cycled past the industrial area and the farmway, and reached Lorong Halus shortly. Lorong Halus is a wetland reserve that has a bridge that brings us across the waters to Punggol. Not many people would have known but there are two islands nearby, namely Serangoon Island and Punggol Timor Island!! During TH night cycling recce trip last year, we actually cycled across the Timor Island to Seletar Airport. And wow, the small airport was really a wonderful sighting in the middle of the night, with planes flying low and emitting lights like fireflies in the sky. It is also a good location for a 那些年 shot hahaha. 

HAHA this picture was taken from the front camera and I had tricia to press the shutter for me (because she can't take human photos for nuts, I've got to do the angling for her yea)

We spent quite a bit of time at the bridge taking pictures of the surroundings such as the waters, sighting an alligator (which Tricia named Luffy, after the One Piece character you'd see appearing in a while). Tricia is fond of taking nature shots, like water droplets on the leaves, flowers and the scenery. I am a mix of both - nature and portraits - whichever appeals to me at the moment. 

 See, Tricia being devoted to the nature.

 And, this is the Lorong Halus bridge. 

 Luffy! Just got this toy from the Macs collection and Tricia said I was lame..hey, One Piece is the best anime EVER. No kidding. I learnt a lot from that show. Hahaha. 

Opening arms, just living in the moment & embracing the wind

Looking forward, expecting patiently for whatever lies ahead 

Come what may :)

I tried to get Tricia to take inspirational photos..you know, pretentious much, but that kind of photos featuring a person staring out at the horizon with deep thoughts in the mind.. Guess what? She failed, again, terribly. HAHA. Sorry Hyung, this is so not a bitching post yeah. We moved on into Punggol Waterway and there's simply more nature - ponds, flowers by the pavement, plants on the wall. 

Reminds me of a movie production company but I can't remember which! This tree is amazing, all dried up and standing alone, as if its existence is simply to provide temporary sanctuary for surrounding birds. 

Hyung and I agreed that this reminds us of the rail tracks in Hunger Games. And, we had fun pretending we were in a mission to get to the Capitol to save the victors HAHA. 

This graffiti wall was the highlight. It goes:

And I

Gazing at stars

Stumbled over you 

Tripped

And Fell

Painfully in love

Couldn't get up 

For Ages 

Mmmmm.

The only two colored robots on the wall, observed first by Tricia. Then we noticed that the girl (must be the one in pink because of gender stereotypes (pink colour) and her smaller frame (biological determination) hahaha) does not articulate any speech. What do you make out of this? 

Cycling out of Punggol

It is a pity that cameras can never quite capture the beauty we perceive and comprehend in our eyes. This is why I believe photos don't represent memories, they do best by evoking the memories in our minds. Initially, we had intended to watch sunset at Punggol but given the weather, and the dread of U-turning back to Pasir Ris, we spontaneously had a change of plans. It was really comfortable doing so because we're both the easygoing kind of people who take on whatever comes in our way. I can't imagine riding with an uptight person who has to come prepared with a foolproof plan and gets worried when things don't go their way. So, we went forth to Kampong Buangkok.

There wasn't much to explore in that kampong. It all looks very staged to me actually. Also, I was from a kampong in Malaysia so these houses didn't fascinate me much haha. It was just kinda cool to uncover a hidden kampong in the midst of a modernised landed property area. We then headed north (from our spot) towards Marine Parade, where we were told that we could return our bikes there too! It's a lovely initiative to have pit stops of the same bicycle chain at different parks. The convenience it brings encourages more of us to cycle and venture into new areas more. 

And so, we cycled along Yio Chu Kang Rd, to Paya Lebar Rd, to Geylang Rd, and to Katong where we finally stopped for GLORIOUS VICTORIOUS FOOD. Wow. 

A sign from the universe to take a break and love ourselves

It would be so so rude to not stop for these gorgeous looking tarts.

Egg tarts and us were meant to be, really. Because shortly after we got them, the shop had to be closed. Not as fantastic as the Chinatown ones, but still, yum yum in our tum tum. The only probable truth in life is, the love for food. True story. 

These routes were not pre-planned haha. After Punggol, I had stopped taking the route used by my hall night cycling. Plain figuring our way out using GPS. Thank goodness for this invention, really. Unplanned routes are the best because of these small surprises along the way - you don't know what's there to offer next, and so you keep going, looking forward to what you're in for the very next minute. Kinda sounds like what life is all about yeah. 

Lo, and behold. Second sign from the universe!! I had already seen this fruit stall when we were at the egg tarts shop. But I've not imagined the kind of emotion it'd stir up in my heart when we were this up-close. Ah, fruits paradise. We looked like two overly excited kids, who shall be judged by the Katong people and perhaps all Easties. But but, we don't really eat our fruits by the roads in Singapore, do we?? 

So, we did not give this moment a miss. 

HAHA. Them excited eyes and grin.

It took her a lot of bites to reach this crescent.

Beautiful. You're what caught my sight and captured my heart, truth be told. 

We had fun dunking our faces into our own share of watermelons and man, were they succulent. We were full from taking in the juice can you believe it. Hahaha. Please refer to my Instagram post for the snap of the blood crescent. 

After awhile, we realised that we're taking too much time indulging in these small joys and so we hopped back onto our bikes. We were already feeling the aches in our legs and butt, an inevitable effect of stopping. This is why in any kind of journey, you have to push yourself and keep going, because once you stop, your body gets the slack and it fails you. BUT. There are things worth making a leeway for always - yup, you get me, food. 

Finally, we returned our bikes at ECP Area C and it felt so surreal having our legs on the ground. Kinda want to be an astronaut right there and bounce my way in the air back home. We were fortunate to have made it in time because once again, the bicycle shop closed shortly after we left!! Haha. And then..it was time to have a legit feast. Once you got the engine on, you can't stop it!!!!!! Was supposed to head back to katong but ended up way past it, and so we stopped at Lau Par Sat. Tricia and I ate there once before, just the two of us too haha, after we cafe-hopped in Tiong Bahru and were goddamn full. So, she told me to have self-control this time. HAHA.

Sat at the open satay area where we had high-rise buildings in the background. The food there are overvalued man, but it's the place you'd want to chill and drink beer and eat zichar. 

No, these weren't enough, but we had no more cash to be indulgent. HAHA.

Got to admit, after this trip I'm falling in love with the East. 

Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

trace my steps to a new beginning

I admit. Tumblr is a paradise for reblogs of captivating photos, quotes and funny gifs, but my thoughts often get lost in between and I hate it. I am totally not the kind of person who sorts out an array of posts neatly by hashtags like #personal #i #diary etc. I tried using wordpress in my attempt to be less conventional..but there is a reason blogspot prevailed as the more popular option right? Haha so I figured starting a new blog where I pen down my own thoughts, and of course selectively post quotes and pictures that speak out to me, will help me to keep track of my life better. Yeah, it takes determination to keep this blog "alive", I foresee. It may be as hard as sticking to new year resolutions.

But whatever, haha. A lot of things have happened in my life the whole year round and honestly, I have never felt this pensive before. It felt like I've unleashed my inner poet, not kidding you (this sounds a tad shameless but hey hey, could be a lousy poet). So here goes, a new beginning!