This post contains quotes I always reflect on when I think we are victims of a problem that we don't even realise how it affects us.
I think the hoohah about public examinations are too hoohah-ed that it makes people go hoohah. Period.
Yes, I did well, life goes on because there's life after SPM.
You didn't do well? Oh guess what, life still moves on, and it doesn't wait for you to finish your thousand-year emotional ordeal. I think most of those who have started college will know best.
"Don't cling to things because everything is impermanent."
I think this sounds utterly cliche and especially for someone who did considerably well, those who did score would probably think it's crap. Yet still, I know how you feel. The feeling as insignificant as humanly possible when you do not get what you want.
"What happened? Life."
Sometimes things like these bring out the ugly side of people, even the people who should be standing by you with arms wide open for consolation. It's sad to see. I don't mean to question parenting styles, but parents should really be the parents their children need at least at that moment of time. As a child myself, I think that to hear something disparaging from the lips of your own parent is like adding salt to the already badly wounded heart. So make a change to things, you wouldn't want to change things only when you child tests the gravitational pull of Earth from the tenth floor.
"All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped. Youth, like pristine glass, absorbs the prints of its handlers. Some parents smudge, others crack, a few shatter childhoods completely into jagged little pieces, beyond repair."
After the thousand year emotional turmoil, sit down and think. In a quiet place free from expectations, judgements and culture, reflect on yourself. When I reach a downpoint so low, I take a ticket to a place where many of us hold and keep what is really dear to us- the heart.
I go there and I sit around. Asking, thinking and discovering what truly matters. This is sounding more and more like fiction, but isn't life a fiction that you pen? Our biggest mistake is that we don't see the grades as grades itself, but as a determinant to a bright future. It might be, but it's not the only. Again bright in this context is to find the shine of gold thinking it'll give us everything we need. Maybe, it's true to a certain extent in the world nowadays, but I've always believed that it'll give a person only as much as it can possibly give. I dare say one of the most ill feelings one can have is to have so much but feel so empty.
"I traded lots of dreams for a bigger paycheck, and I never even realized I was doing it."
I've always been fascinated by culture. It is something that we grow and revel in. It plays such a significant role in shaping us into what we are. Many at times, we refuse to give in to cultural norms and taking a stand in what we believe in. Yet, unknowingly we fall into its trap. There's no one to blame for the way a culture is set, and the trap is there not because someone chose to build it. If we really want to find someone to throw all the blame at, then we are all guilty as charged. Culture is shaped and moulded with the bare hands of everyone in the same environment. What's right, what's wrong, what's good and what's bad today is very much predefined by culture and most of us, as this post clearly says, conform. We all do, and we all shouldn't. Having the faith and courage to break out is something we can spend a lifetime trying, and if we can, then we all can say at least we succeeded on something in life.
"Well, for one thing, the culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. We're teaching the wrong things. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn't work, don't buy it. Create your own. Most people can't do it."
I doubt some will even reach this part of this bland piece of writing. It's not me to write something like this often, but I feel like voicing something out, for this is what a blog is supposed to be, primarily. I think it's very sad to see people dissatisfied with what they've gotten, even if it is culturally defined as 'good'. Their attention is all directed into that few or possibly ONE credit and the other 10 distinctions suddenly seemed invaluable when all these while it was the distinctions they were vying. Why choose to make yourself miserable when a better option is possible? I personally like the following quote.
"I thought about all the people I knew who spent many of their waking hours feeling sorry for themselves. How useful it would be to put a daily limit on self-pity. Just a few tearful minutes, then on with the day."
I have a certain fondness for the poem, "The Road Not Taken". Beautifully crafted and I think everyone can relate to it in one way or another. As different as we are, our stories are all the same. After SPM, we are turning over a new leaf into a new chapter. Little do we know, we are all going the same path, we are answering to the same call we know we have to, even if it was when we were five. As we grow, we tend to forget the call to follow what you believe in due to various factors, but the one thing that's for sure, it has never changed from the day we were born. We know who we want ourselves to be, but what we do not know it how to talk ourselves into believing that following the call will sooner or later be what we really want in life- meaning.
"So many people walk around with a meaningless life. They seem half-asleep, even when they're busy doing things they think are important. This is because they're chasing the wrong things. The way you get meaning into your life is to devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning."
"These were people so hungry for love that they were accepting substitutes. They were embracing material things and expecting a sort of hug back. But it never works. You can't substitute material things for love or for gentleness or for tenderness or for a sense of comradeship. Money is not a substitute for tenderness, and power is not a substitute for tenderness. I can tell you, as I'm sitting here dying, when you most need it, neither money nor power will give you the feeling you're looking for, no matter how much of them you have."
"It is because the human spirit knows, deep down, that all lives intersect. That death doesn't just take someone, it messes someone else, and in the small distance between being taken and being missed, lives are changed."
"Wordy, but worthy."-leginhet
