Currently Playing: Umbrellas-Boston White (on loop).
I am terrified of the possibility that one day, I will utter those words out loud. Insya Allah, if He permits me to live 20 years from now, will that be how I turn out? Perhaps I will say it to a stranger I’ve just met at a bus stop, while we both take shelter from the rain after work. Or maybe the center stage for the moment-of-truth will take place in some obscure bistro. I will probably say it with a touch of melancholy and nostalgia; a longing for the days of my youth when everything seemed within reach. My head will rest in my hands, hanging heavy over a mug of steaming coffee steadily growing cold, and an untouched Sylvia Plath book will lie nearby.
"It wasn’t supposed to be like this. This wasn’t the way I wanted my life to turn out. Things were supposed to be different. I was going to be a Somebody. Someone who stood out, who mattered, who reached out and made a mark. I was supposed to go places, meet people and made my presence known and opinions heard. I wasn’t about to let myself be lost in a sea of tired nameless people who traded their dreams for sustainable and secure livelihoods. It isn’t that there’s anything wrong in that, but it wasn’t going to be me. I was going to throw caution to the wind, I was going to follow my heart, I was going to make history, I was going to start a revolution, I was going to change the world."
"And yet here I am."
"40, with a job that only pays the bills, and with families and friends scattered around the globe."
"What happened to who I was going to be?"
I began university with one target in mind: to earn and sharpen the relevant knowledge and skills so that I would graduate all fired up with a mission in mind and a goal to aim for. I didn’t kid myself into thinking that things would be a simple stroll in the park. No, I knew that 4 years was going to be tough; the road to success is after all always paved with the rocky bumps to bypass. I knew it all and I accepted it. I didn’t and still don’t like backing down from challenges–it reminds me of who I once was. I will not go back to being that shy timid quiet girl who was a recluse to the whole world but herself, although she makes small cameo appearances once in a while these days. Law was what I wanted to do, and it was what I was going to do.
Who would have thought that it was going to be this hard? At this point, I’m only about tenths of an inch close to hitting the Unbearable level, although I’m fairly sure I must have reached it once or twice before this.
And it isn’t getting any better.
I’m having small glimpses of what my future might be like one day, and I’m afraid because the probabilities of it materialising are high.
I remember once reading an article written by a man from the working world, and the one sentence I remember that had stood out went something along the lines of this:
Remember the times when we were once students, naive and idealistic, foolishly planning over cups of coffee about how we were going to change the world?
I didn’t understand it back then.
I didn’t understand how dreams of changing the world could be deemed foolish, idealistic or naive. To me, it seemed like a noble and selfless aim, and one that was achievable and within reach.
A few months later, I came across a postsecret postcard showing a picture of a university campus with the words This is where I lost my faith scrawled across it.
I suppose that could be said to mark the beginning of new realisations about what life after university could possibly bring.
I began paying more attention to real life and have been swallowing in huge bites of practicality ever since. I’ve learned to become what every dreamer should know in order to survive out in the dog-eat-dog world: be a realistic idealist.
Oh yes, I’m all about oxymorons.
The fact of the matter is, the dreamer in me seems to have faded away without me realising it, and that troubles me. I’ve become jaded and worn out weary, and ‘insipid’ seems to rule everything these days.
www.postsecret.blogspot.com
Because Truth is what you want to hear.
This is not who I want to become. I don’t know where I’m heading, although I was once so sure, but that is not who I want to become.
I told Hosni (how is it that I discuss these topics more with guys rather than girls?) that I was becoming more and more disillusioned with Law and who it was really protecting. I was fast becoming skeptical, and so he responded with a Justice Felix Frankfurter(U.S Supreme Court judge) quote:
"Fragile as reason is and limited as law is as the institutionalised medium of reason, that’s all we have standing between us and the tyranny of mere will and the cruelty of unbridled , undisciplined feeling."
Ok. Maybe I can accept that.
And what about the general scenario in the working world these days?
I offered that the problem with civilisation today is that we set yardsticks for success that can only be achieved or surpassed by abandoning most if not all of what keeps our heads high. It could be our morality or our principles. When it becomes a repetitive cycle, this vicious pattern is what we will end up craving for as the only way of life. Survival of the fittest. This is why cynicism pervades us. You can already see it in us, the youth. We don’t believe that our personal talents alone will count out there. It’s about possessing the ability to stay afloat in the race to the top, and maybe having to step on some people’s heads along the way. The line between what is ethical and unethical becomes non-existent.
He agreed.
I despise what they call the law of nature–the strongest will live, the weak will fall behind. Winner takes all.
"There are no limits except for the ones we put on ourselves."
So does that mean that to test our fullest potential, no limits should be involved? Does that mean that to be deemed successful, we should take the road most travelled by, and sacrifice what we hold dear to our very existence? And who has the exclusive right to define what success is? And while we’re busy being embroiled in the fight to be on top, will we realise how much of ourselves we’re losing to escape the fray in time?
"Success is when I have regained all the things I lost in order to be successful."
For the record, I haven’t become a cynic. There’s still some fragments of me that still believes that some good can come out of the world. Besides, mana nak letak muka if I said I’ve turned cynic after just giving a speech on the problem of erosion of faith last sem? Elyna would surely cackle at the irony.
Maybe I’ll look back on this entry one day and reminisce about my days of idealism and utopian dreams from another angle; from perhaps a more mature perspective. Maybe I will smile wistfully and ponder upon the other roads I could have taken, and wonder where they would have taken me.
These are the choices I am bound to make one day.
The hardest part is wondering whether I will wake up each day in the future and look forward to it rather than dread it. It’s wondering whether I will live life instead of enduring it.
My sole purpose is for Him alone. The trick lies in remembering that.
I want to lead a life worth looking back on. I want to continue experiencing the new, expecting the unexpected, loving the unknown, be surprised at the unpredictable, even at age 40.
It sounds almost impossible, I know. Almost.
Because really, nothing is. 
Gets me through most days.
October 2006
Qada’. Qadar. Tawwakaltu ‘ala Allah. Insya Allah.
Enough said here.
