The Runaway Train

I can't sleep tonight. Yet I'm nightdreaming when awake. My mind keeps fleeting in and out of conscious abandonment with rickety recklessness. Notions of Life and its ephemerally embryonic existence darts in and out of the membrane of my hallucinatory reverie - maybe it's just the 3 cups of coffee I had today.

Pulled along the path of reflecting rectitude, I must progress. Caught in the tides of still sentiment, I must confess. And swept away by the waves of purposeful perseverance, I must aggress.

An awareness that is onboard a runaway train of equivocal intent, locked onto the tracks of steely prospect that churns out smokes of inconsistent faith leaves me with a lot of material and immaterial resolution for the year.

Words formed into phrases. Phrases fused into sentences. Sentences expressed into paragraphs. Paragraphs borne into purpose and the sentience takes precedence into milimalism.

Make time for prayers. Read more books than last year. Sit in silence for at least 10 minutes a day and meditate or pray. Sleep for 7 hours. Take at least a 10-30 minutes walk everyday and smile while you walk.

Do not compare your life to others. You have no idea what their journey is all about. Do away with thoughts on things out of your control. Invest your energy on the living force of the here and now. Do not overdo, keep your limits. Take yourself less seriously because no one else does. Waste time and energy not on gossips. Dream more in your waking moments. Envy is a waste of time because you already have all you need. Hate not for others as life is too short to be wasted on hating anyone. Make peace with your past so it will not spoil the present. You are in charge of your happiness. Problems are simply part of the curriculum that appear and fade away like algebra classes but the lessons you learn will last a lifetime; so realise life is a school and you're here to learn. Smile and laugh more often. Every argument out there is not for you to win. Agree to disagree.

Call your family often. Give something good to others each day. Forgive everyone for everything. Spend time with people over the age of 70 and under the age of 7. Try to make at least three people smile each day. What other people think of you is none of your business. Your job won't take care of you when you're sick. Family and friends will, so stay in touch.

Do the right things. Get rid of anything that isn't useful, beautiful or joyful. God heals everything. However good or bad a situation is, it will change. When you awake alive in the morning, thank God for it. And no matter how you feel; get up, dress up and show up! The best is yet to come.

As I end my entry in the lightless vicinity of my room, I concede to the importance of family and friends in life. Be that as it may, never depend on anyone but yourself in this world because even your shadow leaves you when you're in darkness.

Thwarted Panorama

Seven days feels like forever. It was in seven days the world as we know it and mankind was created. But what does seven days mean to one individual? In an inestimable sea of roving souls sailing the indeterminate vastness of this hallowed world, the last seven days conceded to become the cusp of my retrieving reclamation. The essence of the convalescence is now attained.

It was yesterday on the sixth day that I realised the cracks of my illusory invulnerability to the indiscretions dealt out were sipping through with allusions of relapsing. And as I was driving home, the kingly sight that splayed before my very eyes shaped the thwarted panorama of a possible individual who resided in the realm of receding reveries many, many years ago.

If I could chance that I once knew this individual, he was a man of timeless enthrallment. His state of being and air of presence were so pure and defined in his infantile existence that his very actions spawned a lifetime of imaginary serenities in the minds of people.

A boy who formed an attachment to his dog that when it left this world, he discarded his birth name and rechristened himself after his departed canine and would forever be known by that very name till he too came to pass.

A teenager who eventually gave up his childhood Christian faith and submitted into the amorphous atheist belief of a humanist and naturalist, not long after his beloved mother yielded to cancer.

A young adult where through his determinative years, imagined and created, chanced and manipulated, then expressed and conveyed the précis of all his abstractly formed attempts in provoking a realm of infinite likelihoods and convicting conscience.

A man who ultimately became a herald in pioneering one of the earliest form of fantasy writings for children in an epic and ambitious proportion culminating in a ménage of classics who also at this time rediscovered his Christian origin and re-embraced his childhood creed.

And finally an accomplished human being who captivated hearts and minds beyond a generation by his deeds and triumphs but whose devotion was also once again tested when he had to endure the claiming of his wife by the very malady that reaped his mother.

No one wants to ever live a day without their soulmate. He went through three years before following on to the other side.

I guess at the very end of it all, does it really even matter what he ever did and said in his lifetime? For if words from a man is to become the definition of his existence, then the man truly existed beyond his definitive words.

Because it is the very words of the last paragraph that so spurned my heart and belief in the first place that I had to understand why they were ever immortalised beyond his existence. It is now after understanding his heritage and affluence in life do I finally grasp the cusp of Clive Staples’ realm of receding reveries.

It is disturbingly heartening yet convincingly disconcerting to know that the creator of one of the best known stories for children vastly based on a love theme for everything that is alive yet being distinct in life, could paint a canvass of disparaging import for the very theme he so strongly based his works on.

In our seven days, we both discovered the different sides to the same coin.

Love anything and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact you must give it to no one, not even an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements. Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket, safe, dark, motionless, airless, it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. To love is to be vulnerable.

--C.S. Lewis

A Few Five People

Just like how the river needs the rain to flow, life is a chain of constant changes in culture and customs needed in the master tapestry of show.

Experiencing the dismal task of needing to unlearn whatever you have learned and practiced over the many long years simply because you have been wrong about many a thing is never a pleasant realization. Especially if you have been blinded and deluded. 

These decisions made in the past trail the present like an aimless reaper out to place a death mark on the future, but only briefly. It is from this very spot that you begin to appreciate the gravity and sum of all fears and hopes with denominating dreams and binomial beliefs.

Isn't it simpler just to say that the eruditions of exceeding expectations exemplify extreme echoes of enchanted entryways into an ensemble of epiphanies?

Not it doesn't...but it is here that your mind lurches out for actuality in an eventual truth. The main players in this game of tapestry are thus the five people.

So it begins...

On the other side of the river of constancy, spread across the greener plains of allure is the people you want in life. They are always the easiest and most profuse choice. Are they the best? These types represent the unknown in our hearts, spurned from the curiosity of our familiarity and fueled by the yearning sensation of proscribed providence. Here is where the embodiment of your character is at its thinnest virtue and lowest conscience. Loyalty, honesty and trust are merely backdrops in this region.

Every rule has its exception and the argument here is that some of these people eventually become the person you need in life. There is greater credence here on the word 'need' than what is lent. It is here where Fate decides to host a weekend party with Destiny, while Luck shows up late with Serendipity and Order is seen dancing with Chaos in the enclosure prepared by Providence. Amidst the cosmic rivulet of this mix are the individuals you really needed. For better of worse and what other unknown purposes, you will never discern until you have sat through the entire celestial afternoon party. Then you can connect all the dots looking backward.

As natural as every eventuality, you open up yourself and allow them the independence to affect your life. They become people who help you. Indirectly or otherwise, they become the determinant of your heart. When you open up yourself to the kindness of others, you consent to the consequences of receiving love and dealing out affection in return. They become people who love you.

What goes up will surely fall and you will always be instinctively counting down the time. Thus, as the heart loves so must it break. Therein rests the ingenuous irony of the people who have hurt you from the very same people who love you. It is confusingly harsh that two of mankind's strongest and most influential emotions come from the same source of people. At the nadir of your poignant sorrow, you must grasp that the only way for you to stop hurting is for them to be gone. It is when you know they have become the very people who have left you.

Everyone needs a few five people in their lives. Because if you don't believe enough in anything, at the very least believe that God doesn't give you the people you want, he gives you the people you need. To help you, to hurt you, to leave you, to love you and to make you the person you were meant to be.