♥

Since I was a kid, I've been able to sleep through anything -- storms,  sirens, you name it. Last night, I didn't sleep.

-- Dr. John Dorian, Scrubs, "My First Day"

I wonder why I feel the need to do it now, over a year since my last proper entry in this blog; one week before my final exams of my final undergraduate year; three hours before I have to leave for class, having had no sleep and spending the last number of hours not studying, but this is just something I need to let out.

There will come a time in everyone's life, I believe, when the whole idea of existentialism sort of smacks you right in the face. I remember my experience. (If, provided, existentialism is the right word for it, that is, pardon me if it isn't.) I can't recall my specific age at the time but I couldn't be any older than six or seven. Or maybe it was eight or nine? Anyway, I realised, (I've no idea how I'd come to that realisation -- I guess I was a strange child?), that I was here in this body, looking at the world through this person's view. And I wondered, why is that? I could have been any other person, at any other time, in any other dimension. Why wasn't I born a tree? Why am I seeing the world through this particular point of view? Does that make me special? Is my perspective even consistent with reality? What if, the things I'm seeing, touching, smelling are all delusions that my mind has interpreted to be reality, and, as my child self would've thought: if aliens landed on Earth, would they see what I see the way I see it?

And worst of all: what happens when "I" die? Will there no longer be this ... entity - this soul, if you will - staring at the world through a shell?

This begs the question: what are we here for? In the religious view, we'd say that we're here to serve a higher power, and that this life is merely a test before we move to the next. Scientifically, we could say that we're here to populate the earth, to reproduce and preserve our species and to "connect the circle of life", as King Mufasa so wonderfully phrased it. And those are all such lovely things to believe in, but what of individual purpose? Are our choices, good or bad, meant to bring us to our intended, predetermined destination? That all the regrets, all the hardships, will ultimately bring you to your own sustained self-contentment?

The rest of my life can't compare to this night,
And only the heartaches have given me sight;
They bring me to you.

-- Joshua Radin, "They Bring Me To You"

Or are choices nothing more than choices - if you make a good one, great! But if you make a bad one, well that's just too bad - you'll just have to make do with it and work your way from there; that everything, anything that happened or happens or will happen in your life depends on every single event that takes place; and the simplest turn would change everything? If you're meant to be a hobo, it wouldn't matter whether you reach that path straight away, or whether you spent years of your life studying for a degree and having a successful career but end up losing everything. But if nothing is predetermined, if your book of life is being written as you go along, wouldn't it kill you to think that any single choice you've wrongly made or any single event that failed to occur at any point in your life could have stopped you from becoming a hobo?

It's a scary thing to dwell on, really. Or maybe I shouldn't be dwelling on it at all? I've been reminded once by a good friend that life doesn't come with a manual. I guess I just like things to be certain. I've found myself adopting an all-or-nothing approach in my everyday ventures, where I'll only do something if I'm absolutely certain it'll result in the way I want it to and to distant myself from it if it won't. I suppose you could understand why.

I quit my job.

You can only maintain the illusion that you have your life under control for so long.

I think after five years of blogging (more or less), you end up in one of two directions: one, it becomes second nature to you; or two, you kind of get over it. I miss the time when writing acted as a form of release; I was never able to keep my thoughts and emotions in a diary for long, at any age or in any form of paper, but somehow blogging worked.

It's funny, really, because it's not so much of "I have nothing to write about", it's more..."I don't see the point". Way back when, it made me feel better -- it made me feel accomplished, to write about a movie I saw, or to sit down and take a minute to reflect about the things that have been going on in my life: something as superficial as an outing with friends, or something as affecting as my emotional problems, and articulate them. It was a medium of escape, it was a wake up call: it's only when you learn to admit something that you learn to solve it. It sometimes felt like, without taking the time to reflect-and-write, I wouldn't really know what goes on in my own head.

I envy people who see past the surface: people who feel everything, whether good or bad. A day in college isn't just a day in college to them. No, it was a better day than yesterday, because the lecture was slightly more bearable, or because they had a good talk with a friend, or maybe it was a really crappy day, and they whip out their mp3 player to play the loudest, angriest song in it which in turn make them even angrier, and yet these little things were good enough to make them decide to wake up the next day instead of falling into oblivion. They were good enough.

I feel like I'm cruising my own life through a bird's eye view. One day after another, with an empty void where my thoughts should be and a brick wall where my emotions should be. I seem normal enough: I go about my daily life, I don't alienate myself from the people around me, I laugh, I cry, and yet, somewhere at the end of the line I find myself asking, "Why?"

Why do I get out of bed every morning?
(or afternoon or evening, whatever. ;p)

Isn't having purpose, or some perspective of it, what makes us human? What happens if you don't even have that? I feel like I'm wasting my life away. Not because I'm not experiencing things, but because I'm not feeling my experiences.

I don't even know if this is making sense. Maybe I'm just "over-thinking" things. Oh, the irony. :)



P.S. If my life was a movie, most of the soundtrack would be Damien Rice. ♥

P.P.S. I found an almost similar entry here, from like, almost exactly a year ago. Interesting.

P.P.P.S.

Happy birthday again, Kak Chin! ♥