Little notes

It warms the cockles of my heart:

A little note and a packet of biscuits left by two Venerable tzefus before they left for Taiwan in the wee hours of the morning while I was still soundly asleep, after spending a few days at my place, sometime in August 2010. They kindly and thoughtfully turned down my offer to send them to the air port lest in my sleep-deprived state as a result of having to rise up early I would not be able to concentrate at work the next day. The parents of one of the tzefus came to fetch them instead.

One of the tzefus gave me a small diary with notes of encouragement, which I very much treasure:

A blind fish

The day after Christmas 26 December 2010.

Fang Seng on a Sunday

We took a picture of this ikan galak which suffered some bruises and a blind eye probably due to heavy struggle while being kept with other fishes in a small basin for sale, after being cruelly and forcefully robed from their natural habitat. It’s heartbreaking for me to see an innocent life being subject to unnecessary torture like that. After being released the fish refused to escape instead swam to the bank of the small swampy area and stayed unmoved for a long time. I tried to sooth this little creature by placing my hand on its body and uttered a little prayer, but it remained still seemingly oblivious to my touch. I was in fact fearing for its safety for being in such fragile condition it might easily fall prey to other predators like biawak.

I was relieved to find that the fish was no longer there when I returned sometime later. It must have recovered from its wound that it managed to navigate back to the deeper water, to where it belonged.

Or perhaps it had indeed felt, hence responded to my concern..

Dear little creature, I pray for your safety and may suffering evade you.

And you are now safe from harm..

Just this thought

Without us realising, we more than a week into the new year already.

I am simply amazed, at time in awe at how just time can really just zoom past us like that.

Time does not want to compromise with us even if we plead with all our heart wishing it can stop a little, when we are standing indecisively in the middle of nowhere and we don’t know where to go and we need some grace period while we sort out our direction in life.

And time’s intransigent when some of us are drudging through the muddles and stresses of our daily lives, thus are inevitably and unwillingly thrown into the darkness of deep abyss, while we hope and pray for time to wait till we come to the light of day but no, time’s an arrogant machine which will just speed through the dark tunnel of rail track without even turning back to check on us..

Neither does time want to compromise when we are savouring some precious moments in our life, a moment in time which will never come again. Where we feel like we want to freeze time right there and then, and to capture and slide those precious moments into a little pocket between the fabric of time itself.

Like our childhood. Our youth.

But reality is that snarky little jerk that’s staring you right in the face and say “wake up, you have no time for silly reverie like this.”

Yet reality is also that kind little thing that helped plant our feet firmly on the ground, for without which we might be like a lost child wandering too far away from the very spot we have embarked our journey on.

Sometimes, fear of what lying ahead of us presses against us like cold wind blowing in the street which we have no power to shield ourselves from.

But we must press on, in spite of our anxiety, our fear.

For the new year for most of us, there’s also going to be more plans and resolutions to stay ahead...

But just for these few minutes…

I just want to remind myself to breath, someone wrote about how it’s an easy thing to forget, and I must agree, sometimes we get so carried away with life’s seemingly trivial issues so much so we are distracted from what really matters, like the breaths under our nostrils.

That’s the most important thing that we tend to neglect.

To think that I have witnessed with my own eyes how a close relative breathed his last sometime this year make this realization a poignant reminder for me.

So as I am writing this, I just want to allow myself this opportunity to simply close my eyes for these few brief minutes, to really feel the inflow and outflow of breaths coursing through my system.

This very much neglected life-giving activity, so ever precious yet often times fragile, is what really matters, and the reason for my being here…

For that, I am grateful.

And I pray for a good year ahead..