Muddled stream of consciousness

The day that was : 10 November 2010 Wednesday

It’s just the second day of the week.
And I need a moment of quiet introspection.
For the past two days I have been under the weather,
having slight if not terrible mood swings.

Thing like this happens to us.
Some days we are feeling upbeat and all is fine and rosy,
While other days we let feeling of dejection and hopelessness silently crawl within us,
Just a little thing will provoke your irritation and anger
But you never allow yourself moments to reflect your emotional states.
You let it pass hoping thing will get better a while later
But most of the times it won’t.

So this morning, while my younger sister drove me to work and noticing my low-spiritedness, she calmly turned to me and asked `would you want to `kuan cha’ (examine) yourself and see what it is inside of you that made you become so impatient and easily irritated these two days?’

Her statement immediately brought me to my senses .

Yes there are things that irritated me, may be it was initially triggered by the bodily discomfort as a result of PMS, then compounded by some other very minor personal issues which could easily be fixed if only I have not dragged myself too far from reaching within the core of my inner self and called for a little composure and rationale.

Sometimes addressing the root causes of our problem is actually the first step towards acknowledging the fact that most of which that we are feeling or experiencing has nothing much to do with others, but rather the way we response and handle each arising situation. One small issue if left unattended would together with others snowball into a messy woven web you sometimes find yourself having difficulties to disentangle yourself from.

I then reflected how days earlier on my way driving back to KK from the village I have noticed a stray dog, standing forlornly at an deserted petrol station, its furs have all fallen out exposing off its crumbled skin badly afflicted by serious skin desease (kurap), its extremely emaciated frame suggested the animal’s severely malnourished and has been deprived of food for days, or even weeks. I was driving and the traffic was heavy and it was raining and there was no food in my car, not even shops and food stalls selling food in the vicinity which I could offer to the dog to relief its hunger. But the image of this dog has since embedded in my mind. I have helplessly let myself attached to this sight and it has somehow affected my emotional state. In retrospect, I think I was at some point feeling a sense of remorse for reason that I haven’t tried hard enough to provide help to the poor animal.

I feel slightly better after much reflection and analysis on my situation. All of the frustration and irritation are actually nothing but my own making.


If only I have been rationale enough.

It’s raining on my way back from work and while driving I notice a physically-impaired elderly walking along the side of the road with perhaps his wife, slowly and painstakingly taking one small step at a time with the aid of a crutch, again this scene is quickly embedded in my mind, and a tiny bubble of tear forms and floats on the edge of my eye lid.

I don’t know what the tear was for. Maybe I empathized with the predicament of this old man having to deal with one of life challenges which is his physical disabilities, but it could also perhaps due to my own sense of realization of the fact that, nothing impairs you much more than your own mind which would sometimes, more than the physical impairment itself, blight your sense of perspective in life.

And my stream of thoughts has indeed muddled my own perspective for the past two days, ironically it took a tear to finally bring it to closure...

But now, the stream of consciousness flows like the calm water in the tranquil river of hope…

A little spritual food for thought : Master Venerable Hsing Yun