Week Six Thoughts

It’s week six already. Wow, I feel like school just started last week.

Just not too long ago I declared Linguistics as my major – and in such a flurry too. I had been putting off making my decision for so long, pushing it out of my head so I wouldn’t need to think about it, that by the time came where I actually had to submit my decision I still hadn’t decided. I just went along with it, and here I am having three core linguistic modules this semester.

I was a little excited for school, to finally be able to tell people “I’m majoring in Linguistics” instead of the answer “I haven’t decided” that I had been giving people all last year. Saying I didn’t know made me feel small – everyone had decided what direction they wanted their life to take and I was still as muddled as ever. Wasn’t university the time when I figured my life out?

I sit in lectures and seminars and listen to the lecturer speak endlessly. One lecturer says “I expect you guys are all here because of your passion in analyzing language!” For some reason this statement makes me feel uneasy. Do I have a passion for analyzing language? Um, no. No, I don’t. The phrase “analyzing language” itself sounds so dry and boring to me.

But this makes me feel like an impostor – around me are all these people who are in such awe of language, waiting and wanting to know more about me. I’m just sitting at the corner of the lecture theater wondering why the heck someone would swallow a string of beads and extract all his teeth so that his vocal movement could be seen in an x-ray (its a long story).

Its a frustrating feeling. To want to want to learn, to want to have the thrill of knowing new things and exploring new boundaries and having the mastery of the knowledge. But instead everyday I drag myself to my books (sometimes rather unsuccessfully) and force myself to read words I don’t understand and memorize things I don’t care about.

I thought university for sure was going to be when everything started falling into place. Where I finally found what interest me, where life suddenly had so much meaning. I pictured studying something that would intrigue me so much that it wouldn’t even feel like studying, that I’d look down at my work and be so engrossed in it I wouldn’t even feel the length of time.

Think about a jungle – where the trees grow thickly and there are branches anywhere; you can’t see much in front of you. The weather is humid and hot and you just cannot find you way out and you are miserable. I thought university was when I’d come out of the jungle. I’d see a big city up ahead, where I know when I reach, wew, it’ll just be great. It’s far ahead, really far, but I can clearly see the path there, and it is through a meadow with flowers and the weather is nice and fair and it’s a nice journey.

But instead I’m still in the jungle; the trees are thicker and the weather is hotter. And this time it’s worse. Because before when I was in the jungle I knew that in due time I’d leave it for the beautiful meadow, but now when I’m still pushing away leaves and trudging miserably, I’m not so sure if the meadow exists anymore.

Sounds like a rather stupid imagery, and I’m no poet, but that’s the way I can best describe it.

It is difficult to find where all these end, where life starts. Or maybe it’s started already, but I can’t stand the thought of that. That this is where my life begins, how it’s going to continue. That is just a hopeless thought. And there are times when I feel hopeless and defeated and ready to crawl under my blanket and never come out again.

And yet in all these, let me put my fears and doubts and hopelessness at the foot of the cross, and that if I have nothing else, let my confidence in Him be enough.

God is faithful, this much I know.

The Eight Year Old With Fur

“I can see your fuuuuuur”

I look up from the book in which I am writing down the words she has to learn for the week.

“What did you say? My fur?”

“Mhmm, I can see your fuuuuur,” she repeats, staring at me.

I look at her in bewilderment and bend towards her. “My fur? You can see my fur? What fur?”

She reaches out and drags her finger across my arm gently. “Here! Your fur!”

I can’t help myself – I laugh out loud. Maybe from the relief that she wasn’t staring at a mustache on my face that I was unaware I had.

“That’s not fur!! Its called hair. And look, you have it too.”

The Six Year Old Who Wants To Marry Me

He sits next to me and holds my hands, and looks down at my fingernails which I have painted. “I like your nail polish,” he whispers to me, and after a moment of hesitation adds “I like all of you Ms Jody”.

As class ends, he comes to give me a goodbye hug. He pulls me down to he can whisper in my ear: “When I grow up, I want to marry you.”

He starts running back to his class, before abruptly stopping midway and turning back to give me one more hug.

 

The Days, Those Days

I miss the days.

I miss the days of coming home from school in the afternoon, wondering what I could find for a snack even though dinner wasn’t too far away. I miss yelling my arrival to my mum, wherever she might be in the house. I miss eating dinner at 4 in the afternoon, and talking about all the latest things that happened in school.

I miss the days where the most important part of my day was at recess, and whether or not someone would pick me to be on their team to play soccer. Where I ran around the field, some days never touching the ball once, but out of breathe and happy.

I miss the days of queuing for my food in the canteen, where I took a metal tray and a lady with a hair net would scoop rice into it. “少饭,” I always said. I didn’t want too much food – I was a slow eater and I wanted to make sure that I would finish the same time as everyone else, that I wouldn’t be left behind when everyone streamed out to play.

I miss the days where my after school activity was cooking. Where every Tuesday I would proudly arrive home with my creation that week, ready to show-off to anyone who would let me.

I miss the days where we would sneak a torchlight under our pillows before bedtime, so that even when the lights were off, we could read our storybooks. The days when we listened for our parents’ footsteps as we watched Disney shows under our blanket. The days when we talked on and on, giggling at things that weren’t even funny, only to have our mum or dad open the door and chide us to go to sleep.

I miss the days where my daddy came home everyday, armed with a pomelo fruit when I was younger. I never liked to eat it, but I remember taking out my markers and drawing all over it, before someone would finally take it away to cut it up and eat. I miss hearing the telephone ring as he called home to tell my mum that he was on his way back, so that we could prepare his dinner. I miss when he wasn’t overseas so much.

I miss the days of rollerblading downstairs. Where I always complained because the boys were too fast for me, and how come they always ditch me? I went as fast as I could, as fast as I could, and yet they always seemed to disappear ahead of me. The days where we climbed rocks and waded in pools and played basketball with our imaginary hoop.

I miss these days, and so many more.

But long gone are the days where my greatest concern is how I could stay up past my bedtime. I am suddenly thrown into a world where it seems my every decision would end up impacting my future. Where I have to worry about jobs and money and relationships and I’m not ready for it, I’m not.

How come I never got fair warning of this? How come nobody told me to get ready, that one day you’ll find yourself in this great big world, with not a clue on how to survive? Or did they tell me, but I was just too absorbed in my little world to believe that things would ever be different. “Enjoy this now,” they must have said. “Some day things won’t be so simple, the world is so much greater, and it is scary.” I must have thought them ridiculous.

But yet here I find myself, what’s left of my innocent childhood slowly slipping out of my grasps as I try to hold on to it as tightly as I can.

Someday, I suppose, we all have to grow up.

–

I think about what I have lost and what I have gained. I try and weigh them to see which is larger in magnitude. I am looking for the correlation between the two.

I do not lose because I have gained, and neither do I gain because I have lost. I am not punished by having things taken away from me because I have gained something else, and I am not offered something in condolences for the things that have slipped out of my grasp.

Yet, I have gained because I have lost, and I have also lost because I have gained. Because of the things that I have chosen to let go, now new things can come and take its place. For wistful dreams that I recognize will not come reality, I have replaced with happy, hopeful aspirations. Time that I could have used to chase monetary, materialistic things, I have given up to pursue head and heart truths.

I am starting to realize that while in the moment I may not see it, the good will come. It may take longer that I expect, longer than I hope, longer than I think I can wait, but it will come. I believe in greater, better things. It is difficult and it is painful. But it is worthwhile.

Spoonful Of Tea

Today I ask the primary 2 kid I was tutoring what a teaspoonful meant, and he looks at me and say “a spoon full of… tea?”

I teach him about space and how in the entire universe we are just a teeny speck. I tell him we, and the planets and the sun and stars are all in “space”. He asks if we could ever leave this space.

He shows me his handbook’s “reward page” and how he already had a column of stamps, but his friend had gotten two rows more than him. He tells me about swimming and that his favourite part was blowing bubbles underwater. I tell him to be careful not to breathe in, and he says he knows, if not “my lungs will explode”.

I tell him to take his pencil and do the work I’ve assigned him, but he looks over at my pencil case with coloured pen and markers and asks “can I do it in purple?” He takes my markers and draws a picture of the word I am trying to explain to him.

I ask him what the word “shy” means, and he doesn’t know how to explain if. I tell him to act it out, but he grabs my pen and draws a face, then searches for the red pen and draws two bright spots on the face’s cheeks.

We do a cloze passage on rainbows, and the sentence goes “I saw a rainbow in the ___”. He looks at me blankly so I try to prompt him along, and ask him where he thinks he can see a rainbow. He nods understandingly and replies “Parkway Parade”.

I try to explain to him how a rainbow comes about, but all he’s interested in is asking me if its possible to see seven rainbows in a sky all at once. I tell him I’m not sure, but he insists I google it. We find a picture with 3 rainbows in the sky all at once, and he marvels at it.

I test him on the spelling of the days of the weeks and months of the year. He spells “August” as “Orgress” and “April” as “Aeple”. I can’t help myself – I laugh even as he’s writing the words out.

He’s young and innocent and small and today he just showed me how one of his teeth is falling out. I want to tell him not to grow up, to stay curious and fearless, to not be afraid of being wrong and to laugh at everything. But I never listened when people told me “enjoy being young”, so I doubt he’ll listen to me too. And one day when its his turn to look at the younger ones, he’ll know what I’m talking about.

My Great Grandparents

The other day my dad showed me this photo of his grandparents, my great grandparents. I was so enthralled by the fact that I had never met these two people, and they had lived lives that I was completely unaware and un-involved in, and yet without them I quite literally would not exist today.

Have you ever considered how you are the product of so many choices? That for so many generations before, the people have made hundreds and thousands of decisions (both big and small), and each of these resulted in consequences (both good and bad), and you and I, we are the products of all these decisions. This fills me with wonder and amazement.

What if my great grandparents had married someone else? What if they had chosen to live on a different street – my grandparents would never have met. What if my dad hadn’t asked my mum out watch Phantom of the Opera at the time he did, and my mum had ended up with the second guy who asked her? What if my grandpa didn’t sail across the seas from Hainan all those years ago to Singapore?

Mathematically, the probability that I am alive at this time and at this location, with the people around me that are around me – it seems virtually impossible. What are the chances that people have made the series of choices they have made (and if you math it out, there are quite literally hundreds of thousands other possibilities)? So the fact that you and I are both here, now, in the present, exactly where we are, I am compelled to believe that it cannot be by chance.

Who is to say that you have not been called for such a time as this? I have been placed where I am for a reason, and not by chance. So should I not make every attempt to live out a life that has purpose and meaning? To walk and talk and breathe with the knowledge and quiet confidence that my life has a purpose, and I refuse to waste it.

Not sure if my ramblings make sense to anyone but myself, but just what’s been occupying my mind these past few days.