Perfection

“Common man seeks it out. (Perfection) They aspire to attain it as though it were some tangible thing” This is from the Bleach Manga. Yes, I was also quite surprised when I saw this issue’s topic of debate – Perfection. Why did I remember it? The debate on perfection has always been cliché and ancient, however, this soliloquy of Mayuri-sama made me sit up and really reminisce the times I thought about perfection. What made me notice it was the fact that was in Bleach, and also that it was so impressively argued. With the drawings, it looked like art. To see it in my minds eye, it was as though Mayuri-sama himself was reciting those lines, so beautiful, so poetic, it could make the toughest pirate of the seven seas cry.

What do I think about perfection? It’s exactly like Mayuri said. We chase after it like our lives depend on it. We always seek to improve ourselves; we always seek to make ourselves superior to what we were before. But what we don’t realize is that, perfection can never be attained. Tyler Durden once said, “Self improvement’s masturbation, self destruction is the answer. I say never be perfect, I say never be complete. Evolve, and let the chips fall where they may.” We seek to speed up the process of evolution rather than let it happen naturally. Why the obsession with perfection? In time we will improve, but we’ll always fall short of perfection. Where people try to define perfection, I believe that it is something unattainable. I might piss some believers off here, but you might argue, “God is perfect.” Is he really? When he flooded the Earth for 40 days and 40 nights, did he not admit that he had made a mistake? A mistake is an imperfection, is he perfect then? Moreover, God is a product of man’s imagination. God was created by man, in man’s eyes he is perfect, due to the fact that he is a figment of imagination. The bible did not descend from heaven. The bible was written by man. And man, is not perfect. However, by making this statement, we assume that religion and God are interrelated. In actual fact, how do we know if God is real or not? The God depicted in the bible might be no where close to the omnipotent being that sits upon his throne of clouds. To explore all possibilities, there could even be no God. To those who are strong believers in religion, once again I apologize. This is merely a hypothesis, I know it’s a sensitive issue, so please don’t take this to heart. I do not intend to question your faith.

Apart from thinking about the issue of perfection, I watched “The Gridiron Gang” today. It’s quite an interesting show about changing lives. However, I was not concerned about the themes of the show. In actual fact, I was thinking about myself. Thoughts about me ran through my mind like wildebeests in stampede. I thought about the way I saw myself. I saw myself as someone hubristic. But what I realized was that, whereas hubris is to consider oneself to be more knowledgeable or superior than others, one has to have at least the knowledge, or the ability to have the privilege of hubris, I had neither ability nor knowledge. Then it suddenly dawned on me, I puffed myself up full of nothing but hot air. Where people with amazing abilities kept themselves humble, I, with nothing but hot air, have the audacity to consider my shit smells sweeter than most. To call myself “hubris” is an insult to the word itself. To assume that I know everything, when I know nothing is a joke. I have made a mockery of myself. Behold, the fool who thought himself God, the stupid elitist, the failure of a perfectionist.

Apart from realizing my own stupidity, I thought about the privileges that I took advantage of. Let me name an example - Love. For as long as I can remember, I have always assumed that people will love me. That love will find me someday and we could live happily ever after. That was until the definition of insanity struck me. The definition of insanity: To do something over and over again, and expect different results. Which was about the time I realized that I was insane. Stuck in the monotony of this life, where each day is just a copy of a copy of a copy, I expect to find love? Who was I kidding? The maxim which I lived by was “hold nothing”. To hope for love to find me one day, was a mockery of my principles and beliefs. If someone was to “hold nothing” and he prayed for love, wouldn’t that be a contradiction of his own beliefs? And it then made me rethink my life and how I lived it. Expect nothing to be given to you, but yet give everything you got. Live like each day’s your last, fight like you’ll live forever. To hope is a luxury I cannot afford. What has been given to me is a privilege not a right. Being frank with myself, love is something I cannot handle, neither do I deserve it. It would be much more convenient for me to just love others without expecting anything in return. Come to think of it, I would discourage anybody from loving me, I can’t handle it. Well, I don’t think I can.

I’ve decided that my love is to be shared, expecting nothing in return; makes me sound like some philanthropist of love. Nothing of that sort, I’m no generous person. I just feel that people who need care and concern will receive both from me. I bet many of you think I’m just full of it, I’m not. Let’s just put it this way, one who doesn’t expect anything, will not be disappointed when it is not given to him. “Hold nothing”, to be able to detach oneself from everything and everyone, to not rely on anything, to be independent. I haven’t really been keeping to my end of the bargain; I guess this is the time to do so. I’ve made my decision; love but do not expect to be loved. Care for others, but do not expect to be cared for. To look on the brighter side, at least I won’t get hurt by anything or anyone. Hold Nothing: If you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha. If you meet your ancestor, kill your ancestor. Free of everything, bound by nothing, live your life as it is. That is what it means to be truly free. “If I had to relive my life again, I’d do the same thing over again. Because no matter what I did or said, I would have no regrets, I would live my days one step at a time, knowing in the end that destiny would bring us together, for one last fight, for one last breath, for one last day of freedom.” – Boys of Fate. I’m just taking the first steps to living my life free of everything. Being a boy of fate, letting the winds of change carry me to whatever destination it decides. Could that be something close to perfection? Maybe. After all, they say the master plan for us all is immaculate.

Saving Superman

I was walking home one day in the evening, and I started thinking about how those people who are so emotionally sturdy remain that way. Then I realized; they don’t. Truth of the matter is, everybody would fall one day, nobody is built such that they are able to withstand incredible amount of punishment, emotional, mental or physical, and still remain standing, metaphorically, literally (pardon the innuendo). There would be one day, when something or someone just pushes them over the edge, and the long way down they go, until they hit rock bottom; The vulnerable state that everyone is left in when they just asplode. *Poof* brain short circuited, heart broke, whatever, you get the drift. And this quotation puts the results fairly accurately, “the bigger they are, the harder they fall”. The agents of change are the only permanent thing in this world. Pillars of strength would crumble; mountains can be worn to dust given time. You can say that the same results would happen with something much weaker and softer than rocks and metal, the human mind, body and heart.

You might say, “what do rocks and human beings have to do with each other?” Actually, physical geography and Literature are really much more alike than people make it out to be. Both of them are about the study of pressure and time; both on the thingamajigs and whatchamacallits on planet Earth. One made of sticks and stones, the other made of flesh and bone. Come to think of it, most Artsy subjects are based on the study of time and pressure. History is the study of time and pressure on a collection of people. Economics is the study of time and pressure on monetary issues. But I digress. As I was saying, Literature is the study of time and pressure on human beings. It focuses on the flaws and strengths of human beings. However, since each of us is unique, in the end many flaws and strengths come out, and that’s why we have something to study. If all of us had only 1 flaw or strength, we needn’t study lit. Our life is full of tragedies and triumphs. Tragedies are what happens when we fall. And in my perspective, much of our life events, or rather how we perceive much of our life events, we perceive them as tragedies. We are the hero of our story. Every tragedy has a tragic hero, with a tragic flaw. The tragic flaw is the main reason why the hero falls. The more upright, virtuous, strong willed, etc. they are, the harder they fall. The same way John Proctor fell in the Crucible because of one mistake – his adultery with Abigail. The same way Oedipus fell – through a sick twist of fate, his ambition and lust. The same way I fell when I trusted too much in love. Each and every one of us would have fallen at one point of our life. The only thing that matters after that is how we pick ourselves up. “Why do we fall Master Bruce? So we can learn to pick ourselves up,”

“Hope? Hope, my friend is a very dangerous thing. It can drive a man insane,” that line was said by Morgan Freeman in “The Shawshank Redemption”. The issue of hope has always been a topic of controversy. Like adrenaline is poison to the body as well as a necessity to strive to be better, hope is like a poison to the heart, that can drive a man to do incredible feats. Yet to hope is like walking on a thin thread between sanity and insanity. It’s true, hope can drive a man insane. Hope has caused the downfall of the strongest man. Hope, coupled with love, is the deadliest combination one can ever inflict on an individual. Love is the force that can bind 2 souls for eternity. It is powerful and unpredictable. Hope is the force that can drive someone to strive fanatically for something. To strive for a force that is forever binding and when bound, unbreakable, one courts with the mysteries at the very depths of the heart. The deepest darkest corners where when once brought into light, can never be hidden in the shadows again. When one hopes, one by one these little corners are brought into light. When one loves, the heart is left open and vulnerable to disappointments. To open one’s heart and to hope at the same time is to expose your heart to the light at its most vulnerable. To me, that’s insane. Sometimes the light is too strong that it burns the heart and the heart once burnt, takes forever to recover. The number 1 reason why people fall is because of love. I’ve seen people love obsessively and when rejected, or when they break up, it destroys them entirely. And the phenomenon of once bitten twice shy begins. They refuse to love, and refuse to let others love them. And when that happens, when the one for them comes along, they convince themselves that he/she’s not the one and continue minding their own business. They are loved, but do not love back. The person of their dreams keeps on loving them and they do not reciprocate. In the end, the person fades out of their life as though he wasn’t there at all. And it’s then that they finally realize that they have just missed out their happy ending. When they try to get them to love them back, they are already long gone, and once again, the poor heartbroken individual is left in the lurch.

The mighty will fall eventually. Every society at the peak of their development will decline. Like how China rose and fell and rose again. Like how America was one of the most backward countries previously but rose to be a world power. However, they are on the decline again and once again China will be a world power. The cycle of life continues no matter how hard one tries to stop it. One may say that the fate of everyone is predestined. I prefer to think it as although the world has developed, human beings have not. We are so obsessed with external influences that we hardly look into ourselves and address the problem that has been plaguing our species for centuries.

Ethics

Recently, I came across an article about chimeras in the papers. Yes, I read, just in case you’re wondering. It seems that the medical sector is starting to research on chimeras. That is, pretty cool, yet pretty scary. A scene from many movies on ethics and the animation Full Metal Alchemist flashed through my head. You must be wondering what the scene that is so famous is. I’m sure you have seen shows where science experiments on human mutation went wrong. Usually a grotesque monstrosity is created which has the ability to speak and have the same feelings of human beings. Their first words are usually “kill me”. I’ve never really gotten over these shows. While people can watch “Happy tree friends”, desensitized to violence and apathetic to almost everything, these things just stir things I can’t explain in me, and I don’t feel good about it. The question that ran through my head while reading the article was, “Will we end up like this?” Will we have to sacrifice lives for the sake of science? Are animals’ lives less important than ours?

When I was studying literature in secondary school, I came across this line from The Crucible. “Life is god’s most precious gift; no principle, however glorious may justify the taking of it.” I find this very true. However, it’s relevance to our society has been diminished by the debauchery of the sanctity of life. Where people use to love, they now fight and kill. Where people use to show compassion for the suffering, they now stand by the side with apathy. Where people use to smile with sincerity, it is now but a veil which hides their true intentions, the daggers behind their lying eyes. But, when I come to think of it, when have human beings ever led a life without sin? When has any human being ever led a pure, blameless without a single evil thought? Do we suffer from the human condition? Do we try to deny the love of conflict that is inherently in us?

They say the study of literature, is the study of the history of the human condition. They say we study the forces that forge our character and shape our will; the forces that can make or break a man; that we study, the language of the world. I have never denied the existence of powers that only those gifted with clairvoyance can see. People ask why I read people so well; I tell them I study literature. They ask me what literature has to do with it; I tell them that’s why you can’t read people well. People see the material and forget the immaterial. They think with their conscious mind and neglect the subconscious. They believe in what they can see and have never contemplated the enigmatic or the mysterious. They take for granted what is a gift to them. Have you ever imagined what being truly emotionless is like? Where you can kill a person without batting an eyelash? Where life is equivalent to a sack of flour? We walk and we talk because we have the spark of life. Without it, we are just $2.83 worth of chemicals. We take advantage of our life which is so priceless. We only know how to complain, and we do not know how to give thanks for having so much – a life.

Life, so capricious and fickle; it can leave you wishing you were never alive, but when it happens, you find yourself grasping to it like your life depended on it. Pardon the irony. People know too little to be dogmatic. We think we know a lot. “A fool will think himself wise while the truly wise will know himself a fool”. We all have hubristic tendencies. I know I am the zenith of pride and arrogance and many people can’t stand me. Well, I can’t stand myself either. I realize I preach what I don’t practice, and I practice what I don’t preach. I take advantage of life all the time, and hardly think about it. I’m mostly griping about everything and frequently not appreciate the things around me. It’s only when I get quiet times to myself that I get to look inwards and introspect where I find things about myself that I absolutely abhor. When I look at myself, I see the scars of my past, the lines of regret all over my countenance that I can hardly call mine. When I look at myself in the mirror, I don’t see me, I see the visage of a boy who was once innocent. He was once the beacon of childishness and freedom. As the shackles of his mistakes bound him down, his hypocritical shell enveloped him and turned him into the paranoid schizophrenic we now know as “Nick”. With multiple personalities, people see him an enigma. He is the living parable of the 7 sins, and he lives each day regretting what he has become.

However, there is no point in retrospect, unless to learn from previous mistakes. Hitler didn’t learn from Napolean’s mistake. Japan didn’t learn from Mongolia’s mistake. People say we learn from history, but we never do. The conflict between Israel and Palestine has existed since the Crusades. People never learn. I don’t either. I have never learnt that I was not made to have love as a destiny. I have never learnt that I cause pain wherever I go and happiness whenever I go. I make the same mistakes over and over again, causing pain to the very people who care for me. When will I ever be the person I want to be? When will I stop succumbing to the vices of evil? When will I stop taking love for granted? Perhaps I never will, perhaps I’ll always be a false messiah. If that’s the case, I was born dead.

You may feel that I treat myself too harshly, and others may think I don’t treat myself harshly enough. Whatever you guys think, I hope you do not walk the same path I did. Life always gives us a second chance to change. When all hope is lost, life will always provide some. Perhaps this may sound overly optimistic, but I believe that it is the truth. Most of the time, we don’t see the open doors, but stand forever rooted to the closed door in front of us. I have done that for 3 years, and recently, a new door just slammed in my face. I’m just waking up from a dream, and in the noble words of Tyler Durden, “We are very, very pissed.” Contradictory? Wait till you see what’s in my head.

So in love...

It’s 2008. It’s a new year; will it be a new life? Maybe not. Looking around the same sight I have seen day in, day out, year after year. The monotony of life is starting to get to me. There are only so many days that I can wake up happy that at least I’m alive. It may be true that I have everything going for me. It is true that I’m living in a condo, a nice swimming pool at the base of my block – Olympic size. It is true that a have a nice bag, nice hand phone, nice school, nice… well you get the drift. However, it seems that I have lost something more important than everything here. Misplaced item? One soul. Recently, everything just seems like a copy of a copy of a copy. Nothing fascinates me anymore. School is all right, but I’m starting to lose my direction in life. My compass is losing it’s magnetism and going woozy on me. All the new year resolutions, they’re legitimate, but they don’t really affect me, soul wise. Do they? I need something to nourish my spirit, to strengthen my soul. And I think I have found it…

I don’t want to lose my soul. I don’t want to lose the way that I feel for somebody now. I found my soul’s resurrection. It’s nice to be in love again I must say. And I don’t want to ever lose that feeling. The feeling where it doesn’t matter whether you grow a few white hairs racking your brain for an appropriate Birthday present for her, or you sleep way beyond your usual time just to put in a few more hours of conversation that feel like a few seconds. It doesn’t matter whether you think about her welfare every waking hour you have. It doesn’t matter whether she loves you back or not. You just want to make her happy. No need for acknowledgements, no need for reciprocations, no need for appreciation, you’ll do it no matter what. It is appreciation enough just to see that lovely smile on her face. Best of all, she’s worth this effort. Her child-like innocence, simple wishes, simple desires, a heart of gold, so many things that make her the perfect someone and yet they are just icing on the cake of her essence. She might not be drop-dead gorgeous, but she has a heart that makes you want to give your life savings to charity just to be able to feel worthy of her presence. With someone so great, you’re just a common weed, next to the most beautiful flower in the world.

I was never proud of my past. I did enjoy myself back then, but when you walk amongst giants of virtue and principle, your past mistakes and deviances from the right path show up like neon lights in a pitch-black alleyway. She makes me look back at my past. Well, maybe not just her, I often look back. I have so many regrets that listing it out on my fingers and toes will probably take me a day. God help me if I ever become a grown up. With so many regrets as a kid, I probably have to archive them - Nick’s regrets 2001 – 2007 She tells me not to dwell on the past. I tell that to people too. Too bad I never listen to my own advice. She’s right, but I feel that one has to learn from one’s past mistakes to lead a life that you err less. But recently, thinking about my past led me to many little voices in my head telling me, “You’re not worth it,”, “Don’t ruin her life,”, “Be fair,” and other stuff like that. And I started thinking that I’m not being fair to her, that I’m not worth to be in her presence and things like that. Then I thought again, “if she’s really that great, and she enjoys your company, does it really matter what your past holds? After all, you’ve found someone that’s worth it, would you even dream about harming one hair on her head? If you do, I swear to god I’ll kick you in the balls,” I won’t know how to kick myself in the balls but I’ll put myself through the worse torture ever if I ever hurt this girl; this angel sent from the heavens.

You know what the weirdest thing is? We’re the most incompatible pair on earth. Nobody would ever dream that we could get along. Me, Nick, I am the crazy mood swinging Casanova from back streets of Dogtown. Her, sorry can’t disclose her name, she’s the demure, fragile princess from Upper Boston. The prince and the pauper, royalty with rags, who would ever have thought it, were possible? The first day I talked to her, I thought it was only be for a brief moment just to provide a little comfort to her obviously upset heart. Seconds became minutes, minutes became hours, hours became days and days became weeks. Now I can hardly stop thinking about her and I amaze myself every time I make her smile, which I must say I’m quite proficient at doing. I never fail to question why is it that I’m able to understand her so well. It’s as though fate has brought us together and entwined our destinies. I could even say that currently, we’re close to inseparable.

God sure works in wondrous ways. As I amaze myself time and time again with almost spot on answers to her questions, she questioned me. “How do you do it?” For a long time I was speechless. I didn’t know how to answer that question. I found myself talking about God. A non-believer talking about God, can you believe that? It may sound egotistical but I said, “Do you believe in God? Do you believe that God sent an angel in your time of need and appointed him to be your guardian angel?” The irony of it all was that my previous msn messenger identity was the Archangel Tyrael, the life I was about to throw away until I “met” this wonderful girl. Perhaps they’re short of hands up there and requested my assistance. I guess you must assume that my ego is the size of an elephant. Close, it’s the size of a baby blue whale.

Retrospect

I got about to watching a movie today, well, a couple of movies, and they got me thinking about stuff that I’ve never really thought about before. They do say that you learn something new everyday. I’ve never really taken it seriously though.

Something struck me as I was watching this movie called Good Will Hunting. It was that, our actions are mostly motivated by fear. Whatever we do, our defensive mechanisms and instincts force us to choose the path of least resistance for fear of going through difficulty. Take a look at the world around you. People work because they are afraid of poverty. They study because they are afraid of becoming jobless. They strive so hard to make a living and they forsake everything because of that, their family, their friends, their enjoyment so as to run as far away from poverty as possible. Then I came to thinking, if people feared so much, when was the real living actually done? My friend is one good example. He hates the education system but still sits through its tortures. Why? Because he’s afraid that if he steps on the path less taken, it will lead him to somewhere unfamiliar and he might fail in life!

People fear the unfamiliar. People who’re afraid of trusting people will hurt other people before they can hurt him. It’s the basic defensive mechanism of human beings. People can go through their entire lives, not being close to anyone for fear of being hurt. It’s really sad. I’m guilty of that too. I’ve only ever thought ****** was the only girl meant for me because I can never forget the security she gave me. I felt that nothing else mattered in the world with her. But when she left it was as though my world came tumbling down. I was left stranded, I was stuck too long in my paradise and when it all fell apart, I was left stark naked in the world. It’s not until now that I’ve realized I’ve never let anyone come close to me, I’ve never let anyone touch me where it really mattered. Thrust out into the unfamiliar, I retracted myself into the shell that was familiar to me, my own heart. I am guilty of living life motivated by fear. I fear so many things that I probably won’t be able to finish counting in a lifetime. I fear the working world, I fear being in love, I fear…

However, in the process of fearing, I have also managed to harm other people around me. People that loved me, people who had no reason to get hurt because of me. Because I never trusted people around me and have always hurt them before they hurt me first, I’ve always said nasty things to people out of fear and spite. Paranoid personality disorder, that’s what they called it. To believe that there are things out there in the world that exist just to harm you. I lived in that world too long. I’ve found people who showed me that the world isn’t as screwed up as it is made out to me. My friends showed me that people can be trusted and people won’t backstab you at any opportune moment. I appreciate them for that. I appreciate the fact that they helped me even though they had no obligation to. I appreciate the fact that people didn’t care about my past or the bad shit I did, they just saw me for who I was in the present. I appreciate that even though my heart was as black as the night sky, they still showered their care and concern on me and reminded me that there was a time that I wasn’t bad and evil. I thank you all for that.

The other movie I watched was “Unbreakable”. It was an awesome movie. It was the kind of superhero movies that you’ll want to watch again and again and again. It’s the kind that every time you watch that show, you’ll learn to look at it from another perspective. It is so well crafted that every character stands out. All his struggles are shown as clear as day. That’s my personal take on it. It may be a load of crap to another person, but I like it. There was an idea in the show that caught my attention. It was that everything has an opposite. Hot and cold, good and bad, black and white, everything in this world has its opposite. If there are people, whose bones are brittle, and they fall sick often with immune system deficiency, wouldn’t there be people who never fall sick? Bones as tough as steel? Have immune systems that can repel any kind of viruses? It is an interesting theory, and as I watched the show “Good Will Hunting”, I could only see how probable it is for these people to exist. Will Hunting was a genius that solved complex algorithms as though they were elementary school arithmetic. Will Hunting is like the opposite of a retard. If people can be opposites mentally, shouldn’t there be a possibility that they may be opposites physically?

Another thing I learned from the shows was that, every individual is unique. Of course everybody knows that, but if we look at how billions of lives entwine with one another and cause major events that can never be caused by just one person, you’ll see how the entire world is like a living organism with each of us playing a small but vital part in this harmonic world. It’s as though whatever we do, it is a small part of a humongous master plan for Earth. It is like we’re part of a gigantic machine, each of us play a different part. Maybe I’m a screw, an insignificant part of the machine that if you lose one or two, it doesn’t really make a difference, or maybe I’m the fuel that drives this entire rig, without me this thing can’t move. Whatever it is, we are small, we are insignificant, there are billions of others like us, the world would not weep if just 1 out of a billion is lost. However, each individual leads their own lives; they have jobs, families, kids. By looking at each individual life, you would see a whole plethora of wonders. Little experiences that are unique to only them and them alone. Each life is different, each experience if special. That is what makes our existence as the human race so very interesting.