Aaron Kee

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Exactly 36 hours to my scheduled flight to London to kick-start my Europe backpacking trip. Well, it didn’t really conform to ‘backpackers’ definition but close to it, I promise.

I’m excited. I think I am excited. I think I’m trying to be excited.

Not sure what’s fiddling with my emotions but I feel I’ve a lot of unfinished businesses back here. Things I’ve to do, words I’ve to say, stories I’ve to tell. It’s not like I’ll never come back, it’s only for a month, but I will be jetting off with a heavy heart, knowing that there’s still a big burden not lifted off my shoulder.

Everything we have or don’t have are the results from every choices we make. ‘Make things happen, not let it happen. If the grass is greener on the other side, that’s because they took care of it.”

Guess I didn’t make things happen then.

It was a rare gathering of sorts. With my high school friends and college mates. Things change as time flies by. Each of us are now heading towards different directions in life, separated by career path and choices made. The spirit of unison in Chinese New Year brought us all together. Sitting on the same table, under the gleaming sky, as we updated each other on our respective lives.

That’s what new year’s all about. Bringing family & friends together. As everyone now brave the city exodus & traffic standstill, virtually turning all major highways in the country into a parking lot, with just a single aim in mind: to make it back home in time for the reunion dinner. To savage back memories that are long lost. To find our way back home, to where we belong. It’s perfectly true that there’s no place like home. Not a fancy bungalow, not a table full of scrumptious dishes will replace the warmth of being in companion of family & friends. A place is as only good as the people make it to be.

Now the difference between Christmas, New Year and Chinese New Year is that no one writes about making new year’s resolutions or ponders the meaning of life and etc because Chinese New Year is all about family reunion, eating, drinking and gambling. This festival always bring to mind the movie; Four weddings and a funeral (so, excuse me) because it might be true, alot of times we only see some relatives either during weddings or funerals, and Chinese New Year.

“It is all your memories, the joyful ones and the heartbreak ones, that make up who you are as a person.”

Happy Chinese New Year and Gong Xi Fatt Chai!

“Taking one’s chances is like taking a bath, because sometimes you end up feeling comfortable and warm, and sometimes there is something terrible lurking around that you cannot see until it is too late and you can do nothing else but scream and cling to a plastic duck.”

When you have a dream and it takes hold of you, what can you do? Do you run with it or let it go and you’ll be thinking for the rest of your life, what might have been. We had so many dreams as children. Where do they all go when we grow? Are they swallowed up by the mundane things of everyday life? Or do we lose them, leave them behind us in the dust?

If you take chances, and you mess up, you move on. You want to try something, and if it was a stupid thing to try, you look it in the eye and think, “well, as least I know not to do that again.” There’s no turning back. You apologise if you’re sorry, but you can’t cry over spilled milk. If you’re jealous, psych yourself out of it. If you have to lie to make everything alright again, lie like you mean it. If you find yourself stuck in a rut, stand up and jiggle your brains. If you think you love this person, you tell him or her how you feel, sometimes that’s all it takes.

And things happen— people leave us, or don’t love us, or don’t get us, or we don’t get them or fall out of love, and we lose and fail and hurt one another. We are like water vessels. When the cracks start to open upand we finally can see one another, because we see out of our facades through the cracks and into each other. Before that, we were just looking at ideals of each other, like looking at your window shade but never seeing inside.

Some days our heart aches that we are not at ease with our world so full of strives and uncertainties. But isn’t that better than not feeling at all? Maybe we should be grateful that there is beauty in uncertainty. Maybe we should be comforted in the fact that the ache and confusion in our heart means that we are very much alive and human.

Sometimes we need to be more open to exploring the unknown, just jump on the wave and see where it goes. Those moments are often the most truthful.

How time flies and we are off to another week in 2012. This year, my wish is small and very simple. Some days it’s not about passion and courage, it’s not about heroism and drama. It’s not about exotic visions. It’s simply about the act of doing deliciously simple acts, simply.

I’ve been keeping myself occupied ever since my break started after my finals. Got myself a planner to list down all the things to be accomplished, complete with timeline and progress check. Yes, I’m an organised person like this. While at times I can turn out to be pretty spontaneous, often go along with the flow, there are times when I just have to have a clear plan in mind. It gives me a full sense of certainty and allows me to picture an aftermath.

Spent most of my break planning for my upcoming Europe backpacking trip. This idea of having this trip of a lifetime has been lingering at the back of my mind for the past one year and it’s really something close to my heart. I’ll be away for a month, and truth to be told, it takes a lot of courage to hop on the bandwagon to pull off something of this scale. Now that everything has been laid out, I can finally take a sigh of relief as I moved on to other priorities.

Went uphill to Cameron Highlands to experience some cold weather last week. That’s the closest thing to European winter I have back in Malaysia. While the wind can be really chilly at times, I thoroughly enjoyed the breeze up there. It was a leisure trip, we literally spent time watching TV and cooking our own steamboat. No packed schedule, no long tours, just being spontaneous. This may well be the last time I’d be with this group of friends as we all part from here.

I guess we all run on two clocks. One is the external clock, where you follow the tide and the season. The other is the inside clock, where you are your own timekeeper and determine your own chronology, your own internal weather and your own rate of living. Sometimes the inner clock runs itself out long before the outer one, and you feel like a zombie going through the motions of living.

Sometimes we wish we can recapture our youthful lust and zest for life. We wish we have something to take us back to those childhood days and those feelings. Somehow those days are gone now. We’re numb. Sometimes we’re lost — putting up dreams into the sky and dodging all the things that tear us down. As my elders would say, “The days of I’ll wait for you after work” are gone. Now it’s a Facebook poke or an impersonal how are you on sms. And we’re not even missing out because, well maybe we just don’t care as much any more.