The Path of Time

Dark clouds, heavy rain, a long trail of brake lights ahead of me meant I was going to be in my car for a little longer. As I was cursing the traffic silently in my heart, next thing I hear on the radio is song I haven't heard in a pretty long time. Something I could reflect from what happened at work today. Those familiar with radio songs will pretty easily pick up the song and the singer. The chorus really meant something to me. As I sat in the driver's seat slowly inching my car bit by bit in the traffic jam, I heard, "you grieve you learn, you choke you learn, you laugh you learn, you choose you learn, you pray you learn, you ask you learn, you live you learn.". It's a pretty old song and would probably be more than ten years old but still very relevant to you and me (maybe not to you but it does seem relevant to me). It may not seem as what the writer of the song wanted to mean but I think if I look at it from my life or our lives, it does say something. That...

Yesterday, I managed to squeeze out of office to go for my weekly squash sessions. It's a wonderful feeling knowing that I can go out there and play my favourite sport pitching my skills against someone better and to hopefully learning a new thing or two to improve my game.  Half way through one of my matches, the resident coach there who coaches the state junior team looks at me and says, "you are very hardworking in the court!". I tried to laugh under all the panting I was doing and replied while puffing, "I guess when you are short on talent, you just need to rely on fitness to rough it out." It was the same thing when I was training during my junior days, always trying to outlast my opponent and just keep on running until I ran my opponent with sheer tenacity. Until, eventually one day my knee gave some time before I hit the age of 21 putting my squash to a rendering hiatus for the next three years. But then again, I never really had a successful squash care...

Take a step back, look around and what you will generally find painstakingly obvious is that we are shrouded in the world's countless standards. Standards that so called sets people, brand, items, animals, etc. apart from one another. You will always find that virtually anywhere in any conversation that someone is caring, loving, not sensitive enough to care, not smart enough to excel, too quiet to ever make new friends, too prudent to take risks, and soon you'll find that the list of standards, comparable and dichotomies goes on like an endlessly playing broken recorder. These standards have become so commonly mentioned and brought up that it has become apart of our lifestyle, our very beliefs in our minds. The office is a very good place that demonstrates this. There will always be one "star" performer that everyone wants to be or look up to. I cannot deny that having someone to look up to and admire can be motivating but doesn't it give way to a proliferation o...

Ever wondered what it feels like standing in the middle of nowhere wondering which direction to head to? What to do next? How to get about the next step in your journey? Looking left and right into an empty horizon not knowing whether you will even make it through the next day. That's one of those moment I feel I am in right now. It's almost like I am in a different realm void of all reasoning and just not sure what to do next. I am looking left and right really wondering if I can make it through the next day. At one point I thought the first half of this year was probably one of the worse I have ever had but right now, I might have just dropped a step lower in the "worse" situation scale. It is even more perplexing considering I managed to get a two week break out of the country to refresh my mind and following that received some good news knowing that I have progressed yet another small step in my careeer. Put that all into an equation and I should be smiling myself...

I remember it as clear as day, the day I took my diploma exam. It was just three of us is in the exam hall – me, my teacher as the pianist and the examiner. Make it four, if you want to count in the recorder. A lot of preparation went into the exam. Preparation was as early as nine months before the exam. A lot of thought went into selecting the best repertoire of songs that could best suit my playing style and songs that I could interpret well. I can say with absolutely certainty that it is nothing like what you see on American Idol. Playing the cello is more than just singing your heart out to a million fans watching national tv. Playing the cello or any other musical instrument is about reaching out to your listener through the sounds it produces. With the ever popular electric guitar, most of the sound it produces is manipulated by the amplifier and all the other gadgets thrown in but with the cello or violin, your very fingers that press the strings and the amount of pressure you ...

As much as I hate to admit it, there are times where I am guilty of making the silliest of mistakes whether it's at home, at work or in a relationship. It can be as simple as forgetting to turn of the fire at the stove before I leave the house, or a simple e-mail to the client that is drafted incorrectly, or a as simple as forgetting to drop a loved one a sms to let them know you have reached home. As simple as all the above examples may seem, it is never too simple to make the simplest of mistakes. If you may have found yourself in such situations before, you will probably be quick to note that as simple as the mistake may seem, some people don't seem to take them likely and you may well find yourself paying a penalty tad too expensive for such a mistake. The horrible part about committing a mistake is that a mistake will always be a mistake whether it turns out to be a major blunder or a small hiccup. You probably know what I mean. To make matters worse, sometimes the more yo...

Have you ever played the card game, Black Jack? Where you try your luck with a deck of cards to get a combination totaling 21 or anything higher than the dealer of cards. I am sure you have since it is probably the most widely played card game in virtually any casino in the world. In a nutshell, the dealer gives you two cards. What you do is to look at the total of those two cards and you are given the option to keep on taking cards to a maximum of five cards. Once you are done taking your cards, you'll the pitch your total against the dealer in hope to have a total more than him (assuming you don't blow your way past 21). I never really liked this game since you place most of your winning chances on luck since you'll never really know what cards you get until you take which most of the time mean it is too late especially when your current total is 16 and you end up taking a 6! You'd be surprised how often this happens with gamblers, always attracting Murphy's Law. ...

After three years of pondering and saving up cash bit by bit, I finally made the plunge to get myself a DSLR camera. Braving the attempt to go into photography after having been captivated by the beautiful photos I see monthly in my National Geographic subscriptions. I always ask myself, "How do these people capture such photos?". Some of them being the simplest of a person's smile, or a simple landscape, yet it leaves you staring at the picture for a long time as if the picture reaches out and captures your heart and attention. So after three years of saving and pondering, I decided I could spare a little over two and a half grand on a DSLR to start off before I venture into getting different lenses and the works. Starting off isn't difficult once you have read about the camera functions and how you can tweak the settings to get the desired photography effect. The difficult part of snapping a captivating shot is more about knowing when to find that moment - right now...

See the little guy in the picture? Don't you think we are like him? We are small people living in this big world filled with infinite knowledge and experiences! Every day we live in this world is like opening the pages to the infinite series of Encyclopedia. We feel new things, we taste new things, we hear new things and it's like blowing our mind away with a whole lot of knowledge. Of course, if you look at it from the little guy in the picture, it's like swimming in a wealth of knowledge. Although we are surrounded by all the knowledge around us like all the encyclopedias surrounding the little guy in the picture, but the little guy won't obtain any knowledge. Not until he pulls out one of the books and starts flipping the pages. Like us, we can either be happy sitting down pretty enjoying the status quo in our lives or lift our hands, and start doing something to experience something new. Sometimes by watching National Geographic channel during my free time, I lea...

Not everything can go to plan because plans can sometimes fail and more often than not plans to fail. It may not necessarily be plans but sometimes you may set out do something only to find yourself doing something completely different and achieving an entirely different result altogether. Friday night I saw a beautiful crescent moon in the clear night sky and I quickly grabbed my camera to capture the beauty of the moon. All in all I spent a good 30 minutes out in the compound of my home trying to get a good camera shot of the moon. So there I was shooting away and at the mercy of the mosquitoes to have a night meal at my expense. I tried moving around, playing with different angles, camera settings in trying to get a successful shot of the moon. I just kept snapping and snapping away in hope to get a good moon shot. Then as I was happily snapping photos of the moon I turned to my right to look at a nice frame of a flower pot and the night lamp shining down on it, creating a very inte...

I wonder how many of us out there still remember the anatomy of our tongue? Remember where the bitter taste receptors are located on our tongue? It's at the back of your tongue just before our throats. When I was a kid I used to wonder why we have the bitter receptors at the back of our tongues. I mean it always made swallowing medicines or herbal soup difficult because no matter how hard I tried, there was simply no way to make the bitter stuff go around the bitter receptor area. You just have to taste whatever bitter stuff that you put in your mouth. I asked my mom once about it and I guess she didn't really know how to answer such a question, especially when the one asking is only 5 years of age. What she told me was really interesting. "I know how you dislike eating bitter stuff and drinking the bitter ginseng soup I always make for you. Remembered the last time I caught you trying to pour away the soup I boiled? I remembered no matter how hard you tried to squeeze you...

About 9 years ago, when I was still undergoing intensive squash training, I remember how much I used to get so much problems even learning and getting the drop shots right. It either I hit it one inch below the tin or a whole one foot above the tin. Either way, no one could call it a good drop shot. Calling it was frustrating would be an understatement because I used to put in back breaking hours after back breaking hours to try to get it right. It reached a point when I got so fed up with getting it wrong so often I used to break my racquet by smashing it on the ground or the wall out of pure frustration and anger. Thank God, racquets at that time were either free or subsidized. There was one evening when I just threw the racquet on the ground, looked at my coach and said, "I don't think I am ever going to get the damn drop right!". He let out a sigh and then said, "That's probably why you are not getting the shot right." "Huh? What do you mean?" ...

I remember when I was a kid, I used to wait impatiently for the rain to stop so that I could search out a rainbow in the sky. It was a beautiful sight to see the red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. AS a kid, it was something really worth waiting for and when I finally spotted the rainbow, I'd go "waaahhhh......." from its beauty. Then as I grew up, I never even took notice of any rainbow. Not until a little boy showed me a rainbow that could be found in a place I never knew could create a rainbow. The best part about this rainbow is that you don't even need it to rain for the rainbow to appear. I hope I have piqued your interest! =0) This rainbow appeared in the place you'd least expect it to appear. The rainbow appeared one morning when my friend wanted to feed his 3 year old son some cereal. As he was about to spoon feed his kid, his son suddenly looked at time wide-eyed and went, "Pa Pa, rainbow! Rainbow!" while pointing at my friend...

Yesterday evening, while I was at work I suddenly found myself in a situation I have never really found myself to be in before. I surprisingly found myself dealing with a situation where one of my juniors was sitting at her cubicle in a secluded corner sobbing herself to oblivion. I had to use one word to describe what I felt at that point in time, it would be.............................. perplexed. I found myself trying to figure out what to do with her and what to say. At that point in time, I had two major concerns: 1. Making sure I used the correct words when I spoke to her at that point in time to make sure she doesn't go from tear dropping to a full blown sob; and 2. Making sure I could motivate her and not make her full more horrible than she already was feeling. With the lack of new joiners these days coupled with the fact that it is very much an employee's market these days in terms of job hunting and job availability, if she decides to leave because of what I tell he...

Apple pies..... one of the many God's miracles in our lifetime. I might be exaggerating a little bit here but you have to admit that apple pies really taste good. Even apple pie made at McDonald's are pretty good albeit a far cry from good old home made cinnamon crumble apple pie with a tinge of strawberry syrup on top of it, and finally finishing it off with a warm cup of coffee or tea. You might want to check your mouth to see if you have a dribble of saliva leaking out the side of your mouth. If you want to go get an apple pie, I'd appreciate if you finish reading my blog post first considering I brought up the craving in you, it's the least you could do right? Enough of apple pie cravings. Let's talk about something seriously involving you, me and a metaphorical apple pie (again, please do not run off to get yourself an apple pie if you happen to see the word, "apple pie" popping out in this post frequently.....). Alright, alright, back to the main to...

Sitting down in the hospital waiting area, slumped in the chair, Jeremy was soaking up what he heard from the doctor. Confused and grieving were probably the only words to describe how Jeremy felt. He had just heard from the doctor himself that he only has at best, 6 months to live for he has cancer of the stomach. At 30 years of age, Jeremy could only think one thought - it is unfair. Having only started embarking on his journey as an infant pastor, he wasn't worried about dying to early. He was worried of not being able to complete his calling to be a pastor to reach out to those who haven't heard the word of God. Jeremy didn't worry about dying at 30 because he walked by faith and deep down in his heart, he knew if 6 months was all he got to live, that must have been planned by God. The 6 months the doctor predicted, to Jeremy was the 6 months worth of precious time God gave him to reach out to those he had no opportunity to have heard the word of God. He felt it in his ...

It's the time of the year! When the girls look into the eyes of their partners, red cheeks blushing, teary eyed, swallow a gulp of saliva, heart beating like a bullet train and sheepishly say, "yes...." to, "Will you marry me......?" Right this moment, I am seated in a church waiting for the bride and bridegroom to walk in. Having to wake up at 630 in the morning, I am having to focus all my energy to stay awake because I am the best man and ring bearer. Can't be caught sleeping right? Especially when I am seated right in front of the pulpit. Marriage is when two people become an item for life when both man and woman decide they want to live together for the rest of their lives. Its not something that's decided overnight and its not something that one should take lightly. Its a decision for a lifetime. Personally, I think it can be scary but today, its about two of my friends who decided they want live together for the rest of their lives, loving each ot...

A week ago, I had a lucky chance of going to Perhentian Island as part of my firm's department trip. The fresh air, clear skies, clear waters, abundance of fishes were refreshing sight for me. Being away from my office was a really BIG plus point! =0) It was about a 45 minute boat ride from the jetty at Kota Bahru. Landing on the island for the first time in my meager life, I felt rejuvenated. The refreshing sight of the sea and nature was simply an awesome sight. The horizon was blue with numerous islands surrounding the sea. The afternoons were warm but simply so nice to bathe in the sun for a while taking in the freshness of it all. Totally enjoying it might be understating how much I enjoyed it. I got a good glimpse of sunrise, afternoons and sunset. 5.30am in the morning, watching the sunrise with my camera, tripod and patience almost felt like time stood still for me. It even gave me a good camera jump shot to express how time stood still for me.... Afternoon, my senses were...

Do you remember the time when your school teacher first introduced to you a magnet? You'd probably be wide eyed when your teacher shows you how it can stick to metal stuff and at the same time lift or pull lighter metal stuff. You must be lying if you said you were not amazed by the magnet's capabilities! Besides the metal attractive capabilities, you'd probably remember how one side of the magnet will be grey and the other end will be red to annotate the north and south polarity of the magnet bar. Not to mention how the metal dust will move in the shape of the magnetic field of the bar when you place it in the metal dust. When the metal dust move around the magnet to demonstrate the magnetic field, it can really be amazing watching the metal dust form itself around the magnet. What you probably would have since would likely be something like this: Picture from here I am not trying to demonstrate or teach you about how a magnet works but I think I can somehow relate how we ...

Have you ever seen a spinning top? How the top player will unleash it from its strings and see how it just keep spinning and spinning and spinning until it finally stops spinning and falls still on its side. Have you ever wondered how amazing it is? I have seen a top being spun by a professional top player and I've got to admit its quite a feat to let it spin for minutes! A spinning top can metaphorically describe two things. At least the two immediate things that spins into my mind. Number one, how a spinning top can represent the world and number two, how a spinning top can represent our lives. I think you can very immediately understand how I metaphorically link our world to a spinning top just by how our world physically spins during our every second living in this world. Its just like how much energy our world has, spinning itself around the sun. I am not sure if you figured out how I relate our lives like a spinning top but let me take the liberty of explaining how I see it. ...

Two days ago, I finally entered into my first 21km run hosted by Energizer after having only competed in the 10km runs thus far. From all the trainings I have been doing to increase my stamina and endurance, I knew it was going to be a different ball game altogether compared to the 10km I have been doing all these while. As it stands, I can do 10km comfortably within 1 hour 10 minutes. But with 21km, I only managed 2 hours 53 minutes. It's not as simple totaling up two 10km runs because as the distance adds on, stamina reduces, endurance starts to dwindle and it all boils down to mental strength and how much physical pain you can take. As I went through the run, things really got tougher by the minute when I finally breached my 10km comfort zone. Power Gel came in very handy, deep heat stations (albeit insufficiently places) helped to sooth the cramps in my legs. Throughout the run, my mind kept replaying thought of finishing the entire run and complete it within the 3 hour time li...

I still remember it crystal clear when I first decided to put my cello skills into an unconventional quasi-soft-rock band. To be honest, I had no idea what I was getting myself into and I didn't care simply because I wanted to have some fun playing music. For once in a big blue moon, do what I like doing - making music with my cello. No ridiculous deadlines to meet, no corporate politics, no KPIs to meet and all the other blasphemies of today's hectic world. In fact, the entire were made of part time musicians having full time jobs as accountants, lawyers, engineers and engineers-to-be so much so that scheduling for a band practise was real task. But when we finally got together to jam it out, we had good fun just jamming our instruments to high heavens trying to make good music, or at least that was the goal! Band practise didn't really take off until maybe 5 weeks before the performance date and I think we probably only had 1 practise session per week leading up to the pe...

If you are going to compare high stakes environment, there is no place else but your work place. These days, transactions become more complex, value of transactions become bigger and accountability becomes more and more crucial. The burden placed on the employees and employers is becoming tremendously heavier. What you write down and sign off can and usually is used against you when a time comes when something really has gone wrong. The environment has become so hostile that people are governed by fear in the workplace for everyone is so worried about taking of their own rice bowl. It's the scary truth about the workplace we all are absorbed in these days. It has drive things to the point where mistakes and misses are close to not tolerated and for those who make those mistakes are not let off without paying a painful price. It's strange when three quarter's of the world is preaching about tolerance, the workplace is one where tolerance is hardly practiced, almost like ever...

As my friends and I move along the streams of time, changes are happening, seen and unseen. I have friends who just got married, some new parents and some parents to be. Some even had a paradigm shift in sexuality, which has come as a stupendous shock to me. Most call this process, "moving to the next stage in life". With the changes taking place, things around us start to evolve. I don't really mean the gargantuan scale ape to man evolution but the evolution of the smaller things in life. Great things can come in small sizes like my friend's little 4 month old toddler. It's another part of moving to the next stage in life from bachelorhood to married life to parenthood. When I got to asking him about how it felt to be a father, this was his response:- "Things have really changed since the time we were schoolmates. Next thing I know, we were in college, uni then, I got married and you were there during my wedding day, and now, you are here with me to ce...

During one of the weekday, I had an interesting encounter while hitching a ride in a friend's car after lunch. Rather, I'd say it was a very funny encounter actually. It was a rare case of arachnophobia. In fact it was my first case of knowing someone who suffers from arachnophobia! It's funny because we were driving back and just as we are about to enter a roundabout she suddenly starts yelling and freaking out. I am staring at her wondering what in the world just happened? When I say yelling and freaking out, I really mean shouting at the top of her voice almost as if she just saw a ghost coming out from under the driver's seat like in the Japanese horror show Ju-On. Because we were in a car and she was driving, her sudden reaction like that was scary and freaking out while on the wheel is honestly, really the last thing a passenger would want to see. So I looked at her and asked what just happened and I got this surprising answer - "There's a spider on the w...

New face to my blog in my bid to keep things fresh and hopefully not bore readers (if there are any readers to begin with......). It almost reflects the change I am going through in my own life with new experiences and moving ahead with a new outlook. And over to the this post's topic. Over a table conversation, the topic of sex workers cropped up between my friends and I. As always, in every discussion there will be two camps - supporters and detractors. We couldn't really agree with each other on whether it was morally wrong or correct with regard to people who walk down the perceived "dark" and "dirty" profession of sex employment. But is it really "dark" and "dirty", if you were to think about it objectively? On the side of the detractors, their views skews to the fact that sexually transmitted diseases are becoming more widespread globally, increased human trafficking especially minors, increased in triad/mafia activities (it is beli...

Long time ago, when my grandfather was still alive, I would always followed him out in the wee hours of the morning for breakfast in one of his usual breakfast joints. It was rejuvenating and interesting to have breakfast about 5.30 in the morning. Really enjoying breakfast in a typical small town way and not the everyday quick bite to rush off to school type of breakfast. It was one of those times when I could share some time with my grandfather and likewise for him. We lived in different states of the country so, we tried to make it a point to have these breakfast every time my family visited. It was the good old days! There was one instance when he fill up my tea cup half way to the top and suddenly he asked me, "would you consider this cup half full with tea or half empty with tea?". Quite frankly, I was puzzled. What would have expected a 12 year old to react to such a questions? It was random but at the same time my 12 year old brain told me that there was more to that ...