The Path of Time

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...