Old songs

Listening to old songs
Kenny G, Jim Brickman, Whitney Houstan,  Andy Williams, Frank Sinatra
Songs an aunty called "too old" for the secondary school students

Looking through old photos
Finding the old me

The innocent child 
The simple desires of the heart
The simple habits and thoughts and feelings
In the big unknown world

Finding the thread that connects the different seasons
To examine the consistency
To guess what the big tapestry is like

Seeing what I did
and what was out of control
seeing how my life and other people's lives interconnected
and how God was over it all

In the hope of living well
in the hope of fulfilling the purpose for which I was made
to enjoy and glorify Him
something everyone had started on even before knowing Him
something I hope all the more to do in the years to come
with all of me.

The chief end of man is to glorify God by enjoying Him forever.

~ John Piper in Desiring God

Turn to who?

When all around,
there's no people to turn to,

turning to just one
and just that one
is enough.

For at the right time,
when asked
what is needed
what is best
is always given.

Now.
Already.
All the time.

A Friendship Poem

I stumbled upon this today...

--

You Say You Want to Be Just Friends

You say you want to be just friends,
But do you mean goodbye?
Is that the easy way to end
The wish without the why?

You owe me nothing, as I owe
You equally, and yet
There's something in the undertow
I cannot just forget.

There's something lovely like a song
That's waiting to be heard,
Or like the feelings that belong
To some unspoken word.

And so with you I cannot simply
Smile and stay aloof.
I take the risk of asking frankly
For the untold truth.

Copyright by Nicholas Gordon

---

Reminds me of the sweet, sometimes unappreciated poems that we used to write in autograph books when we were younger. My autograph book is still missing. It was last with, I can't remember her name anymore. I just hope she doesn't throw it away, so that one day, we might actually meet again, and then I might be able to reclaim my old autograph book.

CNY this year was good. I saw some interesting faces, including the Greek boyfriend of a cousin, and a long-lost cousin whom I last met years ago. And the atmosphere was good generally.

Hmmm. Although my family ties are still ok, friends have been becoming more and more distant. It's largely my own fault. I'm not one who makes a lot of time for friends, or people in general. This is because there're so many things that demand time, and there's also the fact that I have a very long 'warm-up' period. I wonder if it was ever shortened.

Anyway, I think it's important that we're good to ourselves before we can be truly good to others. To me, to be good to ourselves is to be able to keep ourselves through achievement of important goals while appreciating the journey, which is what makes life life. That means we have to prioritize, and balance living in the now and preparing for the long-term.

(But of course, this priority ladder is different from people to people. Or sometimes, it's so vague that we end up regretting our prior decisions, or sometimes we regret difficult choices when we need not, especially when there was already a 'sunk cost'.)

Haha. This style of self-talk, was influenced by the fable "The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari" which my sister borrowed from her library, which I read over CNY because it was the only short storybook available to me. The book's good, its presentation is better than many other self-help books, which I guess, explains why it was a bestseller for quite many weeks.

Hmm. I think my grammar in speech is becoming really bad, maybe because I have not been talkative enough nor book-reading enough for quite a long while. Nonetheless, I enjoy conjuring new words or new phrases everyday, just as much as a lot of manglish/singlish users. (:

Haha. I just found my old stash of poems that I long ago immortalized on Angelfire, which was one of the few free website providers then. Back then, I still used my old email (which by the way, isn't supposed to sound narcissistic, but to sound like joys forever). I remember especially liking the Friends 2 poem.