Viva La Vida or Death and All His Friends!

I don’t want to follow death and all of his friends!

It took a lot for me to go through this week. Just when I thought things were looking up; death comes knocking on my neighbour’s doors. My uncle is currently still in critical condition in the hospital. He is a chain smoker so I was always wondering how long he can keep this up and the answer was not for too long. I got the message that he suffered a stroke when I was abroad and it only took a few months for his condition to worsen. Now my uncle is also my dad’s cousin which means they’re pretty close. My dad always buys him breakfast for reasons I don’t know why. In an instant, my dad has one person less to go out every morning. Sometimes I wonder what’s going on in my dad’s mind; I remember my dad telling me stories of how he searched for my uncle when his ship sank. My dad went from Muara to Belait in his boat all day to find him. As the day got darker my dad decided to give it a last look at Labuan and he found him covered in a blanket; rescued just earlier by other fishermen. ]He survived around 8 hours in the sea clinging on to flotsam from his boat. 8 hours in the sea clinging for dear life. Sometimes you gotta admire the will to live for some people, maybe that’s why he became a chain smoker after that incident in his life. All these stories came flashing back when I saw him struggling in the hospital bed in pain.

I never liked the thought of death and what comes after it. I never liked the thought of dying. I am not afraid of anything but the process of dying and breathing one’s final breath. I have witnessed a number of dying processes and it was never a comfortable sight. Unfortunately, nobody can escape that and we all must go through it and also guide our loved ones through the process, making it as comfortable as it can be.

An old classmate texted me out of the blue asking me to hangout. I got awfully suspicious because I was never close him in the first place. Nevertheless, I agreed to meet him up and talk. We started to talk more and it turned out, his brother just passed away at a very young age of 32 to cancer. I stopped talking and couldn’t say a word beyond that. He told me after that happened, he just wanted to not waste his life and get to know people in his life while he can.

I don’t want to follow death and all of his friends.

Until then,

Two Ways to Build a House

These days I have been contemplating a lot about how I live my life. Let me explain it simply using a much more complicated analogy because I never go straight to the point. You see, building a house can be seen as analogous to living a life. A house is a long-term investment or it could be a liability but let’s not go there in terms of monetary value, this is not rich dad poor dad okay? But when you really think about it, building a house is similar to living a life, you spent a long time planning and building it and in the end, you live in it. Now I realize there are two ways to build a house;

The first method of building a house is that you lay the plans and foundation of a house to fit your needs. Plan a solid foundation, design your rooms and then buy the furniture to make it a home. A lot of people I know does this; they plan their lives around what they want and some even set an age to get married so that they can start a family at a certain age.

The second method of building a house is a rather unorthodox approach. The second method involves finding the furniture first and then building a house around it. Let’s say I see a nice couch and then I start imagining how my living room would fit like with the couch. In a nutshell; you plan your life across something you found or something that found you. Not many people I know live their life this way.

Now I am not going to say which method is best ad hominem but I am here to reflect on how I live my life. The way how I see it if my life is a house, I’d say I have a solid foundation good enough for earthquakes and sea level rise. The design of the house is not yet set in stone because I keep finding things I like along the way, I do know that I have a rough idea of what it looks like with what kind of furniture as the centrepiece. It is an unorthodox way of living but that’s what it is really. It would be nicer if someone was there to help me to build a house together though.

Not really the thought-provoking article you were hoping for but I thought it was nice to write this out as a note for myself and how I see things now in this present state of mind.

Until then,

Is this how it feels like?

I have received flowers for the first time. For all the movie scenes that we are living in, I’ll always look forward to the next one. The best parts of my life include you. My heart is full, what more can I say?

Yours,