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Revising my time

Monday, February 27, 2006

School is pressing me hard at the temples. But I am not going to, nor do I intend to, procrastinate and complain non-stop about it as I usually do, for the simple reason that I will spend yet another hour here yakking away (which I cannot afford to do at the moment).

I think I now have better time management (hurrah!). This is what I usually do these days: go for lessons, stay back after to catch up on readings or mug for my dreadful tests/assignments/presentations, and then come back home when the dark sky is hanging high and glittering with stars. Yes, except for the occasional meet-ups with good friends, this is what I've been relegated to. This is what I've become. I guess it's not that hard to keep time if you only have to do about three or four kinds of things everyday right. So in a highly ironic sense, I have improved when it comes to managing my time.

And I highly suspect that I will end up with not an office job, but a job that will make me run around during office hours, again not peering my bloodshot eyes into the little 12 inch screen of my laptop to while away my office hours but taking long trips on buses/cars (I'm absolutely boycotting taxis!) to reach my destination to do a short stint/assignment and then going home to snuggle on my dream plush couch with a new dvd or novel.

Ok, maybe we'll have to revise that a little...

uh, maybe some other time.

9:13 pm
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Blind

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

I was young but I wasn't naive
I watched helpless as he turned around to leave
And still I have the pain I have to carry
A past so deep that even you could not bury if you tried

After all this time
I never thought we'd be here
Never thought we'd be here
When my love for you was blind
But I couldn't make you see it
Couldn't make you see it
That I loved you more than you'll ever know
A part of me died when I let you go

I would fall asleep
Only in hopes of dreaming
That everything would be like is was before
But nights like this it seems are slowly fleeting
They disappear as reality is crashing to the floor

After all this time
I never thought we'd be here
Never thought we'd be here
When my love for you was blind
But I couldn't make you see it
Couldn't make you see it
That I loved you more than you'll ever know
A part of me died when I let you go

After all this time
Would you ever wanna leave it
Maybe you could not believe it
That my love for you was blind
But I couldn't make you see it
Couldn't make you see it
That I loved you more than you will ever know
A part of me died when I let you go
And I loved you more than you'll ever know
A part of me dies when I let you go

I love this song, not just the lyrics but the whole thing: the energetic guitar drumming and vocals that makes you ache just listening to the song. I guess it does have the power of tugging at someone's heart strings. It's called Blind by Lifehouse, and indeed love is blind. We were just debating the other day, Dawn, Faith and I, about how love plays tricks with your mind and heart, it sticks stamps (or rather more accurately vanguard, according to Faith's mom ha) on your eyes.

It also, I think, makes you delusional (to quote Mandy), and lets you travel back in time to the past. It drags your emotional baggage around like an unwanted enormous heavy trash bag that you never want to be caught holding. In fact you never ever want people to know you have that amount of baggage, because that would just scare them away if anything. Love also makes you jaded, but it's a kind of drug that you get so addicted to, you keep going back to it (like a cycle of self-destruction) even after you have been hurt by it, and you really want to just...

stop.

but you just don't know how. It's like you have the manual of the phone you just bought but you never look at it because you assume you can figure things out by yourself. But guess what? When it actually breaks down on you and you go back to flip its dusty pages, surprise surprise... you find that it doesn't have the answers either, so now your phone is damaged and even if you bring it for repair, it can never be exactly that same phone you bought before, can it? It becomes like a permanent stain on your record which can't be erased in your mind.

In the end, you just continue to fall in and out of it in a neverending cycle of trance. No, on the contrary, you get sucked into it like a black hole and you just whirl round and round inside and never get out... unless by some good fortune you find the other end that, rumours has it, leads to another dimension or parallel universe. So actually you don't come out of it... because you can't, not because you don't want to... unless of course by some miracle (which rarely happens in people) you find a way out.

I'm not saying you can't. I'm saying maybe even if you can, you won't want to.

12:19 am
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The Six Loves

Sunday, February 12, 2006

A tribute to all lovers out there this Valentines' Day...

Note: This is something I wrote for Candle!, the original article can be found here.

How many loves are there in our lives? Some may say only one while others may claim to have as many as the number of people they love?

According to C. S. Lewis’s The Four Loves (1960), there are four categories of love based on the four Greek words for love:

Affection (storge) is fondness through familiarity, which would include love between family members or people who find themselves together by chance.

Friendship (philia) is a strong bond existing between people who share a common interest or activity, not just mere companionship.

Eros is love in the sense of ‘being in love’, but is nevertheless distinct from sexuality (venus) since eros is an indifferent appreciation of the beloved as opposed to any sexual pleasure obtained from them.

Charity (agape) is love towards one’s neighbour which does not depend on any loveable qualities that the object of love possesses. This is exactly as Jesus says: “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself” (Matthew 22:39)

Lewis’s exploration of love from a Christian perspective is thus completed in the four loves. Why then the Six Loves? I assure you firmly that it is neither inspired by the film, My Six Loves (Gower Champion, 1963) nor by ancient Tarot six faces of love.

What are the Six Loves?

Instead, according to Craig Owen’s The Six Faces of Love (2000), there are six loves, namely, Friendship, Romantic, Spiritual, Community, Marital and Family, which resemble an expansion of Lewis’s four loves as each of Owen’s six loves can be mapped onto one or more categories of storge, philia, eros and agape. For instance, Friendship, Community, Marital, Family and even Romantic love can be mapped onto storge, Friendship onto philia, and Romantic, Marital and perhaps Spiritual love onto Eros. Lastly, all the six loves except Spiritual love can be mapped onto agape, which Lewis sees as a specific Christian virtue, and that there is a need to subordinate the other loves to the love of God (Spiritual love). Thus, Lewis’s four loves can be interpreted as secondary to Spiritual love because the love of God encompasses all others, as can be seen from the diagram:

Unlike Lewis’s pre-assumption of the Spiritual love in each of us, Owen includes Spiritual love as one of the loves, thus ending up with six and not four loves. Nevertheless, Owen too recognises that Spiritual love is the most important of all the six loves. Although each love is distinct in its own respect, the six loves are bonded closely by Spiritual love, which is a requisite in order to appreciate the other five others. Once you understand the nature of Spiritual love, you can experience all the other loves in a fulfilling way. Therefore, Owen’s diagram would probably look something like this, since all the loves are closely connected and Spiritual love being at the centre of it all:

Before I delve into why Spiritual love is essential for understanding the other loves, I would like to take you to consider something most essential to our main subject: the definition of love.

What is this thing called “Love”?

Yes, what is Love exactly? How do we define this word that we all recognise and this feeling that we all experience all the time but can’t know for sure if “we’re actually in love” and can’t put a finger on it?

Owen’s definition is that “Love is a choice to be committed, vulnerable and responsible to the one for whom you care.”

Indeed, love is a choice, a decision we make, out of our own free will, which God bestows on us, that is, we can still choose to love Him or not.

Love is also a commitment, a belief in the person you choose and an acceptance of his/her strengths and imperfections. It also encompasses an affirmation for the person you love: “I believe in who you can become.” When we love God, we believe in his unconditional love for us and place our faith in him, for “Love… believes all things.” (1 Corinthians 13:7)

Love is a risky business because being vulnerable in it means that we accept the joy and happiness of love together with the pain and struggle that comes with it. When we commit to believing in someone, the disappointments that come with loving imperfect people are inevitable. Thus exposing oneself to the hurt that is bound to come with love makes us vulnerable, yet we love because of the happiness that outweighs the pain and because “Love… is not resentful…[and] endures all things.” (1 Corinthians 13:5-7)

However, making a decision to love and sticking firmly to our choice is to be responsible, and this means that we are accountable to and for the one we love. It also means that there is no shortcut in loving someone and in the activities that involve love, for example, trusting one another, being honest with each other, and communicating (not just talking) with each other. For instance, we cannot make a second-rate decision to love God by only saying that we do and not putting in effort to trust in Him or communicate with Him.

The Spiritual Love and its relationship with the other Five Loves

According to Owen, the nourishment of the soul must be satisfied by spiritual love so that we do not commit the mistake of expecting another love, most commonly the romantic love, to fulfil the double duty of undertaking both the spiritual and romantic loves. If we search for that one true love that would give us a sense of purpose, a feeling of being connected to the world in a positive and meaning way, we would be committing the mistake of expecting a romantic love relationship to fill an emptiness in our lives. While a romantic love relationship creates a shared sense of self and identity, he adds that, although closely related, it is essentially different from our transformation of the self, which is the primary focus of spiritual love. Thus we should not expect another love to satiate our own selfish needs (such as our spiritual needs) because “Love… is not self-seeking.” (1 Corinthians 13:5)

In spiritual love, the transformation of the self is one that involves the learning and practice of values that God encompasses, such as compassion, mercy and kindness. As such, we should aim to have all our different kinds of love relationships tempered by these values, for instance, by approaching our friendships with compassion or our romantic love relationships with kindness, because only then can we find a sense of purpose and a feeling of being connected to the world in a positive way in our lives. And in understanding who we truly are and in loving ourselves, we can then love our neighbours as Jesus did.

4:37 pm
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Madwoman in the Attic

Tuesday, February 07, 2006

The Madwoman has just crawled out of the attic where she was entrapped by patriarchal oppression and has spent years and years dwelling there and yearning for her liberation. Thus by this very act, she has regained her freedom, her strength and her individual sense of identity. She is tyrannic. She is hysterical. She is hungry. She devours men, picking on their every move, every word and every tiny detail of their outwardly appearances. Each action is met with scrutiny, each word with sarcasm, each apparel with scoff. As you can see, she holds the highest contempt for her different counterparts.

Her biting tongue hurls criticism that oozes acid. She is fully equipped with daggers, ready at any second to shoot them from her sharp eyes.

At the same time, rather contradictory in fact, she suffers extreme emotional drain and an immense lapse of memory. She has no idea who she was. Neither can she decide for herself who or what she is right now. She can only be known as the Madwoman in the attic, the female lunatic associated with the little hole with no windows that imbowered her. Some moments she laughs hysterically, other times she cries bitterly and wails loudly for all her sorrows' worth. She longs for love, care, concern, but from whom she does not know, neither does she know the fact that she pines for them. She is in denial. She pines and yet refuses to acknowledge that she does.

She unleashes her frustrations through her wild screams. She is delirious. She suffers from manic depression. She loves to plunge into the lake, letting her long long curly black hair get strewn all over the water. Then she ducks her head in, hoping that the water will wash the melancholy away from her mind. Is she in the right state of mind?

Of course not, the men say, she is called a Madwoman for a reason.

Of course she is, the women protest indignantly, she is just lost, her soul is twisted, just give her a little more time.

She is not named, the Madwoman of the attic. She is what he constructs, perceives and desires her to be. Yet, she struggles to be something else. Someone else. She wants to let be. She wants to remain the Madwoman of the attic, because that is the only person she can be, she thinks.

She shares a love-hate relationship with herself, also with the people close to her. She loves her identity as the Madwoman of the attic, because that is where she seeks solace and finds it. On the other hand, she hates herself for being so repellant to others. She hates others for not being able to understand her. But most importantly, she hates herself for not being able to understand herself. Like something you swallow but is unable to digest and gets choked instead, she is that something.

It is not that she did not try to comprehend her maze of a mind, she just doesn't know how. Neither do others surrounding her. They become frustrated after a while. She too is frustrated. She is frustrated because they are frustrated with her, and she is frustrated as a whole because they don't know what to do with her and she too doesn't know what to do with herself. She is frustrated still and will always be till the day she departs from this earth.

She has lived her world in silence. Silence comforts her. Silence is the easiest solution to all her problems, she can only unleash through writing. Silence is how she gives up on others who try to comprehend her but fail and get frustrated. Silence is how she gives up on herself.

And she now wants to give up. Give up all her frustrations, her sarcasm, her hysteria, her others, her hunger and even her identity. Yes, even that which defines her.

6:05 pm
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A Song for the Broken Hearted...

Sunday, February 05, 2006

Now, before any of you get overly concerned or paranoid, I am musing about something I heard from a sermon today.

You know how we normally associate a broken heart with a breakup or something similar of a relationship (usually a BGR) right. Well apparently, someone with a broken heart can also mean someone who feels emptiness in his or her life, such that happiness and joy cannot enter. With this, he says that a person with a broken heart can also approach God to revigorate his life and fill the emptiness of his soul.

I think it's true. I know it has been quite a while, but I do feel emotionally drained still. Perhaps there are a few stages of a broken heart (like its diagnosis and healing stages):

First is obviously the act of breaking itself (like walking away from God or in the BGR sense).

Second is the denial process, where you imagine or hallucinate that you do not have a broken heart (like pretending that the relationship with God or someone is still intact when it isn't).

Third is the start of the healing process, where the truth is accepted as fact and you start to move back into your routine and try hard to fit the pieces of your life back together again (although they probably will not fit back exactly the same way as before).

Fourth is in the midst of the healing process, where you think that you have completely recovered but in actual fact still need more therapy (like discovering that your relationship with God or someone else has changed).

Fifth is doubting if you did recover in the first place, it's like wandering around and coming back to the exact same point and wondering if anything changed during that whole duration.

And maybe after this, this healing process will be completed. Although you may wonder if certain things did change or happen, they did as a matter of fact. I know I'm not an expert on broken hearts (I mean who am I to judge what actually happens when someone gets a broken heart?), but I guess I do have my fair share of them and this is probably what I go through (I think).

I suppose everybody is looking for that special presence to fill their empty hearts drained from previous years or to fill their hungering souls. Probably they are not purposefully searching for it but they are keeping an eye out for it so that they do know how to seize it when it comes. An emotional drain is not a small matter, but it can be escaped from temporarily or only as long as another problem of similar strain pops up.

8:17 pm
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