Life is simple. Most of the time, you are waiting for something to happen. And you spend a good portion of your life doing cut and paste activities. Or pure repetitive, routine type of work. Even the pleasure that we seek comes mostly in a variation of cookie cutter recipes. Or the same old thing that pleasures us time and time again.
The purpose of a job, to me, is to keep us productive. Whenever I hear the comment “my job is mundane / routine / boring”, I cannot help but to think that most of what we do are routines. And routines can get mundane over time. You may imagine otherwise. But the underlying remains. Routine execution perfects processes that in turn increases productivity. Increased productivity supposed to bring forth better rewards. That is true until everybody’s productivity level is increased to the same level as yours, on the similar things that you do or produce. You may get lucky and manage to bake the best cake in the world. Make it big. But still, the baking process remains the same.
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Jesus once said, “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give you”. Every religion claims to be a religion of peace, teaching us to be just that. Yet, we humans seem to be constantly in a collision course, with someone we know, with someone we do not know, do not wish to know. It could be an email your colleague has sent to you, maybe copied to the whole world; it could be your neighbor next door playing Mahjong throughout the night and the noise only subsides in the break of dawn; it could be that driver who cuts three lanes of traffic endangering the lives of others because he or she does not want to miss the exit or the car park’s entrance. Conflicts are surrounding us, as it appears. So, what shall we do?
Deal with it. The inevitable in life. Don’t sweat over it. Don’t swear over it.
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These days, I am finding it hard to tap onto my pool of inspiration, when it comes to writing. At first, I wonder if it is because I have spent too much time playing computer games. But my life has been full of obsessions of some sorts. If it was not computer gaming, it could have been something else.
Today, I had a meeting in town. And hence, I got a chance to get out of my home and smell the air of the city. Everything I saw stimulated my mind. The cars, the faces, the little routines like the change of traffic lights for the pedestrians, the beautiful girls, the not so beautiful men, and soon, obscure observations began to surface. That girl in my office sticking her entire hand into her skirt from the back to scratch, I suppose, her butt; those lion dancers inside an office lift not holding the door for me; faces that recognized me, smiled at me, on the street and I have no idea who they were; the tall blonde from across the street took off her high heels and slipped into a more comfortable pair of sandals.
And then, my writing engine starts to work again. That little lubricant called anywhere but home.
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We are thieves at heart. And money is not the root of all evil.
Deep inside, I think, none of us wants to work for something we want and need. If we know for sure that we would not get caught, and if we observe that the majority is doing it, most of us would steal. We may even condition ourselves that what we do is not stealing (think piracy). Because?
Because stealing is meant to be punished and if no one is punished (yet), it is not stealing?
The commercial world is smart. They know we love to take without giving. Money is a currency used to keep track of our productivity and to exchange products and services with others. Maybe some love money more than they should, they would rather have the things that they want or do not want, free. And so, some companies give out freebies. Soon, more and more products and services are bundled as ‘free’. But we are smart (I hope we are). Nothing is free. Someone, somewhere, somehow is paying for it. It could well be you.
Money, is not the root of all evil. The love of it, is.
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Is it me or is it true that the festive celebration of Chinese New Year is not as festive as the good old days. What gives?
Learning Chinese is no easy feat. Yet, Cynthia has been working hard using all that she can to communicate with my mother in town. This evening, over the dinning table, she asked, “What is the difference between Yoga, now, and cloth hanger?”
My mother and I were laughing in tears. Indeed, the words of these three distinct concepts do sound similar when spoken in Cantonese. Especially in the ears of a non-Chinese speaker.
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When I wrote in Facebook that life is full of copy and paste, one friend commented: how about undo?
That is hilarious. Yes, we spend much time undoing things that others have done, and things that we have done.
