if you're reading this, you're either
a) visiting this blog for the first time
b) bored
c) trying to practice your reading skills
d) jeremiah marvelling at his genius
e) a retard who doesn't realise the symbols on the left are links

Sunday, February 27, 2005 [[]]


I quote from Brave New World, the cursed book i have to study from for my exams.

John: "But I like the inconveniences."
Mond: "We don't. We prefer to do things comfortably."
John: "But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."
Mond: "In fact, you're claiming the right to be unhappy."
John: "All right, then, I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."
Mond: "Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; theright to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind."

Long silence

John: "I claim them all."

Those who never read the book or take literature, haha you won't understand the extract above. but what prompted me to write about this was my situation. and how a friend's msn nick got me thinking. his nick was "we've only got a 100 years to live". it's a line from the song 100 years by five for fighting. and though i'm very familiar with it and can play it on the piano, the lyrics never really got me thinking until now. yeah, you know, we really have only 100 years to live. we're nearly into our first fifth of our time on this earth, and what have we done so far? for ourselves? for others? can we truly say that we have lived our life so far to the fullest? the extract above, it describes what it is to be truly human, to truly feel.

if we're gonna take the ups of life, the high ones: getting straight As for exams, having many loyal and close friends around you, getting a great job that pays well, finding the love of your life, having a family and so on, we're obliged to take the downs as well no? the sharp spikes of emotion are double sided. if we feel really happy, we can feel really sad as well. depression, death, disease are all incarnations of the other side of life's coin. some of us, we can say that life's been flipping tails alot for us. but there are always two sides to it. life won't suck forever. we're human goddamnit, we're blessed/cursed with the ability to feel, whether we feel great or lousy is up to us and how we interpret our current circumstance. and we've only got a hundred years to live, so why make the decision to feel lousy, when we can choose to see things in a different perspective? it's not that difficult really, just reach out and make that change of paradigm.

i think it's not really a problem of being able to shift that perspective. we just don't wanna. i think deep down, we lament our condition too much, we wallow in self pity. oh poor so-and-so, why is this happening? why can't i have made a different decision then, why did i allow this to happen? it's easier to wallow in self pity and depression, unable to move on, than to take active steps to think about it in a different way, because it takes effort, it takes strength. and not all of us are willing to go that mile. some of us aren't even capable of going that extra mile to see thigns differently, because we're far too bound up in our emotions of the present.

ah well, all i can say is, i think i've managed to see things differently. after all, "15, there's never a wish better than this, when you've only got a hundred years to live."





`donovan. |7:49 PM|