why we travel

"We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again -- to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more. The beauty of this whole process was best described, perhaps, before people even took to frequent flying, by George Santayana in his lapidary essay, "The Philosophy of Travel." We "need sometimes," the Harvard philosopher wrote, "to escape into open solitudes, into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard, in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be compelled to work desperately for a moment at no matter what."

Why We Travel by Pico Iyer 

working days

Working day

another day all the same
no games no fun no meet-ups
day of 'productivity'
meetings and wasting around
there you are and bored to tears
staring vacantly at them
discussing line after line
how to sell and what to buy
prevent loss and make profit
to preserve this humdrum life?
weekends come and all seems fine
to the parks and to the malls
as we all throng the same paths
happiness on discounted racks
laughter for another time
as you reached back to home
you closed my eyes and fell asleep
waking up once again to
another day
all the same

夜深回到家〜 妈妈留了碗爱心汤：我是世界上最幸福的女儿。

"our time is but a breath, so we better breathe it"

It really doesn't matter at all, what people think, what you think they think, what they think you think. At the end, we live our lives, and that is all that matters. I have learnt to ignore the rest.

being 30

(it is all very strange, for when i started writing this post about age, it wasn't going to be a birthday wish. a sequence of events - 2 dreams, a chat with a taxi driver, a chance encounter and a talk by neil gaiman had driven me here. and then i looked at the date and it read 13.6. 3 days to you turning 30. i had no intention to imitate, this is strangely, deeply from my heart.)

here's a confession: when i was 17 i fancied i was 50, and when i reached 25 i wanted to be 20 forever.

it always mattered to me what people thought i thought they did, and it mattered to me that i had not gotten certain things very right, or very wrong on several occasions.

and then i turned 30. and realised that it doesn't matter at all what people thought - for everyone thinks too much of everything else. and realised that it didn't matter whether i got things wrong or right, because everyone gets things wrong and right all the time.

now i'm happy being where i am, doing what i'm doing, and possibly making a change to do what i want to be doing.

i hope the same for you.

occasionally with a cup of coffee, a good read and some good friends - i hope you find comfort in being 30.

Tau Sah Piah

Ok, I really want to try this.