Monday, October 24, 2011

Metamorphosis




M.C. Escher is one of my favorite artists of all time. One of his famous works is the ‘Metamorphosis’. I would say that I’ve reached another point of my life that I feel like I need to morph from one stage to next. Well, the change that I’m gonna make is by no mean big. It will be all within myself and won’t have any impact to the others unless I really carry that out effectively.

I don’t know about how others manage their lives. By reading biographies of famous people, they changed their lives mostly the results of some dramatic incidents, like Steve Jobs who got fired by the company that he found, or other cases like dealing with death of a love one, etc. However, I rarely read what made the famous people make incremental changes of their lives. The change that I’m talking about is not like changing from brand toothpaste to brand B. What I mean here is something like point of view changes that lead to change of actions, more or less in the self-improvement area. Of course, most biographies would only pick the significant events to write, it is really hard for a writer as a third party to write this kind of subtle smaller changes that went on inside the head of another person. Purely speculation would be more in the realm of psychology rather than writing biography. On the other hand, for autobiographies, people would usually write what they do and how they do, but less about why they do and particularly rare about what the causes behind the ‘why’. Thus, I don’t really know if my thinking process is any different from the others. I’ve not openly talked about this with anyone, cuz it is rather personal and I doubt people would be interested in how dots are connected in my brain. As such, this is only where I’m gonna talk about it, it starts here and end here.

As the name of my blog has said, which is something that I believe in, Only Change is Forever. The upcoming change is largely internal driven within my brain. Graphically speaking, it is like there is a fuse and there are few chemicals. Somehow, my brain mixed the chemicals to become fire powder, and I’m gonna light them up at the fuse. As this is a ‘controlled’ demolition, so it should bomb the ‘right’ way. With that, what is that fuse? The answer is the feelings of sad, unmotivated, exhausted, suppressed, basically a bowl of negative energy that has overshadowed my life in recent months. Deep down in my mind, I know that if I don’t do something about that, things will crack here and there and shit gonna happen.

Now, what are the chemicals? There are not related by any mean except in my head. These are just few things that happen recently that I happened to ‘receive’ them here and there and connect them somehow.

The first ‘chemical’ is a news story that I read about Steve Jobs’ comment on Android. I’m not gonna drill down that in details as I probably will blog about that separately in later days. The thing that I wanna highlight here is that though he certainly had grudge towards Android, but he reportedly, still gave advice to Larry Page, one of the founders of Google, upon his request about improvement in running Google. Steve told Larry to ask himself what the important things about Google are, and stopped doing those that are not important; otherwise, Google will become another Microsoft. Then, Larry stopped few things that Google was working on and began to focus on the five or six things that he wants Google to really do. What I got from this story is that as resourceful and super-smart as a big company, there is only so much it can do. On its way of development, it would still need to make decision to filter what are important and focus on them in order to be successful down the road. Well, I’m just a person, not a company, but I think it would apply that to me too.

The second chemical is a wedding that I attended recently which gave me a chance to catch up with some old colleagues. Nothing dramatic happened there, just some informal but candid conversation about the latest status of some folks that I know. Some of them are obviously pretty well off, at least doing quite well superficially. While others are fine but I would say that I ‘may’ be better than them in certain aspects of life. I didn’t really feel particularly proud of or bad for myself. I just reminded me that there are options. We can remain unchanged to certain extents while the world is changing around us. However, that may lead us to change involuntary later since the external factors are much powerful than us. On the other hand, we can make relatively controllable voluntary change in spite of being in a steady environment. Namely, we change before being forced to change. There is no right or wrong for either one, either way we will just have to bear the consequences. The bottom line is that I need to realize that there is always more than one way while I’m on my way.

The third chemical is a ‘semi-insomnia’ night that I had recently. I usually sleep well. Insomnia doesn’t happen to me more than few nights a year. In that night, I was doing self-reflection again. Somehow, I remember a story that may be I read long times ago, and maybe ‘partially’ made up by myself. It is about a Japanese Imperial army that had been left behind in a jungle in Philippines many years after the end of WWII. He didn’t know his country had surrendered, so he had remained faithful to his duty all these years. The perhaps ‘make-up’ part is that he found out the end of war from an encounter of an old lady who was washing her clothes at the bank of a river. He was trying to threat her somehow, and the old lady didn’t feel threaten, and just told him to just give up and stop doing what he had been doing. Somehow in mind, I emphasized that solider. Just like being struck by a lightening, I can imagine or visualize I were him. While looking at the sunset, with my dry lips, fatigued body, I disarm myself, and drop down on my knee. I feel exhausted and abandoned. Then, I just tell myself that ‘that’s it, it’s time to go.’

The result of mixing those chemicals in my mind is that I’m gonna reshuffle my priorities and then reallocate my limited resources, i.e. time, money, and energy, accordingly. Cuz, in the past few months (may be longer); I had allocated my attention and time on things that I found interesting but not important. As a result, I began to see cracks here and there. Though there may not be very noticeable by others (or they know it but just not telling me), I think it’s time to do something about them.

Of course, I still need to safeguard my privacy for what exactly I’m gonna do. I’m not gonna list them out in details here. What I would say is that, I just need to look at myself in the mirror and asking who I am to the people around me. The next step is to see what I can do better in those roles. That’s what I’m gonna do.

Hopefully, the ‘bomb’ will explode as planned, not on my face! i.e. things will work out my way.


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