The problem with me and signs

Can it be true when they say that some people aren’t meant to go on gap years, to go wild, to run with the wind and never look back?

My decision to bury my head in the sand lasted for roughly a month. Now I’m bound for university again, for even higher education. I’m not quite sold on the idea just yet, but at least it doesn’t repulse me and make me want to hang myself with the same intensity as it did before.

After months of soul-searching, deciding, moments of absolute liberation and crippling denial, I’ve decided to open my eyes and my ears, my heart to what the universe is telling me. When all signs point in the same direction, surely, that’s the way to go?

The 6 instances I found happiness in Bohol

The other day, while on holiday, my grandma pulled me aside to share something she read from Theosophical Digest with me. It said that happiness can’t be achieved by looking to material things or experiences. I agree with the first part – new iPhones get old, shiny cars depreciate, state of the art laptops break. The second part, hmmm. Not so much.

I spent the last four days in Bohol, Philippines, soaking up the sun and the local sights. For non-Filipinos reading this (I mean YOU, Aida ), it’s this little island off the coast of Visayas, an hour-long plane ride south of Manila.

Now I thought I’d try my hand at travel-blogging my first adventure of 2012. I’m not going to bore you with the nitty-gritty details of said trip (like how we missed our flight, how the cute little kid behind us pooped in her diapers and filled half the cabin with suspiciously adult-smelling odors, how many mosquitoes feasted on my limbs, etc.etc). Nope, we’ll stick to the highlights.

Highlight #1: Bluewater Panglao

Truly the jewel in the crown of our whole trip. I don’t think our trip to Bohol would’ve been the same if we’d stayed elsewhere. We knew it was going to be a good time the minute we set our bags down at their front desk with a member of the staff handing us cold towels and lemongrass juice, with a warm “Maayong Buntag!” (Good day in the local dialect). The place was gorgeous – it was all pools and villas, with violin music and cricket noises filling the air.

The view of the never-ending pool from our rooms

The path to their beachfront

The war on weakness

By Usien (Own work) via WikiCommons

And then one day she realised that the effort it took to be weak and sentimental was far too much more than the strength it took to suck it up and keep walking on. She realised that the courage she had within her had been kept in storage for far too long, like a muscle that grows weak from disuse. Strength had atrophied, shrivelled up, yet was still there, nonetheless. Now taking it off the shelf, she blows the dust off of its top and polishes it till it shines. Just because she’s tired of whining, complaining, feeling helpless and sad all the time. Just because the want is too much to bear, too strong that she can feel its palpable presence, the weight of it, like a smooth grey stone in the palm of her hand. Because the black wave she feels starting to engulf her must be stopped. In order to change things, she must help herself. Perhaps this is the start. Perhaps this is the solution, the end. Maybe not talking about it, not allowing feelings to permeate every single thought, such that it oozes from her pores, is the key to the undoing of undoing. 

What I learned today from tv

As per usual these days, life lessons come in the form of tv episodes. I’m learning a lot about being a woman, being in love and loving, but mostly,  about self-respect and about leaving some for yourself because no one else will. People take and take while you give and you give, and this is as it should be. However, upon the disintegration of the relationship, or whatever it is that’s happening at the moment, there is no giving back, even if you both wanted to.

It’s s terrifying how love turns us into animals – hurtful and hurting, left with nothing to arm ourselves with in the fight to save ourselves.

On not knowing.

 

Maybe there is a certain kind of joy that is to be reveled in in not knowing. Maybe the excitement of waiting for what the future will bring is and should be just that – excitement. Maybe it’s all a matter of perspective, what the future holds.

Maybe the joy is not in the answer we seek but in the question itself that we ask.

Maybe i’m not meant to know everything and anything these days, at this point in my life. Maybe this epoch is for exploration and learning, of discovery of myself and of the greater world. Maybe the beauty is in the world surprising you with what it can suddenly offer.

Maybe I should love the freedom of choosing instead of being boxed in by the array of choices before me. Maybe there are no shoulds, only mays and cans. Maybe there is something in letting the dice fall where they may, letting water take its natural course, going with the flow.

In homage to the timeless question: ‘WHAT IF?’

I am perfectly aware that in the course of our days, we constantly negotiate and re-negotiate our present in order to influence our future happiness. I know this – we make decisions then we change them. We make little choices throughout the day as to what colour undies to wear, what to have for lunch, which movie to watch. And then we make the bigger decisions that take significant time and effort, maybe a period of soul-searching. Or two. I know all that and yet it takes me by surprise when I am faced with big decisions that need to be made every other day, that I’m starting to laugh at the great cosmic joke that I feel like I’ve been thrown into.

On the here and now and the allure of tomorrow.

Looking through the collection of thoughts via tumblr and random files in my computer, I notice a recurring theme in the collection of quotes that at one time or another have struck a chord in me. That is, to slow down, take a breath and enjoy the present. I guess I have always been a worrier, rushing from one task to the next, either anxiously awaiting what the unknown will bring, or silently despairing about the present. Oh me of little faith. 

Of commitment to the cause.

I’ve finally gone ahead and done it. I’ve committed – to a proper blog. I’ve never really understood blogs, not since my last one back when I was 16. I guess I never really understood the point of putting your thoughts up in cyberspace for all the world to see. I mean, what is an ordinary person meant to write about that’s so interesting that other people (who aren’t their friends) would care to read? Heck, I don’t even want to hear about my day, let alone strangers. Except maybe for the Kardashians’, I am loath to admit. But maybe that’s just me.

Now that I’ve decided to put myself on this (psychological) gap year, though, I feel like I finally have something to say. This whole trip that consists wholly of holidays and conversation upon conversation upon conversation with beloved girlfriends always falls back into the same things – talk of the future over endless cups of coffee.

I suppose it’s because we’re at that point in our lives where the dreams we were dreaming can now actually come into being. The seemingly endless years of being told “You can do what you want when you finish college” by our parents weren’t endless after all. They’ve ended, and we are here, now, and decisions have to be made. Weighty decisions that determine the course of our futures – decisions that we had been waiting to make for decades but now confound us to no end, decisions that we cannot afford NOT to make, at the risk of life just passing us by with absolutely no sense of direction. Yet still, some of us are more decided than others, some of us just a little bit more lost than the people supposedly in the same boat.

I am out of the boat, completely. I’ve decided to jump overboard and swim towards the beach where I’ve chosen to bury my head in the sand for a little while longer.

I know it’s not like me to do something like this. It’s not like a member of my family, or my (stereotypical) race, even. But it’s the lesser of two evils – to continue struggling against the jungle of choices and decisions that need to be weighed and considered, then taken, or to stay sane and healthy. Hopefully (somewhat naively) happy. Right now, at this point, I can only choose sanity. It’s all the answer I can muster at the moment, and the world will just have to content itself with, “I don’t know…yet.” as the best answer I can give right now.

There’s this concept in Filipino called pagwawala, from the verb magwala which means to run amok. It’s something akin to the concept of the show Girls Gone Wild, except possibly with less boob exposure. When I told my mother I had decided magwala this year, she looked at me with a raised eyebrow that pulsed suspicion and scepticism and asked me, “You’re not going to get pregnant ‘by accident’, are you?” No I am not. I explained that when I say pagwawala I simply mean that I’m going to take this year to figure out what I want to do with my life at leisure, steeling my heart against expectationspressuresandstress and just following my heart, which at the moment yearns excitement and the experience of youth (but more on that later). To which she replied, “Oh. So a gap year?” Ah! That sounds much more promising than running amok.

And so, I am on a gap year. The concept of a gap year is something I learned in Australia. It’s taking a year off between high school and uni to do whatever it is young people do – whether it’s spending the year on the couch, veging out or couch surfing across Europe.

While being optimistic, let’s be realistic though. For a person like me, a gap year doesn’t mean unemployment and a solid year of Robinson Crusoe-like adventures. What it means (most probably) is getting a job (instead of a career) to save up enough money to see a bit of a world before answering the (now dreadful) question – “What do you want plan to do with your life?”

Before taking on blogging again, I was given the advice that the best blogs are the ones with focus. And so, I’ve decided this one to chronicle my (psychological) gap year – (hopefully) my journey from being lost to finding myself, from being a confused little girl to a decided young woman, from having absolutely no answers to finding the best one from the set of alternatives before me.

So. Here’s to blogging, here’s to youth and life. Here’s to asking the questions and trying to find the answers.

Cheers,

Trish