membajak kata bijak
Tinggal sendiri, jauh dari keluarga dan orang orang yang dekat membuat banyak hal dalam kehidupan bergantung pada diri sendiri: dipikir sendiri, ditimbang-timbang sendiri, diputuskan sendiri, dan akhirnya dievaluasi sendiri. Asiknya, sebagai bagian dari penelaahan dalam kesendirian itu, memory terhadap kata kata bijak yang saya koleksi sejak beberapa tahun lalu menjadi muncul.
Mengejar ambisi studi dengan aral melintang fisik dan mental kadang membuat mata hati menjadi sempit. Banyak hal lewat saja. Yang terpenting adalah menemukan metode yang tepat, data bersahabat, hasil analisa sesuai hipotesa, penulisan tesis lancar, supervisor sumringah. Kalau itu sulit tercapai atau tekanan ambisi menanjak secara eksponensial, sementara energi dan semangat hanya beberapa strip di atas titik nol dalam garis horizontal, jadilah stress, gelisah dan dunia serasa kelabu. Teringatlah saya pada the three musketeers, maksudnya tiga quotes yang saya jadikan musketeers untuk melapangkan sempitnya mata hati tadi:First shot, “God allows life to be rocky, not to let the rocks grind you into dust, but to polish you to become a brilliant gem”. Hmm… dengan percaya itu, tantangan jadi terlihat sedikit lebih terang euy.Second shot, “Turtles can tell more about the roads than hares." (K. Gibran) Intinya: tenang… tenang…, jangan cepat panik, biar lambat asal dapet banyak. And third one, “Take something as what it is and what it is not!” Maksudnya, hei PhD sih memang penting, but that’s not the only thing in life! Banyak masalah lain dalam hidup yang lebih hakiki sebenarnya, atau penderitaan orang lain yang lebih substansial!
Karena semua dipikir sendiri, kekhawatrian sering muncul terhadap banyak hal. Hmm jadi membuka kenangan sewaktu di negri sakura, 11 tahun yang lalu: ….. Kami sedang ke luar kota dan jalan jalan di sebuah taman, tiba tiba mendung dan hujan, dan saya terus saja menyesali karena tidak membawa payung. Seorang teman bilang begini: “Atiek, don’t worry about something that you can do nothing about”. Bener banget! Dan kata kata itu terus teringat dalam banyak episode hidup saya selanjutnya, concentrate on the doable things, then it feels lighter and you stay sane.
Sudah sendirian, banyak masalah, ada aja orang orang yang bikin jengkel, langsung maupun tidak langsung, yang dekat maupun yang jauh. Ke-bete-an terhadap karakter2 yang menjengkelkan membuat saya teringat pada kata kata Khalil Gibran: I have learned silence from the talkative, toleration from the intolerant and kindness from the unkind; yet strange I am ungrateful to these teachers”. Iya ya, kenapa jadi sewot berkepanjangan? Anggap aja orang orang itu bahan observasi untuk pematangan karakter kita sendiri, free psychology lessons!
Kadang mengakui ketidakenakan yang kita alami ternyata membuat perasaan jadi lebih tenang sedikit. Mungkin analoginya adalah seperti dalam matematika: negative * negative = positive. Kalau kejadiannya ‘buruk’, pikiran kita diarahkan untuk ‘mengakui keburukan’ kejadian itu, rasanya akan jadi lebih ‘positif’. Ada teman yang pernah bilang: “Good things come in drops, bad things flow like flood. It’s true that sometimes life is not fair” Bagi saya menyikapi kejadian buruk yang bertubi tubi dan kenyataan bahwa kadang hidup tidak selalu adil, adalah dengan mengakuinya, “diam sejenak”, “nrimo”, dan bukan sibuk memerangi perasaan buruk itu. Dan hei… I feel better afterwards. Dengan disertai rasa percaya bahwa time heals, in the end we will bounce back ok….
Tetap semangat!
--------------------------somehow kata kata bijak di atas terinspirasi oleh beberapa orang: Wayne, Evy, Yani dan David Cook ( yes, the 2008 American Idol :))
Soulmate in Reality: FAQs
What is soulmate? Dictionary.com and Wikipedia.com define soulmate as ‘a term for someone with whom one has a feeling of deep and natural affinity, friendship, love, intimacy, sexuality, and/or compatibility’.
But what is soulmate in reality? And how do you find your soulmate in real life? First, does soulmate have to be of opposite gender? Although some might not agree with me, let me use an opposite-gender assumption -- and because it will be more interesting too ! --.
Is finding soulmate a progressive process? After some life episodes, you think you have found your soulmate but as you mature or change through the course of life you find out someone else is better off as one. Or, is it a one-time conviction; after long iterative dynamics and interactions with people you will then be struck with a faith: “hmm… he is my soulmate….” Permanent.
Wikipedia.com illustrates further on soulmate using examples of various movies, some of which are mainstream Hollywood ones like Serendipity, Something Gotta Give, The Lake House and even teenage movie series Dawson’s Creek. It looks that finding someone as soulmate involves delicate interactions, heart pounding events, mixture of feelings, all of which lead to a unity of emotions or some sort of bonds. As a process, however, how can you be so sure you’re at the top of the ladder and not on a bar in between?
Should finding a soulmate be a reciprocal situation? If you find him as your soulmate, should he find you as his soulmate too? The similar rhetoric is whether it can be one-to-many relationship or it must be one-to-one. You consider him your soulmate but he might think another person as his, or you might have ‘peer-soulmates’. Oops...
So then, is soulmate always singular? or can it be plural, like classmates, roommates? Take a look at those who have great influence on your life, but who follow nature’s law of “nobody’s perfect”: one who’s always around, a shoulder to cry on, purely a big-brother kind; another one, who connects well plus some affection involved; another one, someone with perfect chemistry, but you two stay in no-flirting zone as he is too good a friend to ‘screw with’; last one (to complete the dimensions!) despite distant differences, the universe seems to unite two of you and bring you to be for each other. Can you have partial soulmate in some of them? Or does it have to be only one among them?
Such a pragmatic pondering I have to admit. At the end of the day, I think having soulmate has to do with believing that two of you belong to each other and in what may be called an ‘inexplicably intrinsic nature( bah.. is there such a phrase?!). This somehow means whether or not you’ll eventually end up with each other in such a physical sense. A pity though if not, but hmm... I guess that’s why it’s called soulmate, not lifemate or livingmate!
No tastes could’ve been so similar
No feelings could’ve been so in unison
(Lake House movie)
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... to my friends undergoing new exciting pathways, with chances of finding soulmates or realizing that indeed they have already got theirs all along!...
What do China and Eritrea have in common?
One November Sunday afternoon, out of lethargy and lazy mood, I dug my DVD collection, and decided to watch a movie called The Painted Veil, a love story set in China in 1920s. A newly-married English couple living in Shanghai was shaken by adultery committed by the wife. The husband, a dedicated microbiologist, took revenge by dragging his wife, an attractive London upper-class young woman, to move to a remote mountainous place where he joined a mission to help in cholera epidemics. As fragile as she was to cope with the hardship, she survived the other facets of life but the husband’s tight vengeance. “I despise myself for allowing me to love you once”, he explained his distant attitude in that already distant place for her. Through intricate but inevitably natural processes in the middle of nowhere, they eventually embraced each other, submitting understanding and forgiveness and stick to what mattered most, and discarded the rest. I was indeed intrigued by the inscription on this movie’s cover which made me decide to buy the DVD: “Sometimes the greatest journey is the distance between two people”
Finished with the movie, I summed up my Sunday evening by finishing a narrative documentary book which I had started a few months a go, but stopped after more or less one-fourth of the pages. Ciao Asmara is written by a young English man, describing his exploration of Eritrea when he volunteered as an English teacher in that country in 1990s. Eritrea is a north-eastern African country, located by the coast of Red Sea, which was once colonized by Italy and then British Empire, and it was federated to Ethiopia in early 1950s. Eritrea was finally recognized independence in 1993. The writer depicted different angles of his encounters with Eritrean people and life during those independence years, with history and memories of wars being inseparable from their lives. So thick also was the expectation on what independence had to actually bring to the people. The woman-gender issues are complex (like in anywhere else?), in which women face the oppression from men and from the traditional ‘laws’, whereas the latter means pressure from women themselves through inherited norms which were held tightly. His exploration was forced to stop because he had to leave the country when a war broke out with Ethiopia in late 1990s.
Back to why I came up with the title of this writing….. Surprisingly Eritrea and China did have connection! During the fight against Ethiopia, soldiers from EPLF (Eritrean People’s Liberation Front) apparently went to China for learning Mao teaching. And the writer spent most of his volunteering work in China and Eritrea!
Those two Sunday episodes also brought up religion and God on the table. As grateful as he was for being alive after some life-screening experiences in the war, Awot, one important character in Ciao Asmara, bluntly said “There is no God. If there was God, He wouldn’t allow such prolonged sufferings to Eritreans like what has happened to us”. In The Painted Veil, a sister of Catholic missionary convent where Kitty (the wife) volunteered, contemplated on her falling in love (with God) when she was young and her being seduced by the romanticism of religious life. Through time, her relationship with Him changed and turned into constant peaceful indifference, “like old husband and wife sitting on the couch but rarely speak”, she said.
And finally, the ultimate answer to “What do China and Eritriea have in common?” is that through the movie and the book, the two countries represent my success of creating a beautiful Sunday at home. They satisfied my fondness on exploring landscapes in foreign places, which was fulfilled by the gorgeous backdropping China mountains in The Painted Veil, and with a bit of imagination by the European, African, Arabic ambiences in the Eritrean towns depicted in Ciao Asmara. On top of that, I got a bonus of pondering on love and distance, on war and people, on passion and faith; yup quite a full-fledged Sunday....!
