I know I haven’t been updating this blog because I’m too lazy. Years 2 and 3 have been an exciting flurry of business (both work and busy-ness). I constantly spew bite-sized thoughts that stream into my mind on Instagram Stories anyway, and I am remarkably easily bored and excitable, so longer, more considered pieces on Blogger aren’t sustainable. I digress. Many exciting life updates! I’m now officially done with my undergraduate PPE programme at King’s College London. I loved every bit of it: the depth, rigour and intellectual intensity of the course, the international student community, the bustling city of London and all the travel opportunities around Europe. Words can’t do justice to the profundity of the experience. In typical Quincean fashion, I milked everything I could out of the three years: went to Cumberland Lodge (for free) as a photographer with the Philosophy Department in Years 1 and 3, clinched the Principal’s Global Leadership Award (PGLA) in my second year (spending...
Wow, I can't believe that half the academic year has passed. It has been a perpetual rush; KI IS proposal writing, then a second round of research, writing and submissions, then Block Test 1, then two months to finish all A-Level syllabi, then the Photographic Society exhibition and photo book, then the Hwa Chong Invitational Philosophy Olympiad, and next, Block Test 2 in less than a month's time.
Hmm, maybe Secondary 3 was equally hectic, but the stakes are much higher this time. I think I've gotten used to having multiple schedules proceeding side-by-side. It can be dizzying at times, but I think I am actually doing legit things, and that gives me satisfaction? "Legit" is relative anyway; maybe my satisfaction is an illusion.
Oh, I almost forgot. SATs (Finished my Subject Tests today, yay!), university applications, personal statements, all sorts of interviews, and whatever comes. Beggars can't be choosers, so if anyone takes in this crazy ass, I'll buy a lottery ticket.
I really don't know what keeps me going. I'm just creating my own meaning along this "jaunty helpless journey". Absurdism à la Camus.
Maybe it's JC life. Maybe it's being 18. Maybe it's standing at the cusp of adulthood, realising that sometime soon I will be on my own. It's a tug of war between youthful ambition and belonging: I want to travel the world doing big things, but I have emotional needs that home and only home can meet. One day I'm Frank Sinatra making it big in New York City, another day I'm the resident Ah Beng at the kopitiam downstairs, another day cosily at home with family.
Everything has an opportunity cost. And it gets personal sometimes, when the next best alternative forgone turns out to be more precious than the initial choice. I will have to grapple with harsh realities, love and loss. I guess that's inevitable; we just wait for them to come. In this respect, life's financial challenges cut less deep. What about others who really have financial difficulties and barely manage to get by every day? Do they not have to deal with problems of the human world? We are all not spared. Indeed, "[t]ime's wingèd chariot [is] hurrying near", and Death is the sole passenger.
Maybe it's wanting to have everything, material, immaterial or otherwise, that causes us such sorrow. The soothing sweetness of death, where nothing comes and nothing goes. But what if death is not really so? As Hamlet reminds us, "there’s the respect that makes calamity of so long life".
"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." Gatsby failed. What makes me think that I'll make it?
Growing up is tough. But we never stop growing. And so the struggle not to think of past, present and future could-have-beens continues... ∎
Comments
Post a Comment