Monday, January 31, 2011
age and time
January 2011 is gone. and I can't wait for it to be February 2011! I feel like compiling a wishlist of what I want for my 20th birthday, but I won't use my blog as a big hint broadcasting station:DI love birthdays. or at least I love MY birthday. not the date [though thats really special] but the fact that I'm one year older, and it gives the day an 'aura'. like some mystical quality such that on the 13th february 2359 i'm 19 and the next minute 14th feb 0000 I'm 20! like I grew 1 year within that minute! Although we all know that thats a stupid theory and isn't true. and speaking of theories reminds me of my hole-y 'food' theory. but, thats besides the point.
And while I know the theory of aging is not as simplistic as the one I offered above, it still is special and fantastical to me. Another way I look at it is that every second every minute every hour i'm getting little by little older and finally on my birthday, I reach a WHOLE number without the excess +xxnumber of days/hours/minutes/seconds...but then again my theory only holds true for 14th of february 00:00...so no, it doesn't make much sense either.
whatever it is, I look forward to my birthday every single year. without fail. I have no idea why, it's how I pass a year! to me, 'next' year has only arrived with the arrival of my birthday. narcissistic, i know. but, thats MY way of counting the years and the one constant thing to mark time.
you'd think that after 20 years i would have learnt to tone down on my expectations....but no, there exists a child-like belief in me that 'everythingwillbehappilyeverafter' at the stroke of midnight 14th of february...i might have read one too many fairytale books when i was younger. fiction and fact sometimes crosses and lines are blurred.
This kinda reminds me of people who have 'chased the rabbit' as told by my dad in ytd's sermon [he took the story from a book called finishing well]
In a certain country, dogs were trained by setting them to catch a mechanical clockwork rabbit within a pen. The dogs spent days running around in a rectangular pen, and they just spent the entire time going around and around in circles chasing after the clockwork rabbit [which obviously was programmed to run faster than the dogs]. this went on for some time. One day, as the dogs were chasing the clockwork rabbit, due to some technical glitch, the rabbit stopped running. The dogs finally caught up with the rabbit, but what did they do? or what could they do? they never touched the rabbit, because they never knew why they were chasing the rabbit in the first place. Once they had caught up with it, they didn't know what to do with it.
so the rabbit represents things we strive towards, we chase and chase all day long, but we never know why we are chasing them. and at the end of the day, when we've finally caught up with our rabbit, we get disillusioned and lost. because we don't know what to do with it.
I don't really know why i'm including the story here. and the story is really from memory. But it keeps sticking in my head and I ask myself, what are the rabbits in my life. my birthday is another rabbit-like example. year in and year out, i anticipate, i eagerly await for it, and yet when the day is here, it passes like any other ordinary day. no big fireworks in the sky that says "HI EUNICE IT'S YOUR DAY TODAY" [it certainly doesn't help that i'm sharing my day with all the couples in the world] not that I'd expect it to. I mean, 14th of feb is just another ordinary day. and i'd be disappointed, but not by much, and the very next day 15th of feb, i'm geared up for another whole year of anticipation and disappointment.
quite foolish, come to think of it! when there could be much more things to be looking forward to.
but i'd like to believe that my foolishness comes in a smaller dosage than those whose rabbits are more time-consuming, more human-eating than mine. Mine's a passing fancy, I don't spend the whole year doing nothing and just watching the clock. But rabbits of other natures are not as kind, are more vicious in taking away family time, and things that are actually of value, like the things of God.
I'm quite surprised at what i've written here. but i was inspired. I have no idea by what.
When i told clarence i was going to blog, I had no idea this was what was going to come out, and neither did i know that it was going to be this LONG. so this is a disclaimer...kinda put at the end of the whole long chunk:D
by eunice at Monday, January 31, 2011 |
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