Consider this a sermon illustration, to a much lesser degree. Lately, I've been thinking a lot about what would happen if I died now? What sort of impact did I have on my friends while I was around? Will it be a loss to my friends because of who I am or will I just be another surprised look on people's faces when I'm gone? Now this is where the similarity ends as above. I've asked myself that question for a couple of years and the answers that I've been getting isn't very encouraging. Of the many people that have come and gone since my schooling days (and to a certain extent I still am), what are things that I've done? Well, there's endless amount of gaming, endless amount of debates/clashes of worldviews/conflicts in opinions/whether-that-blue-jacket-looks-good, endless amounts of stupidity and of course, lots of churchy stuff. At the end of the day, when the people I've met have packed up and left for their next stop on their road of life, I'm guessing that is all I am to them. Nothing more, nothing less. And most of the time, the feeling ends up being mutual, leaving a rather large void that should be filled with the stuff friends are made of.
So, who's fault is it? I can't say with absolute certainty that I'm in the wrong nor can I say that they are. I can't say that I haven't tried hard but I also can't say that I've tried hard enough. But in the end, does it really matter? Does knowing whose fault is it give some sort of closure to wondering "What happened to us? We used to do so much."? It is utterly frustrating when this cycle goes on repeat. It makes it even harder when people have moved on to better things while I am still stuck in whatever present day scenario, moving in all directions but a net motion of zero. The more I think of it, the more I think there should be a new class of friendships that will encompass me, the outlier. I call it the "disposable friendship". All the joys and conveniences of friendship but with the added advantage of "no real strings attached". But please, feel free to discard but do so in the appropriate bins.
There's got to be a fundamental starting point from which all of these frustrations started and there has got to be a fundamental lesson to be learned here. But for the life of me, I can't figure out what are they. Many times, I am tempted to implement a solution to my problems without trying to understand what went wrong first. It just saves a lot of the heartache and frustration which I think I've had a lot of it already. It's like starting to program from scratch because your previous program was too screwed up and debugging will take a lot of time, more time than rewriting everything. The flaw in that analogy is that you sometimes do that but that is assuming that you knew what went wrong in the program in the first place. But I digress. One such solution is to start with a clean slate. Uproot myself, ship whatever insignificant belongings I have and myself to some other place in the world, reformat the friendship database and hit the "execute" button. Realistically, that will be in the form of re-pursuing my PhD. What's that I hear? Escapism you say? Well I guess so, but it's more like restarting in hoping that whatever mistakes I've made in the previous base will not crop up again. It's holding down the "Esc + Power" buttons (I'm not quite sure what that will do to you machines).
The other one is give myself an ultimatum. For several years now, I was pretty close to committing in an ultimatum of x amount of years, that if they goals of the ultimatum are not achieved then I will just not care anymore. But I know that this is like threatening God to do something or else I won't care. And I know this is just wrong. The temptation is very real and while there's nothing wrong in the temptation itself (succumbing to it makes it wrong), it's just damn hard not to do it. We all like to be able to control everything in our lives, including the lessons that are to be learned. It's this control freak nature of being human (so to speak) that brought sin into this world and let's face it, who hasn't been a control freak in their own way. I like to be able to decide what is good for me. And that is a bad thing to have. So I'm just praying that I don't do brash things like these.
I ask myself the question, what good will come out of me still being in Melbourne after that failed attempt at my PhD. I'm glad to say that a great many good things came out of those years, which makes me think that God is really working behind the scenes. But for some of the hardships that I've faced, I am still waiting for the lesson to come. Many times, I ask God to just show me the lesson already so that I can move on and just be less of an ass. Or like just tell me what to do, God, so that I can put all these things aside (of course, in asking God to just tell me what to do, the hard part is that He might actually tell me to do it). God is teaching me something, I just don't know what it is yet. And while that is pretty annoying at times, a lesson will be learned.
Ok, enough of the emo/angsty/slightly morbid post. Oh...and I'm not suicidal. Not to my knowledge at least. I think.
Two tales of love. One of how they got together and the other on how they were separated.
To get into a relationship, two friendships are sacrificed. I'm guessing I'm one of the two. Disposable friendships I tell you.
Adaptive traffic control. It's about time.
Physics and soccer. Still can be used to write a paper.
This can't be good. If I do go back home after failing to remain here due to my mum's wishes thanks to stricter visa requirements, I'm just going to say to her "I told you so"
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