Tag: life

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On Things I Wish I Had Known When I Was 25

For some years after I had just turned 25, I would joke with my friends that my “internal mental clock” was stuck at 25. This lasted for some time, until of course the fiction could no longer be maintained as the body increasingly refused to play ball with my gentle conceit.

This year, I will be turning 45. It won’t be as harrowing as when I was turning 40, I think. By now I’ve come to some amount of reconciliation with who I am and what Life means. I recognise that in many many ways, I have been stupidly fortunate, and remarkably undeserving of many things that have graced my existence of these few decades.

I also recognise that to the extent that I still hold feelings of Envy for others, and Self-Pity for myself, for the many missed opportunities and desired achievements that have eluded my ham-fisted grasp, there is still work to be done in learning on how to become a better human being.

Maybe the lesson will never be fully learnt until my time on this Earth is up.

I am now old enough to know that time travel is a fanciful idea, nothing more – but if I could go back in time and talk to that blithely-hopeful young man of 25, I would be telling him a few things, like these:

  1. It’s ok to make mistakes. All your life, you will fear making them, and you may well have missed out on any number of wonderful things that could have been part of your life, if only you had that little extra ounce of Courage to try and risk failing. You will find, ironically, that some of the best things in your life will come out from what you may have thought, from the outset, was a regrettable and irredeemable error. Be prepared to be wrong, often.
  2. There is no such thing as “The One” person for you – this is mere hogwash invented by movies and Hallmark cards to make money off your naivety. When you truly Love someone, your concept of Love and Self will grow to encompass the larger person that you should and will become as a result of loving that someone.
  3. Family will hurt you and disappoint you. Because they, too, are human, and will commit the mistakes and mishaps that humans do. Some of them might never deserve your forgiveness, but at the very least, you can learn to live with the hurts and the disappointments, and save room in your life and in your heart for the ones who truly love you and care for you.
  4. Ambition is important to your personal growth and livelihood, but never forget that these are all means to a far more important end: to learn what it means to be who you are, and what you are meant to do on this Earth.
  5. In work, try your best to gain the right Skills that will make you useful as you grow older. Since you weren’t born with Wealth, you must sell your Labour like most others on this earth – gain the right skills that can make your Labour useful and worthwhile, to yourself and to others.
  6. What you might think is desperately and shatteringly important to you today, will likely end up being something rather “meh” as you grow older, and your priorities change and grow to encompass the bigger and better and more mature person that you become.
  7. Friendships – you need to pay attention. Too often, in the past and in the years to come, you will let friendships lapse and wither out of lack of tender care and attention. Don’t do this. Spend the time to reach out. At least drop a text from time to time – better yet, make the time to meet over coffee. The friends you have are the most precious gift you will have in this life – we are all ships passing by silently in the night, but it is no small consolation to know that we can sail alongside each other for a while and make that loneliness a little easier to bear.
  8. Reading will save your Life. Not merely the influx of information, as mundanely important as that might be. Rather, reading offers you a window to constantly reflect on Life and the big questions that will increasingly haunt you as you get older and closer to your own mortality. Some of the best highlights of your life will come from the epic, beautiful and haunting reads that lie in wait for you.
  9. On the point of mortality: Death is the ever-present phantom, the one thing that makes you truly human, that bittersweet pill that each one of us will need to take one day. Raging against Death will serve you no purpose: running away will only lead you astray, and cause you to twist and turn in the most unnatural and transmogrified ways. The only truly human way to live life is to constantly think of Death, and look Death in the eye – and embrace what it means to live well so that you can die well.
  10. Love yourself. You will find that you are one of the lucky ones on this earth, who can count on a good number of people in your formative years as well as in your later years, who have loved you truly and unconditionally and unreservedly. More than anything, and despite everything, this has been the best gift of your life, because it has taught you that you can love yourself. In the end, all you will have ever have is yourself, to live within and to live with.
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On Dignity

This morning I woke up
And walked to the bathroom 
I saw my face in the mirror
Those dead eyes, swimming in doom

God, please, I said
Give me a way out, any way out
Thirty years, all this time
Like a cornered rat, without redoubt 

These choices I have made
Now I drown in a sea of regrets
My friends, their laughter echo loud
I sink beneath Life’s parapet

God help me now to find
A path out from my ragged mind.
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Tentang Pengakhiran

Dihujung hayat aku terlantar
Minda terjerat dibawah sedar 
Sepuluh jari terketarsusun 
Merontajerit memohon ampun

Wahai Tuhanku! Aku bermohon 
Berilah aku sedikit masa! 
Nyawaku ini jangan Kau runtun
Hamba Mu masih belum bersedia 

Belum masanya mandi gaharu 
Barkapur barus - tunggu dahulu!
Belum masanya berhijab kafan 
Berkuburtalqin, kumohon: Jangan! 

Berikan aku sedikit masa
Jiwaku masih berlumur dosa
Berikan aku ruang bertaubat
Sebelum jasad beku termayat 

Belum masanya Ya Rabbul Jalal
Jangan biarkan aku tersial!
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On Foiled Dreams (or, If Not This Life, then Next)

Some days Life kicks you in the teeth
and tries to bury you beneath
Reminds you that you're down and out,
defeated in your final bout.

In youth, you dreamt of summits' heights
The culmination of long nights
and days of striving, willing toil -
Yet here you are, your hopes all foiled.

For no one's owed a just reward -
as hostages to Life's sharp sword,
we all shall suffer what we must:
the lashings of Life's roaring gusts.

This bitter Truth shall have its round:
To some, all riches shall redound
while others must make do with this:
If not this Life, the Next holds bliss.

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On the Oldest Dream

It was darkness. Pitch black.

Up ahead, a glimmer of light. A heavy tome, its pages old and yellowed, sandwiched amidst thick gnarled leather.

Then suddenly, the book flies open, and the pages are flipped open in quick succession by an invisible hand. And all around, a raucous laugh, echoing and unremitting. Not laughing at anyone or anything, but delighting in the act of laughing, with just a hint of menace, a steel edge to the tone of rejoicing.

Then I wake up.

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On Buying and Reading Books

Hi, my name is Ziad, and I am a bookaholic.

Like, yeah, addicted to books.

I should be specific, of course. I have been a reader since I first learnt my alphabet, back at the age of 3. (My mother never fails to remind me of the story of how she was told by a pediatrician that Yes, your son is short-sighted, and Yes, you need to teach him his ABCs real quick so that we can get him tested. And that’s why all my toddler photos are of geeky Ziad in too-large glasses.)

So yes, I have been reading for as long as I can remember. And it makes my reading habit even more inevitable that my mother was, for many years, a librarian at a teachers’ training college. My entire childhood has been surrounded by, comforted by, engulfed by, and flooded with books.

But around about the time I had just finished graduating, and started to work, I fell prey to a related, but far more pernicious disease: I became addicted to *buying* books. The constant logic is that Oh, at least I am spending my hard-earned money on Knowledge, rather than frivolous things.

And that is how my books at home kept piling up.

When I moved into my in-laws’, and later on when I moved into our own home, I kept up the habit. Whenever I got depressed, my usual destinations would be McDonald’s, or Kinokuniya. On really bad days, both.

It got to such a ridiculous level that I now have books piled up on bookshelves, by my bedside, on my working desk, and on the floor, flush to the wall near our patio. I have books in the car, books on my working desk. Everywhere. We have started to donate books to charities and non-profit bookstores, but it has hardly made a dent in our ever-growing pile of books.

So, as a New Year’s Resolution for 2023, both Kat and I resolved not to buy any new books for the entire year. The only exception was for books that we could buy if we were travelling overseas. (I have recently discovered a loophole – downloading books on my Kindle! – but I reason to myself that I haven’t broken my resolution since no money is changing hands. Yeah, very Clintonian, I know!)

It helps that I now try to focus my reading via my Kindle, which of course is more portable, and can contain many more books that my bookshelves at home ever could. I miss those moments of “bookbathing” in Kinokuniya, and I still make my way there from time to time, though so far I have been very steadfast with my resolution.

Yes, my name is Ziad, and I am, indeed, a bookaholic.

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Tentang Fitrah

Aku diajar tentang Fitrah
Tentang naluri teras ciptaan 
Yang terukur teratur indah 
Jadi batu asas sang Insan 

Mereka diajar tentang Fitrah
Kalau lelaki begini jadinya 
Kalau perempuan begitu pula
Semuanya lazim mengikut lumrah 

Kita diajar tentang Fitrah
Seolah insan wataknya mudah -

Kalau lelaki: ketua keluarga 
Kalau perempuan: dapur tempatnya
Kalau lelaki: jadi pemimpin
Kalau wanita: menyalin lampin
Tugas lelaki: mentadbir buana 
Tugas wanita: menggoncang dunia
(Nun jauh rantai asbabnya 
Kononnya buaian mencerna kuasa)

Ini ajarku perihal Fitrah:
Setiap insan pelbagai lumrah 
Maksud Adil penuh ma’rifat 
Setiap sesuatu terletak tepat 

Kalau Rafidah: jadilah Menteri 
Jangan disorok tepi perigi
Kalau Zeti: jadilah Gubenur
Pasti iktisad cantik teratur 
Kalau Jemilah: jadilah Doktor 
Harum nama negara masyhur 

Ini hakikat ertinya Fitrah:
Setiap insan dicipta Allah
Lengkap kamil dengan cirinya 
Setiap seorang tiada sama

Tanda hormat sesama insan:
Mengukur kain pada sang badan
Tinggi budi tinggilah maqam 
Itulah janji Allah Yang Akram!
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On Cussing

One of the most difficult things that I had to get used to, when I first came up to boarding school in Melaka, was the cussing. It was not just that it was casual – friends would greet each other by the side of the road with “Woi, sial! Lama tak nampak!”, faces beaming – but that it was constant and unthinking. Everyday, everywhere, all at once, you could hear a chorus of Babi and Lahanat and Celaka in a hundred parallel conversations at any given moment.

Cussing was a big part of the culture – the price of admission to be part of the tribe.

I remember one afternoon, a couple of us played a stupid parlour game to see who can let out the longest unbroken stream of expletives, like a string of polished pearls of excrement – gleeful wannabe rappers with a bad case of Tourette’s, going babikaulahanatcelakapukimakpantatlancaucibaimakkau! at the utmost top of our voices.

Swearing as an art form: we were incorrigible.

Not long after boarding school, when I went overseas for A-Levels, I became the unfortunate existential trial that God inflicted on my pious, budak-sekolah-agama housemate. He would wince at every profanity that came out of my foul mouth. Certainly he was too polite to tell me off, so I had to find out from someone else that he was seriously considering moving to another house to get away from my baleful influence. Of course, I found this mortifying – I thought of myself as a good boy, and my housemate was such a gentle soul that the very thought of him moving out, because of my cussing, was a painful thought.

I cleaned up my act, and my potty mouth, pretty quickly.

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On Becoming a Person ( or A Book Review of Carl Rogers’ 1961 Classic Book on Psychotherapy)

This classic book by Carl Rogers, first published in 1961, will likely be the most important book I read this year.

Useful and enlightening, Carl Rogers’ approach to psychotherapy resonates with what I believe to be my own take on life: that humans are deeply unique, and that one of our most primary tasks in Life is to give full expression and flowering to the most singular and delightful aspects of our human existence.

Unlike other luminaries of psychotherapy such as Freud and Jung, Rogers believed in a far more grounded and almost ridiculously basic approach to therapy: that the primary responsibility of the therapist is to provide a safe and confidential space for persons to learn to listen to themselves, and to fully experience the entire spectrum of their emotions. His belief was that when patients rediscover what it means to become and be themselves, they will learn that they already have the resources within themselves to recover their own dignity and self-worth.

Most importantly: Rogers walks the talk. Through his flowing and honest prose, the reader gets a sense of who he is – humble, curious, empowering, democratic, authentic, sincere, perhaps even a touch naive.

Rogers also brought two novel approaches to psychotherapy. The first was his conviction that the efficacy and usefulness of what he called “client-centred therapy” or “person-centred approach” could be proven scientifically, through rigorous experiments which were carefully documented and published in the leading psychology journals of his day. His other innovation, which was to grow to become a leading preoccupation for him in his later years, was that the basic principles of his approach to psychotherapy had real and vital applications in fields far beyond the therapist’s room: in the classroom, amongst married couples, and even in the drawing rooms and conference halls of high diplomacy. He was certain that the greatest problems of his age could be solved by an appeal to the fundamentals of human creativity and decency.

Most importantly, from my point of view, his perspective on human communications suggests that we already have the tools we need to form a better life for ourselves:

  1. The faith that every single human being is, at their core, a decent and dignified human being, and that rediscovering that core humanity requires us to actively work towards listening to and understanding ourselves and others.
  2. The courage to be sincere with how we feel, at any given moment, and to embrace the implications of those emotions in how we deal with others.
  3. The curiosity to truly listen to what others have to say, to fully experience the words and the tone and the music with which others communicate themselves to us.
  4. The commitment to constantly work towards becoming better versions of who we are, to lean into our self-knowledge and self-understanding and bring ourselves to the fullest flowering of our unique and indivisible selves.

Some books come along at the moment when you most need them. Reading this book gave me further validation that the way I see the world is a way that could work well, and I finished the book with the hope that here was a roadmap that I could walk in my every day to become a better person.

In other words, this was a 5-star read that I would highly highly recommend to anyone interested in an engaging and coherent approach towards living a Good Life.

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Tentang Hidup Seorang Melayu Borjuis

Aku selalu bingung.

Aku diajar untuk patuh taat. Ikut perintah ayah. Ikut perintah mak. Ikut perintah guru. Patuh arahan loceng sekolah, patuh pengawas, patuh peraturan sekolah.

Aku ikut. Patuh. Belajar rajin-rajin. Masuk universiti. Dapat degree. Kerja keras. Beli kereta. Beli rumah. Kawin. Dapat anak. Dapat kenaikan pangkat. Kalau untung, dapat gelar Datuk, gelar Tan Sri.

Patuh arahan lampu isyarat, patuh undang-undang, patuh saranan Kerajaan.

Semuanya aku ikut. Jadi kenapa aku masih rasa bingung? Kenapa aku selalu rasa ada benda yang memulas dalam perut, memulas dalam kepala, katanya kenapakausiniapakaunaksiapaengkauapamaksudsemuaini?