Who are you really?

Many would have us all believe. A man’s character needs to be created like a lego building, by adding the right bricks early on in life – want your kid to be an engineer give him alot of stimulation in numbers – if you want him to be a big fund manager get your baby a plastic Ferrari with crappy brakes. But there is a big spanner sticking out from this happy picture. What if a man’s character is not something that is LEARNT, what if it’s always there residing within the deepest recesses of his being – like a solitaire diamond snuggling somewhere in a crevice deep in the belly of some mine – that incidentally is what I believe in.

The notion our true character is already in each and everyone of us – like a tree, you don’t need to give it instructions of how many inches to grow every year or even tutor it on why its roots should burrow towards water instead of the desert – it just knows what to do and when to do it and even when to stop doing it.

The greatest gift that nature has bestowed upon man is not life, but the opportunity to discover our REAL character – who is after all the real you. And many times through out the course of our life, we may have said, done or thought things has held us back instead of pushing us forward because we really don’t know WHO we really are – and it is easy to get confused in our age of endless hype and spin – an age that seems to be really only fixated on telling you and me; how we should dress, what kinda car we should drive right down to how we should raise our kids – all these distractions in life, do very little except to cover up the real YOU! As this thing called character is already in all of us – many of us have simply not stepped outside our mental boundaries and had a meaningful conversation with ourselves – if we did, then I think that would be a very good start to getting to know who we truly are.

Darkness 2012

“To be yourself, you have to really get to know yourself – that is really the only way to reinvent yourself if you are not going to be ground to dust in this modern age. Because if you don’t even know WHO you are; then the chances are you are going to jump on the first bandwagon that comes along – if someone you saw on TV ask you to eat more vegetables, you eat more chai sim and drink more iced lettuce juice; if someone you heard in radio, said it is a good idea to turn your kids into a tool so that they can be employed one day and pay taxes – then you are really like someone with no roots. It is fine not to have cultural roots or to have only very fine roots – but when it comes to the SELF, if you do not have any roots, then you will always be a wanderer – ever searching for that thing that you know belongs to you; but through the years of just waking up every morning, sending the kids to school, putting in another day at work – this thing has somehow disappeared – and as time goes by, all we really see in the mirror is the man who could have been someone, but just couldn’t make it – so we beat ourselves up; we overcompensate by being extra nice to our kids and even transposing our hopes and fears on them – as we don’t want them to end up like us. As a result we end up coloring their lives with the SAME perpetual fear of failure that regularly haunts us and robs us everything that is meaningful and good about life – and why do we go through this misery? Why do we even become the architects of our own unhappiness and strife?

Could it have something to do with the idea – we don’t know WHO we are; or rather WHO we are supposed to be? Or even what we can and cannot do – and we see this same state of uncertainty in the brief history of the Singapore social political blogosphere – when the internet first appeared; everyone was uncertain how to use this tool that has dropped from digital heaven – it was like in that movie by Stanley Kubrick Space Odyssey 2001. In that scene when those monkeys woke up and found a huge black monolith – they went nuts at first; but if you notice every time they went nearer to that which was the source of their fear and fascination; they went closer to the object, till they eventually touched it and. Within this same scene, we notice that some of the apes even began caressing the lines of this strange monolith that had suddenly appeared before them. So this was really Kubrick’s diorama of man’s awakening – but this scene of apes jumping up and down only to settle down and perhaps even THINK is not so different from how our own blogosphere evolved to what it is today.

But the internet was not the magical wand that transformed many netizens into a single identifiable voice of consciousness – it was merely the platform – what is significant here is to remember many of the voices we hear today in the internet has always been there deep within all of us – the idea that all if not well in paradise – the niggling notion that you’ve been screwed – and so these voices grow louder and louder. But my point is like the REAL you that you have to look for; it has always been there within YOU. 

You really just need to find a way to coax it out – it could be through writing, music or even being able to do really nifty things like blow bubbles by curling your tongue.”