So I hit the big twos not too long ago. I know half the population probably raised their brows when they realised that yours truly here is younger than twenty five.
My birthday this year was definitely much more eventful than last year. It wasn't necessarily for any tangible reasons, just that nervy sensation that you got when you felt that things were about to change. I guess in a sense it was and is true. The semester is ending soon, which means time to switch onto nocturnal mode (bummer!). I'm about to take on my first internship at a surprisingly kick-ass firm (praise Him!). And I'm flying to Canada in less than two months for exchange. Things are a-changing, and they kinda got me feeling something on the night of my birthday.
I was flipping (well, since it's Facebook, so I guess, clicking) through my old photos, those taken when I was in year 1. I could safely say that I wasn't the same person person now. I mean, people say this kind of thing all the time, but I was actually taken aback slightly by my transformation (pardon the melodramatic lingo). I reread old notes people gave me, dating back to when I just joined Blast! performing my first item, all the way to those recent ones. I got sad. I realised that I had won the confidence of a lot of people in past-- not to say that I've lost it now-- but somewhere along the way, things just didn't work out the way those words predicted I would be. Again I'm proud of what I did, not because those were the right things (morally or otherwise) to do at that time, but because I did them out of choice, instead of out of lack of choice.
About a year ago, it got me thinking: this whole thing about being mature. I think maturity is the ability to act on personal convictions-- conscious decisions made out of choice. It requires guts, and it entails calculation. Bad decisions are mature decisions insofar as they are based on reasonable calculation of the pros and cons.
Here's the thing: we, as people, complicate things for our own good. That's supposedly because we have brains. Stripped to our bare essentials, we only need one, food, two roof on top of our heads and of course three, we need to procreate. But our brains complicate things for ourselves. We invented junk food and energy drinks. We created fun. We made porn and other paraphernalia for aberrant private behaviour. We just can't help ourselves. We separate ourselves from beasts with our supposed sophistication. We build standards and expectations which we strive to surpass rather relentlessly-- in an almost masochistic way-- every day. To a certain extent we let ourselves to be pegged by these standards, which is fine because everyone is thrown in the same basket in one way or another, but I think there ought to be a time where we use our brains (the bane of our existence) to reason these standards out.
Whenever we are unhappy about something, as we fail to meet the standard (self-imposed or set by hapless circumstances), we should use our brains to see whether that standard bears enough reasons to warrant the unhappiness. In other words, does the torture of the means justify the joy of the end? If no, then do something about it. We gotta. And this is what I feel being mature is all about. Calculate the pros and cons, and muster (or fake, which comes first I suppose) enough guts to act on the outcome.
On the night of my birthday I again did the same. I just suddenly felt that life could be alright even if I didn't dance anymore. I mean, when you were up at 9am on Monday with a sandwich on one hand, and a cup of coffee on the other, thinking that the day would be a bright day despite the constant downpour, and suddenly you walked in on your classmates flipping their 4000-word research papers which-- by the way-- were due there and then, and you realised that you had totally forgotten about it, that you were worse that word zero, that you were literally at word negative zero because you hadn't even done your research, and that you had just spent ten good hours on Sunday dancing-- child, you've got a problem. Well, I had a problem, and it really went beyond the whole "guys don't multi-task" cliche.
It felt that life could be okay, even when there was no dance, and even there wasn't that one thing that supposedly defined who you were, because you could live life legitimately even without having a tag clipped on your shirt.
