Passions abide

I got woken up by my borborygmus today. Probably a series of borborygmi before I finally stirred awake at the grand timing of 8:10pm (previous meal was brunch at 11am). It’s a good Sunday to sleep in, and I’m not sure how I did that, but I managed to complete the work I planned to do. Still on schedule!

A huge feather appeared on my bed today, so I guess I am on track with what life is handing me. I abided by the time needed to get through the murkiness, and it really feels like a / the dark cloud has lifted. Ah well, the news. Well, I am back in the teaching arena again, this time in a formal institution. I was a little apprehensive at first, because I had a terrible time with the first academic institution I was enrolled in. Took years to understand this saying, “Before you diagnose yourself with depression or low self-esteem, first make sure that you are not, in fact, just surrounded by assholes.”

I am very thankful my parents believed in me. If you ever find it weird why I always blog about my family, it is because I am infinitely grateful that I get to be who I am and where I am today and it is all thanks to what they have provided, such that I get to stand on this platform to receive today. (Tiger) Mom never got to enjoy the luxury of receiving education, yet she was visionary enough to know its importance and pushed all of us in this direction. My family was not going through an easy time when I moved to Melbourne for my postgraduate studies. Yet Mom insisted that our home country was too small for me, and I would just get into a darker hole if I stayed put. She was so obviously right. So we fought through the tough times as a family, and before we know it, all of us just ended up spending time mostly overseas.

Bigger countries do open up to bigger hearts, even though there are also bigger social issues by and large. But bigger hearts do tackle these big issues from a bigger perspective, rather than to try to squeeze everyone into a small mould to make it easy, convenient, and efficient to manage. We humans are not merely statistics, we students were not just your KPIs, we citizens are not just your economic growth workerbees.

My first day at Melbourne Uni was unforgettably enlightening. I was going through my course planning with the Prof, and aired my concerns about a certain module because of my terrible experience in undergrad days. His reply was something along the lines of, “don’t worry, isn’t that the point of education? To learn and explore what you do not already know”. Yup, so I soared in my postgraduate studies with renewed enthusiasm, although in a slightly different field, and I explored and pushed the boundaries of what we could be doing, reframing many perspectives from which we saw things. That is definitely wayyyyyyyy more fun and closer to my heart than just sticking to the darn “correct” answers which I had to “abide by” when in the previous education system I was in.

Lifehack this period would be to constantly remind myself of the quote on low self-esteem and assholes, each time I near the brink of anxiety and nervousness from the architecture days (I’m teaching architecture now). Just have to keep reminding myself how far I have come since almost two decades in the real, practical developmental arena, and that there is absolutely nothing wrong in a real push of boundaries. And NOT merely paying lip service because it was trendy, funky, and atas (singlish for high social status) to say so.