(1) College
is the Best Time of your Life
As I stepped
into College, I always told my High School friends how our time was the best
time of my life. Looking back, it gives me that little satisfying moment of
chuckling about how oblivious I was of the world I was faced with. I always
thought sitting in that ancient arm chair, not doing anything with my
classmates, was the best way to spend my days. Somehow, doing nothing and just
letting things happen did sound appealing at one point in my life.
As I sit in this
quarter they call an “office” (having finished the things I needed to do, of
course) , It has never been clearer to me that college is the best time anybody
could ever have in their entire lifetime. How could I not feel invincible when
I had everything under my control? It was that time of my life that, in the
deepest sense of the phrase, I was the master of my destiny. Nothing was ever
forced into you while you were in College; not even the classes you seemingly
“had” to take. You were always left with a choice – to study or to flunk, to
shine or to disappear, to make each moment count or to live blindly in the
shadows.
It was that time
in my life that I surprised myself everyday with the slightest decision I chose
to make. I never thought I would end up to be a strong-willed child, packed with
my own beliefs and ideals on how the world should be. I never thought that
given the option to indulge in the limitless array of possibilities, I dealt
with freedom the way that made my parents proud. Sure, I fucked things up once
in a while, had my share of failed subjects, and partied hard until I passed
out – but hey, who does not go through that? I was a good kid but that does not
mean I wasted my youth living the “right” way every day.
I fell “in-love”
hard and felt the most painful heart ache I have ever experienced, I gave in to
temptations of cutting classes and failed, I worked hard in one of the best
school organizations and went on to be a respectable officer in my field. One
thing I am most certainly proud of about college was that I had my own
business, one that allowed me to create my ideas into tangible items that would
be part of other people’s lives. I
stumbled upon hundreds of failures - but that one moment you get to put a smile
on somebody else’s face will always be worth the sacrifices you made.
Work allows you
to earn money and have freedom just as well but where I am now, I have come to
know the difference of living young and free from that of living inside the
rules of a rather bigger entity. Having a job means you have to please your
bosses and be mindful of your actions – at all times. It means you have to
blend into the culture no matter how hard you have to bend. It means creating a
version of you that should be turned on as long as you get to be associated
with the corporation’s name. It is almost like you get to wear an invisible
uniform mixed with the complicatedness of being a unique individual while you
prove to everyone else that you belong. It is like being trapped in a fish
tank, mixed with different kinds of sea creatures – you are put in a spotlight
with nowhere to go.
As I have come
to know how it is like to be thrown into the so called “real life”, my mind has
been made up that college was in fact, the best time anybody can have in this
life. In a way, it felt like one huge experiment – a stage where I was held
responsible with every move that I made. I had a whole army of friends and
family but looking back now, I never depended on anybody to make my decisions
for me or to shield me from the consequences of my flawed judgments. I was the
only ruling party in my own universe, an individual capable of winning and
losing – but winning some more (for it is through failure we learn the best).
College was the
time of self-discovery, where we can all make mistakes and wander the halls
aimlessly as we try to find who we really are. It was an excuse to play around
this playground of a world. We lived a life where we all get judged less just
because of the ultimate leverage of being young. It was that time that we
formulated an idea of who we really are and who we want to be. You may not know
it now, but as you look deeper into your existence, you already know the answer
- you just have to accept and embrace your very existence.
(2)
You
can Never Choose who Stays or who Goes
It has always
been a choice whether to leave or stay in someone’s life. There is no one in
this world that has not experienced loss. By now, I am sure you have thought of
one or two people who left; may it be by choice or through an event bigger than
us – one that is totally out of our hands. At the higher part of my list of the
most painful events in my life would be losing someone special. I know that I
could be the hardest person to understand or even to be with; but at the end of
the day, those who make the effort to get to know me surely gets to have a
piece of me – my loyalty, my kindness, and my trust. Once I fall in real
friendship with somebody, I choose to never let go.
You can never
choose who stays or goes. You can have this really annoying suitor who would
choose to stay even if you try your best to shoo him off every day. You can
have this amazing lover who, at some point you thought you would marry – but
then you find yourself in that situation where he has made up his mind about
leaving you for good.
See,
we are all given the gift of freedom by some kind of higher being. It is the
thing – we may wish to select those people in our lives that get to leave or to
stay. Sadly, it never worked that way and I am so sure that it never will; not
now, not ever. We enjoy the freedom of choosing if we should stay or go in
somebody’s life - and that “freedom” is the same freedom that stops us from
controlling who stays or goes. Aside from the whole grey area of uncontrollable
events, just like you, everybody else exercises their right to decide when to
stay or go.
(3)
Dreams
are Overrated
I can’t
remember exactly when I started dreaming of something I wanted to be or wanted
to have. I’m pretty sure it comes innately with the mind the moment we develop
our consciousness. I am no expert in this field but based on my twenty years of
observation, we all have this image of us that we want to experience in the
near future. The oldest memory of a dream that I can recall was that I wanted
to be a big shot doctor – then later, when I started going to school, I wanted
to be a teacher just because I enjoyed drawing on the blackboard. I remember
dreaming of having a sticker album with a complete collection of all the Lisa
Frank stickers.
By now, I have
realized that as we grow older, our dreams become bigger. As our dreams get
bigger, they seem to get harder to grasp. As I have come to realize this, it
made me think – which one of these dreams in my twenty one years of existence
came true? Maybe there were a few – one here and there, scattered wildly in
between the timeline. One thing’s for sure – not one was significant enough to
be remembered or praised.
We all have
that one vision that we want ourselves to be part of a couple of years from now
– as we grow older, it transforms and adapts into the current predicaments that
we are faced with.
I have always
looked up to people who dream as hard as I could – who see their vision not as
tiny flashes of photos but as one bright and vivid movie. I always thought that
these dreams are the ones worth living – the ones that are meant to move from
the mind into the realm of reality. The sad truth about this is that they are
just dreams – visions in that brilliant universe in the mind. No matter how
beautiful it is, no matter how vivid and bright it can be narrated, it will
just be a dream – unless drawn out from the mind and brought into the physical
world. Until then, a dream will just be an over-rated attempt to seduce the
receiver – wordplay, imagination, mindfuck.
(4)
Time Heals the Wounds but Never Erases the Scars
(5)
Society does not Recognize Uniqueness
(6)
True Friends Love You More than You Think They
Do
(7)
Nobody Ever has the Right to Judge Anybody
(8)
Studying Hard hardly Gets you the Job
(9)
Love is Infatuation
(10)
Photos do not Always tell you the Truth
(11)
The Difference between Acting Mature and Being
Mature
(12)
Somebody will Always be Better than You
(13)
Things Happen for a Reason
(14)
There is No Shortcut to Mending a Broken Heart
(15)
Nobody Remembers who they were at 21
(16)
The Number of Years in a Relationship is Not an
Assurance that You will end up Together
(17)
Your Parents are your life’s greatest miracle
(18)
Never Revolve Your World Around Anybody
(19)
Trust is one of the Hardest Things to Do
(20)
Let Go of the People who Chose to Give Up on You
(21)
Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder
(22)
Every day is a Date with Destiny
(23)
Every Tear Drop Makes You Stronger
(24)
As You Grow Older, You Carry Heavier Baggage
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