Thursday, April 26, 2007

pursuit of happiness

what is happiness? everyone around me seems to be pursuing happiness lately.... when is the last time you are happy? is it something that we can measure or feel? how does it feel like? is it given by someone? no one can really give me a definite answer.. i guess everyone of us has a different definition about happiness.. maybe to someone, having a lot of money is happiness.. to others, a successful career is happiness.. or maybe just having a good meal can be considered happiness.. why are we busy searching for happiness? how does it feel like? when will we find the answer to this question? is there an answer to this question, or the answer is there, but we never really take a good look at it..

maybe it can be associated with contentment... to be contented with whatever you have, to treasure the people, the things that you have... we only have 1 pair of hands and there is so much that we want to hold onto.. or is it about unconditional giving to other people, not expecting anything in return?

all the while, i am seeking the answer to this question and i dwell on it when i can't find the answer.. suddenly, i realise that i am going in the wrong direction.. the answer is just right in front of me.. just that i never take good notice or appreciate it.. listen to your heart closely.. it tells you when you are happy or sad.. manify your happiness and minimise your misery..

i guess it is the little things in life that made up the happiness, not the big things.. little things and actions in life that touch your heart... maybe we never realise how fortunate we are already, but always trying to seek more and more.. then we get lost along the way... instead, we feel more misersable.. maybe if we focus on making people happy, we will naturally feel happy as well..

maybe no matter how much people tell you, you will never know until you experience yourself.. until you make the first move to truly make someone happy...

Monday, April 23, 2007

a work-free weekend

i realize time flies faster when i am relaxing and doing things i enjoy. after two months of late nights and working during weekends, i finally decide to give myself a break this weekend to run some personal errands.

i woke up on a saturday morning with a call from xueying. she was attending violin lessons at a music school in my neighborhood and we arranged to have breakfast together. the hawker centre was bustling with people queuing up to buy breakfast. we chatted over breakfast about our recent lives and found out that she would be going to USA to visit her sister. we sat for a while to wait for the photo shop to open to take photos for her visa. as i was planning to go diving in malaysia, she was giving me some information of the place, since she had gone there diving before. she is an avid diver and she loves to see turtles underwater. her love for turtles could be seen by the number of turtle soft toys that she had and i was amazed when i saw the photo of her collection.

after bidding her goodbye, i went home to prepare for my next appointment. i arranged with my colleagues to visit another colleague of ours who just had an operation at kk hospital. we were glad to see that she was doing fine after the operation, with good appetite and watching animations.

after that, i made my way to lavender street to buy bus tickets for my diving trip. the ironic thing was that i realized i had no money for the tickets when i reached there! guessed i got ‘overheated’ by the hot weather to remember to withdraw some money. i went around searching for an atm machine before returning back to the bus terminal again.

the last errand to run for the day was to get myself a mp3 player. i met up with my sister at sim lim square where there were lots of electronic shops to shop around and compare prices. i didn’t have a good idea of what brands were available in the market now. i wanted to get a MP3 player with music storage and fm functions at a reasonable price. so we walked from shop to shop, looking at the brands and enquiring the prices. there were a lot of brands available but actually, I could only recognize 3 brands, samung, ipod and creative. after some enquiries, we realized that ipod didn’t have fm function, so it was down to 2 choices, creative or samung. creative zen model caught my attention since i knew that creative specialized in mp3 players. however, the price of the creative charger made me think twice as i felt that it was too expensive for a charger. then the sales person recommended the samsung mp3 player to me. it was sleek, with the functions i wanted and had a touch pad to maneuver the functions. so we went around comparing prices for the samsung mp3 player until we came to a shop. the sales person was friendly and willing to explain the functions of the mp3 player to us. after some negotiation, we agreed on the price, including the charger and made the purchase. finally, I got my mp3 player!

i spent the rest of the night exploring my new mp3 player and caught up with some reading. it was an exhausting but fruitful weekend for me, having to accomplish a few things. this summed up my saturday weekend...

recently, i realize that a day could pass by very fast, depending on what we are doing… a day becomes a month and a month becomes a year. we live a day by a day, making new discoveries and having new perspectives of things around us… our mindset change as we grow older and we begin to realize things that we never consider before... everyone has 24 hours a day and we have a choice of how to make use of the time. i guess i am learning to live my days fruitfully and appreciate the beauty of life… = )

have you started to appreciate as well?