recently, i have been feeling living in a bit of a cloud and my past few years being a little bit of a blur. and when i look back, life hadn’t been that way when i was in school.

the truth of being in real life is, you’re on your own, and this time around, i’m specifically talking about giving yourself a direction and the drive to move on and move up.

the luxury of being in school is, you’re in a well-defined cycle. there are things you should learn and know by a certain time, to make sure you do that, you’re given assignments and tests, if you screw them, you go back and re-learn and re-do, if you still screw them, you repeat. the entire education system is designed to show progress, courses in college are organized along the number of 101, 102, 201 and 400+, and calculating the credits you need to complete before you can graduate is as clear and straight-forward as collecting coupon stamps [if you cannot calculate your own credits, you probably shouldn't be in college].

the thing is, you know what you need to do. a senior does something that a sophomore doesn’t. a freshman takes courses that a junior would have already taken. freshman looks for fun, sophomore looks for experience, junior looks for interns and senior looks for jobs.

the luxury of being a student is, your cycle is short, but decent, and ample. you have one full year to do thing you are asked, want and need to do. you can time yourself. you can pace yourself. knowing that the date and the expectation are both set.

real life, for me, is quite different.

real life, is a one big messy cycle. it’s not clearly-defined, and basically you try make the best out of it, according to your very own liking. you do something, you don’t do something, fine. you fire your boss, your boss fires you, fine. you take this opportunity, you don’t take this opportunity, fine. there’s no test to make sure you’re on the right track, nor is there anyone telling you if you’re doing the right thing. it’s all open and up for your interpretation and determination. no one gives a flying fuck.

while some takes a painfully short amount of time to get their shot at the top, some never does, and most people lie somewhere in between, struggling with there day-to-day, questioning and self-doubting, drowning a little bit, soaring for another little bit, and then shut themselves up and get on with living and working.

the angel and demon of real life is, there’s no template and no framework. life is yours and how far you want to go for it and with it is entirely up to you. there’s no first honor in real life nor is there summer vacation. you don’t get to intern and you can’t defer and “i’m taking an year off to ‘find myself’”. real life is about looking yourself in the mirror and giving yourself the motivation and drive, to give yourself the reason of being, walk out to the battlefield and, well, do battle.

real life’s cycles are either too long or too short. living a life is a mammoth task because who can visualize 60 [or whatever number] years of time? but then, a day is such trivial because how much can you do in 24 hours? it took shakespeare three years to write romeo and juliet, it took 4 or 15 years for james cameron to make avatar depending on how you want to count it, 276 years to build the great wall of china, it took 1969 years to land people on the moon, and it will probably take more than a life time for someone to say i love you.

the thing is, we need to design our own cycles with the right timings. too long and too short won’t get you anywhere. how to break down your life into workable modules, and how to string fragmented days together into workable modules. to keep yourself excited and motivated throughout and make sure each module links to your bigger and ultimate goal, which defining that in itself is enough of a headache.

hate to break it to you, but in school, that’s all pretty much done for you.

i suspect that’s why they say it’s good to be in school.

it was just that. nothing spectacular, nor grandeur, nor dramatic. because in the end, whatever happened didn’t matter as much as who it happened with.

in a world where “love” is over-rated and “relationship” is commoditized, we are just as lonely as we are “social.”

i used to think that people come and go, and i still believe that there is truth in it. i also used to frown at the saying “i can’t live without you,” and i still do.

but both are insufficient and incomplete as a sentence because the context is not there.

for me, people only come and go if you don’t make an effort – only people that i do not care about come and go, for all others, their staying is not up for contestation.

next up is that the truth is, we all live on, with or without someone. but then it is possible that life changes drastically with someone’s absence, and it’s somewhere you wish not to go to. it is where your bottomline is drawn and below which, your life is no longer yours, from which you cannot claim you are living.

the point i am trying to make is you need to find the person or the people that defines you. quite the contrary from saying that your life is subject to others’ presence and at their mercy, it is up to you to make your life full by inviting the right people into it.

because while relationships do not make your life better, nor do they make it worse, they make it more complete. despite giving context and purpose, reason and direction, despite being inspiring and not despising, critiqing but never doubting, supporting but never indulging, they give you the power to see colors brighter, to reverse the negativity in this world, and the ability to win over the tide of time and freeze the shining moments of your relationship.

relationships give you the chance to be more than just yourself, to open up and be vulnerable, to be part of something and someone that doesn’t belong to you, and to be important.

so… who’s there?

because my job is all about making it work, on time, on budget, on brand, on brief, while keeping everyone sane. but then, isn’t that the story of life too?

i grew up with the training that whenever you wanted whatever, you go get it yourself, that you go figure. nothing was given and granted. so much so that it almost felt like an insult to be given/gifted something, and an even more of a show of weakness to accept it.

because in reality, nothing is ever given. you might be given the opportunity or the potential, but seizing it and utilizing it is up to you.

the truth is life is not a cruise ship trip, where everything you need is, well, there, and that whatever that’s not there could not be had. no one is really born to serve you and help you make the most out of your 80 or so years around. if we had to keep the travel analogy, life would be more akin to backpacking, you have what you have and what you have is limited, but you make use of it to add things and ingredients along the way, and ultimately piecing together your unforgettable memory.

but most of the time, life is more like being a gladiator. it’s really about having a clear goal and then working your way towards it, finding the right people, the right tool, the right way, to get there.

it’s tough, tiring, and stressful work. but no one said life is easy.

the alternative to fighting is surrendering, the alternative to being a gladiator is being on a cruise ship. the choice of having the glory of a gladiator or the ease and peace of being a faceless one-of-them, is entirely up to us.

we just need to, well, make it work.

i prefer books to e-books, brochures to e-brochures, bills to e-bills [not that i prefer bills at all]. i prefer mails to e-mails, cards to e-cards. i prefer buddies to e-buddies.

i had the fortune and luxury of sitting at a cafe and reading a book this very afternoon, and it’s not until then i realize that it has been a while i had an actual book in my hand. not an iphone, not an ipad, not a kindle, but a book, and the weight of each and every of the 239 pages in it.

of course there’s the reason that having an actual book in hand lets me know exactly how much more there is to go till the end of it, and how far i’ve gone. there’s a sense of progress in the page-flipping instead of being lost in the constant scrolling.

but there is something more to it. there is something the non-e-s have over the e-s. and that is a sense of time embedded in the material, as if it’s time materialized, and you can hold it in your hands.

when we think of e, we think of speed, and the convenience it brings us. especially this day when things happen at lightning speed and no one ever has time for anything, e is good. compared to writing a letter, which for a writer like me, takes about an hour, i finish typing the same content in less than 15 and off it goes with a click on the “send” button and voila, that is done and “next.”

with e, we spend fraction of the time doing the same thing, and having more time to squeeze in other things. we are more productive. we can manage more things. we can talk to five people at the same time. we can write a hundred e-mails out a day. we can carry fifty five e-books on your mobile device and you can read them anytime you want to. with e, we give in less, but we do more.

we put in less “time”, but we do more “stuff.”

of course an e-mail does the job as a mail does, or does it?  it conveys the same content, but not the same context. it conveys the text, but not the emotions. when you receive a letter, you know someone took the time, sat on a chair behind a desk, held on to a pen, and wrote it. it’s not machine-speak, it’s humane. it’s not cold, because there was someone hand doing it, someone cared enough to hand do it, and that is the human element in it.

and in a world where time is a priced commodity, having someone’s time is having someone’s care.

this is much the same why “handmade” sells at a premium. or why “organic” is supposedly to be good for you. because someone took the time and cared for it. that it wasn’t one of the many-s off an assembly line. that it has more of a story and flesh to it. and we know that care is rare.

i will break into tears if my doctor actually looked me in the eye and spent more than 5 minutes for my consultation, or if my waiter spent the time to provide proper service instead of busing through his tables and pushing diners away so a new crop can come in. by the same token, it always gives me a sense of joy when i see mails addressed to me, when i meet up a friend and hear the clinging of wine glasses, or simply when i browse between aisles in the bookstore.

e is not evil, but call me old-fashioned, i think what it does is that it merely provides new avenues of us to live our lives, but does not assume the right to abolish the traditional ways of things, nor should we let them to.

call me old-fashioned, i care, and no, not e-care. care.

but there’s a different kind of family. one that is everything but “family” – one that you aren’t born with, one that you get to choose who should be in it, and one that for better or worse, you do not have to stick to for the rest of your life if you decide not to.

i am a big believer in we live the life through the choices we make, and i will only be responsible for my own choices, anything that is force-fed will be like stuffing broccoli or green peas down a baby’s throat – they’ll get puked out with 10 times the amount.

the problem i have with “family” is it’s like a rehearsed high school drama, everyone knows their lines and knows when they need to shut up and when they need to speak up. relationships are arbitrary and inconvenient. it requires effort because you have to be appropriate. the alternative to that is you get the glare and the glance, or the jeer and the jest, or all of the above, all of which you didn’t voluntarily sign up for.

the converse to that is you hand pick those you want to care and want to keep, much like granny picking her apples – she studies them, picks them up, squeezes them, puts them down, picks them up again, puts them in her bag, and open her wallet for them. there’s an understanding process, there’s an evaluation process, and when decision time comes, there’s a leap of faith with real investment involved. you are defined by how inappropriate you are and at some point some one says “it’s fine, i can take that. i can have a relationship with someone like this”, and thus you are accepted so. we are evaluated at the bottomline instead of the ceiling cap. when your most inappropriate self is seen, all of you’ve been seen and the rest goes from there, whatever that is floating on the surface and in our lives, as long as we are above the bottomline, the decision stands and the relationship remains.

in the end, “family” and family are just different ways i/we categorize people, and are just labels how i/we describe people coming into and staying in my life. the issue with “family” is it’s like copyright goods, you know you’re supposed to purchase the authentic ones but you always feel like there’s no point, that it’s “being righteous for the sake of it”, and you end up with the pirated version.

relationships can’t be acted out because no one goes about carrying a relationship like a drama, no one is comfortable when you have to remember what to say and what not to. no one is comfortable when you have to be close with someone when you don’t feel like it.

and if you can’t be comfortable with the people you’re around with, how can you be comfortable with life?

kudos for being grateful with what you have, points deducted for giving up what you can have.

the but-at-least expression is the bottomline mentality.

“my job sucks, but at least it pays.” is the same as “my job is bad, bottomline is it pays me.”
“my boyfriend is an ass, but at least he’s still with me.” is the same as “my boyfriend is an ass, bottomline is he’s still with me.”

bottomline is the point where the story changes. if your job doesn’t pay, it’s not a job anymore and you certainly won’t evaluate it with what you would with a job. if your boyfriend isn’t even with you, then it’s certainly not a boyfriend-girlfriend issue anymore. the story changes at the bottomline.

the beauty of bottomline is it outlines the least we can accept. i need my job to at least pay me. i need my boyfriend to at least be with me. it tells you the “below which you cannot accept”. it means a mere “pass.” it means “you’re just okay.”

that said, if you are okay with being at the bottomline, that you feel home there, then you’ll always be there. you’ll always be at the bottomline.

but most of us don’t want to be “just okay.”

we want more. we want more than the bottomline. it is the life way beyond the bottomline that we aspire to and feel proud of. living at the bottomline is a shitty life, because you are using brain to convince yourself it’s an alright life when you don’t feel so. because you are the kid in grade school who only gets a “pass” on every subject when you know life is much more better for those who get more than a mere pass.

the bottomline for companies is to break-even, they actually want to make profit.
the bottomline for most of us is to earn a decent living, most of us don’t actually want to work.
the bottomline for employers with regards to employees is to be diligent, they actually want them to be smart too.
the bottomline for human beings is to survive with bread and water and air, we actually want to feast and travel.

survival is the bottomline for us human beings, but we want to do so much more than just survive. because what is the point of survival if there’s nothing more to it?

hong kong is a bottomline city. work sucks, but at least it pays. pollution sucks, but at least there is air. government sucks, but at least the city is stable (sort of). traffic sucks, but at least i can get to places. architecture sucks, but at least buildings don’t crumble. design sucks, but at least functions.

it’s a half-full-half-empty situation, bottomline mentality gets you to see half-full, and while a little optimism is healthy, at some point you will fail to see what you can actually do to a half-empty situation to make it full. if a glass is half-empty and half-full is not good enough for you, you get a water jar and fill it and make it full. done.

accepting half-full is compromising, being okay with bottomline is surrendering the right to make things better. it’s pathetic and painful to watch because every one of us are entitled to our shiny golden star sticker in life instead of  a mere pass.

we don’t have to survive. we can live.

it’s something that says why a communication piece is needed, what it should do, what message should be communicated and how it should be said.

in a way, it’s a decision. a decision why and how a communication piece should be. it tells the reason for being, and informs the blue-print of how to be. it’s also the measuring stick of the concerned communication piece, whether we said what we were supposed to say in the way we were supposed to say it to the audience we were supposed to speak to, whether it solved the business challenge it was supposed to solve.

there is a brief to everything, a television commercial, a print advertisement, a leaflet, a paragraph of text on a particular page of a website. the communication is strategic, because we want it to fulfill a purpose. because it’s purposeful, we communicate in a particular way, and that is because we know the “reason”, the “why” behind a particular challenge.

so, we decide on what and how we speak to our audience, because we know what we want to achieve. our brief is the documentation of all that.

take a leap with me.

what if i say, we decide on how we live our lives, because we know what we want to achieve, and our briefs is the documentation of all that?

the good thing about having a brief is it’s a decision, and decisions provide direction.

there is always a decided way to live a life. even if you make not having a purpose your sole purpose, that is still a very particular way. to not have a direction is to not have a decision, to not have a direction is to drift. drifting is easy, but it also won’t get you very far and most probably not where you wanted to be.

not having a direction, or too afraid to make a decision, is to not have a say in your life. it is saying “i don’t know” to life’s challenges. it is saying “i don’t care enough, do as you please.” it’s saying “i’m afraid, and i surrender.”

it is not losing the fight, it is giving up the thought and courage to fight. it’s worse.

we cannot always make the right decisions. more often than not, we make really bad ones. but life is not about scoring points by making the right move, it’s about making moves after moves, so you eventually get to where you want yourself to be. nor is life a popularity contest to please whomever, it is a personal quest and you only owe your life to yourself, to your decisions.

making bad decisions are obviously not good enough. but not making decisions and surrender is just bad. if your brief for life is to be a bad-ass, and eventually you become one, you are at least someone. the world and people’s lives changed because of you. if there is no brief, you drift, and you are no one, and your life will not mean anything to anyone. there is no significance. it is just a pathetic pass of time.

hence the key is not about what your brief says, but is on whether you have a brief at all.

and it’s okay to change your mind.

life is not a communication piece that has a shelf life of 3 weeks. it’s a 80-year long project, and we are the project owner. circumstances changes, and we evaluate and review, and we make decisions accordingly. we all said we’ll be firemen when we were a kiddo, very few of us actually become one, and we live on just fine.

we change our briefs as we know more. a 30-year-old investment banker deciding to quit job and travel the world is possibly changing the brief to be wealthy. a young executive deciding to switch professional fields is probably changing the brief for his career. an angry wife deciding to stab an unfaithful husband is changing the brief to be a loving partner. a young man finally settling for marriage and building a family is probably changing the brief to be carefree. right or wrong, they are making a decision, they are writing a new brief for themselves, for their lives. they are living instead of drifting.

having a brief for your life for yourself might not make you happier per se, but would certainly leave you more at peace.

and that is all we can ask for.

so what is your brief?

“huh?”

yeah, it’s not something much. it’s just the skill of saying “oh okay, it happened.” when things actually happen. it’s just that. it doesn’t really get you anywhere, it doesn’t solve problems, it doesn’t foretell the future, it doesn’t really do you any good. it’s almost embarrassing to mention, maybe.

or maybe not?

i can acknowledge success as much as i can acknowledge failure. i can acknowledge the possibility of luck and the good honesty of hardworking. i can acknowledge the shame of mistakes and the pride of brilliance. i can acknowledge the work of God’s hands and at the same time acknowledge the thought that He was never there. i can acknowledge dreams of a mind and the boundaries of a body. i can acknowledge the importance of being an individual and the vitality of being connected.

i can acknowledge to a lot of things, and say, “yes, it’s possible. yes. it happened. yes. it’s okay.”

no, it doesn’t get me anywhere, it doesn’t solve my problems, it’s not divine intelligence that helps you navigate the nonsense in the world. but it helps keeping me sane. to know that things do happen, with or without a reason, for or without a purpose, and knowing that these happenings are there, whether i like it or not, whether i’m part of it or not, whether i’m connected to it or not, and that’s okay. it helps me give everything a chance to be possible, to be relevant, to be true, and by doing that, it gives me the chance to explore the possibility, to examine the relevancy and to ponder the truth.

it helps me to acknowledge there’s this world, and then there’s me, and to acknowledge that i am a loose part but nonetheless a part of this world.

it gives me the courage to see things as they are, see people in the eye, look into both history and future with ease and peace. by acknowledging that things happen as they are, i can acknowledge myself being as i am, and we are equal. that i am no different from them, and they are not different from me, that we are all mere happenings, and we just, well, happen.

and maybe we are just happenings, which is how the way we exist at all, but we can make our happening relevant to others in our own way, but this relevancy lies in the acknowledgement from others.

so yes, maybe the skill of acknowledgement will not bring me a million bucks like other revelations would, but then again, what’s the good of living a life that is irrelevant? i will not be making anything out of this particular skill, but by being able to acknowledge, maybe in turn, i will be acknowledged and not pass my life like a ship out in the dark ocean.

and that’s all i, who is really a mere happening, can ask for.

and why shouldn’t it?
the world isn’t built for us and life do not evolve around us.
there will be people that we like and dislike, and some things will go better than others, there are things we wish to get and not have, and things we want away but stick with us.

life will not be perfect for us, because it comes as a full package and it comes with ups and downs.
life will not be perfect for us, but we can rise to each and every challenge, and thrive on those moments and shine.

so life’s most important lesson isn’t to avoid falling, but how to pick ourselves up after each of it.

with every fall, it is either because of us or others, and we can complain both ways. but to be able to go beyond complaining and be the first to recover and move on, is the difference between the weak and the strong. there is only one life and it is short, we can mourn and dwell and complain, find fault and point fingers all day, but at the end, life happens only once and time doesn’t rewind. to dissect the details and hand out responsibility of fault is fair, but to thrive on the fall and make yourself stronger is brave.

So to the ones that just fell, admit and accept it. Say aloud to yourself that you just fell, that you could have done better, that there were things you didn’t know, and tell yourself that’s okay. because you are still here. whatever that doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and because you are not dead, you are already stronger.

you will not know how many more times you will fall before you reach your own definition of success, but you can know how you will deal with them. people can and will challenge you. people can and will take things away from you, marks, awards, medals, bragging rights, the like. but what they cannot take away from you, is who you are. what they cannot take away from you is the respect and pride you have for yourselves.

life’s lessons often come in disguise as defeats, but you can always be proud of yourselves because only you yourself know how far you’ve come. it’s nobody’s business to define success and failure for you. shut them up. write and define your own life.

warriors do not look back to see what they have left behind and how far they are from home, but instead, they look forward and see what they can conquer.

be a warrior.

i like watching time pass by, as if it’s part of witnessing history, as if it’s a chronicle of me being alive, or maybe it’s just a blatant reminder of how “this life” is actually happening.

we are conscious about the passing of time: a briefing at 9am, lunch at noon, getting off work at 5:30pm, OT-ing, being early for an appointment, running late for a dinner date, the like. However, how many of us are actually conscious about the system of time?

the concept of “time” helps keep everything relevant. your birthday, your job, your family, your relationship with whoever and whatever, all, are marked by time. your job is made stable because of a 10-year contract, but made painful by a 2-month notice period. your birthday is significant because it marks the passing of every year, it’s a celebration of your existence, and that is marked by time. your family are precious because they are supposed to be the certainty in the uncertainty of a lifetime. your relationships are to be cherished, because good things are not meant to last so you ought to treasure those that do.

as we all strive to make sense out of the nonsense in this world, a system of time is our answer. because if the sense of time was taken away, life will just be like downing boze – we keep going till we can’t, which might be the next glass or the one after, we will never know and keep drinking to a point when we suddenly realize it’s the end of it and have no idea what we actually did.

so life’s happening doesn’t ambush us, we are here and doing our time here. time is our reference and helps us make relations with things. it puts everything into context. it is not the truth nor the antithesis of it, it is but a framework and in itself otherwise meaningless if nothing fits into it.

“don’t add years to your life, add life to your years.” – let’s stop being a spectator of time, but an interpreter of life.