sea and thoughts

1st march 2014:

"i love this particular stretch of sea. I spent two days staring into these waves and sitting amidst rocks thinking about work and swatting away flies.

for some reason, at this point, i feel my life increasingly swell with purpose and a strange sense of determination to make things work. i'm beginning to see where i should be, although i'm not exactly sure how to get there as of yet. but nonetheless i feel buoyed by a quiet belief in myself... a part of me stoic-ly wants to push through, always have. i see in myself now the same person at 10, unable to fathom how i would look, behave, and feel at 20 - that person felt so far away, so unknown, and so impossible to reach. looking onward to my life in the next decade, i similarly cant grasp who i'll be and what i'll be like no matter the hopes and dreams i have for myself now.

but really...all i need is this quiet sense of purpose. a little faith perhaps. and knowledge that love will always be there waiting behind me; well, i hope i never forget this feeling."

i was writing this the other day, and was reminded of what i said in my uni admission letter - they had us write a letter about why i wanted to go to NUS and why i wanted to do law. to be honest i wrote that i didn't know if i wanted to be there - and thats true even now for many things. that i could never know for sure what i wanted to do, and therefore couldnt articulate with complete confidence about such things. i could only speculate based on small signs that pointed me towards possibilities, and then take a little leap of faith and just go for it. that most things i've done in my life and grown to love, i had stumbled upon by complete chance and then never looked back. we always connect the dots backwards, and the future always seems murky (unless you're a really good fortune teller and you have alot of belief in your skill lol), and its pointless to spend too long speculating.

i'm graduating in a semester from law school. i'm not sure what i accomplished in the last four years, nothing much really, especially on the academic front and the learning about the law front, embarrassingly so. i did love these 4 years though. it might sound abit self righteous to say this out here (and to myself), but this was the most meaningful four years of my life where i really grew. i really hope i unravel all (if not most of) the questions i have for the world by the time i die.

i'm entirely clueless as to where i shall be going from here. zilch. just like me at 10, really no clue as to how i'd look post puberty (yes i thought alot about that for some reason - in fact i probably know the reason and i think the word for it is vanity), what my personality would be like, what my interests would be like, where i'd be, list goes on. what will i work as? for now i'll probably start out at a law firm like everyone else but is this where i'll be at 30 - or forever? i have so many interests, so many skills both tangible and intangible i want to develop, so many companies i want to work at, and types of people i want to accomplish great work with. also, will i be a mother by then? will i ever succeed at influencing people to make this world a better place? will i still be curious? lazy? mischievous? will the world as i know it now, and my life as privileged as it is now, remain this way, get worse, or better? will i stay in singapore? i'd love to get to leave this country one day, maybe just for a few years, maybe forever! don't get me wrong, i love this country, i really do, and i'll always want to come back. for now i know that if i ever leave, its because i want to give this short life a chance at experiencing some place that based on aforesaid speculation skills, point me towards the possibility that i could love these places just as much as i love this lovely city i now call home.

i'm definitely slightly afraid. and i unabashedly say this because i've been lazy these four years in university - so there's definitely a lot of catching up to do on my knowledge of legal things and the like, and also because various (raises possibility!) divination methods (i also unabashedly say this) speculate that these will be the toughest 10 years for me. fuck! i'll probably live through it i guess. like i said, we just need a quiet sense of purpose, a little faith and knowledge that love is always waiting behind us.

hopefully i'll come back here at 30, and find that i've stumbled upon more things to love, and managed to do all of the above. or that at least i'm still trying to stay on that path.