Greatest Celebration (II)

2020 might be remembered as the year where festivities and celebrations are cancelled. But perhaps it will also be remembered as the year we learn to participate in the greatest celebration on earth; one thing that is worth celebrating every single day. It's none other than gratitude. 

Right as promised, I will talk about the greatest celebration that we learn to participate in this year. None other than gratitude itself. So yes as we all know by now, 2020 has been a weird year where we cannot hold the usual festivities and celebrations that we usually commemorate every year. For example for me, we didn't go for Qing Ming, and Vesak wasn't celebrated at the temple. And the most recent ones, Lebaran feels relatively weird and empty. Usually we could feel the spirit.

However, even though we have to go through these cancellations, I think we also learn to participate in another kind of celebration that we do everyday. Gratitude. We learn to count our blessings, what we have, who we are with and who stay with us and so on. When the going gets tough we learn to toughen up and find ways to get through this. When we see people facing hardships we also see people rising up the help one another. From news, social media and so on. It reminds me how blessed we all are.

We see the doctors, nurses and medical professionals working in the frontline curing people. We see the essential workers working tirelessly to keep things going. We see people supporting each other. And we see people adhering to rules by practising social distancing. As we go through isolation, we begin to notice the people and things around us. What we actually have, the selfless people working together, angels and heroes not many notice, but are actually surrounding us. They are everywhere.

And I think when we truly realise and notice what we truly have, we being to live a life filled with more gratitude. We become more thankful that this life as we know it is actually abundant. Abundant of resources, abundant of wonderful people. We see through the power of humanity. We see what we can truly do as a human being, and collectively as a human race. We seem to open our eyes.

And anyway, I kinda think that the root of every celebration is none other than gratitude itself too.

When we celebrate birthdays, we don't just celebrate the day we are born. But the fact that we have lived through another year. And without realising we're inching closer to our death. The same goes when we celebrate the passing of the clock at 12:00 every near year's eve. Thanksgiving is pretty obvious, we give thanks to whatever we went through in the year. Chinese New Year signifies the arrival of spring, another new year, new cycle. Where farmers go to work again after a harsh winter.

Ramadhan taught us the spirit of giving, to share and experience what the less fortunate goes through. Deepavali celebrates the victory of good versus evil. Every celebration is rooted in gratitude if you think about it. So perhaps 2020 is bringing us back to the root of these celebrations, by reminding us to celebrate gratitude every day. Probably the only thing worth celebrating every day.

And of course, I surely hope we can continue with this even after this whole pandemic is over!

Stay safe and take care as usual :)

Being Enough

Having enough and being enough are two different things. Though they may differ completely, being enough is pretty hard to define isn't it. How do we enough being define, when it is already difficult for us to define "being me" haha. Well for me being is just another branch that reaches out from "have". It's about how we feel ourselves as a person, and eventually what defines whether we have enough. 

Have you ever felt good enough? When you look into the mirror and see yourself, are you happy and proud of who you are? Have you ever felt that what you are doing in this world is good enough? Your career, its progression, where you are right now etc. And similarly to the previous post, this world seems to always make us feel that we can never be enough. Always chasing for something better.

Which is nothing wrong, I think growth is essential in life. Without growth, without movement, we're all stuck in a place that we can never get out of, unless we decided to hustle forward, or... Slowdown backward. The problem is however, when the world seems to push us too much and too fast out of our comfort zone. When we feel good enough about ourselves, the world will always try to find ways to make us feel like we're not good enough. And so on. That's my observation.

There are times where I feel that we're chasing for the wrong things in life. Or that the world has designed a path that it is asking us to follow, to chase for these wrong things. Some of us have seen through this and decided not to follow the path and walk on our own designed paths. But the world will somehow make us feel uncomfortable, and eventually we leave our own paths.

People who walk on their own are deemed insane.

Or is the the other way round? That the insane ones are actually the sane ones instead.

I'm still struggling to define the word "enough" in my life. Sometimes I feel like I don't want to be great. I just want to be enough. Enough of everything. Financially enough, happy enough, satisfied enough and so on. But now that I'm still struggling to define that word, I'll continue this journey to give it a meaning. 

Never Enough

Right this is a continuation of my previous post, about how at times I feel that we live in a world that is designed to make us feel that we can never have enough, and never be enough. 

It's quite a terrifying thought sometimes, how I met quite a lot of people who seem to never have enough. Even though in my opinion, they already have enough. I thought to myself, are they just craving for more, or are they just oblivious to what they already have? And how as I move along with life, this is no strange thing to me. It felt very common. Which makes me question myself if this world makes us feel like we can never have enough. And it's a terrifying question to ask, to be honest.

We seem to always want more. We want a better house, a better car, a better phone and so on. Seems like when we're happy with what we have, the world urges us to get something better. Well of course this doesn't apply to everyone. Especially me. Cause I've been practising minimalism. I do not want to get new things unless I really need them (ie they are broken, lost and so on).

My dad once told me that people are becoming more and more reliant with money. Which is why I really agree with the Chinese saying of "Money isn't everything, but without money we can't do a lot of things". And being in the working world for 5 years, meeting people and so on, that statement has become more evident. People seem to... Never have enough. And they seem to want more.

Which then leads me to the question why? Why do we do things even though we know we can't do it, or will make our lives more difficult. Why do we get/want things even though we know we can't afford it? Is it greed? Is it just a irrational thought that we have? I'd say it's ungratefulness. 

Ungratefulness for what we have, craving for more, suffering in the end, and the cycle continues.

Okay continued to part 2 about being never enough.