Growing older and wiser has always been a fascinating, significant and important deal to me, and I mean that in the most positive sense.THAT'S WHAT IT'S ALL ABOUT
This deal is hardly as related to the common and naive "I can't wait to grow up!" comments that we hear ever so frequently from youngsters, who feel they deserve more freedom than what their parents have entitled them, as it is to the thrill of growing into the individuals each of us will eventually become, to finding out who that person is and what the future holds for all of us.
Corrinne May, a soulful Singaporean singer/songwriter, wrote and sang so beautifully, "Every year we're getting closer to who we're going to be".
HEY, I'M JUST A KID!
But it's ironic how the beginning of adulthood can make you feel like a child, simply because there's so much in the adult world that you have to inhale all of a sudden that the culture shock makes you feel like an ignorant noob. It sort of makes you appreciate the past and how fulfilling it felt to have had bountiful experiences under your belt as a matured teenager among youths younger than you.
My life in its 21-year entirety has continually been about making the right decisions, ensuring that the people around me are well-loved, and developing myself into the gentleman that my father is - a person who matters, a person who's accomplished and a person who's worth remembering.
Finding love, gaining new talents and nurturing old ones, and discovering every aspect of my innermost self as the deep introvert that I've become over the years, were all also huge parts of my journey, together with ensuring that happiness and satisfaction were close comrades (which is terribly arduous to achieve what with the mountainous expectations I tend to have of myself).
ONE LOVE, ONE LIFE TO LIVE...
It's not easy to have lived a life with no remorse, and even more difficult to say that you're happy with your life with all it's complicated and dramatic elements. Yet, in spite of the countless complex pieces that make up my current life and all the convulsions that my past include, I'm very blessed to still be able to say that I'm extremely pleased with how life has turned out. At the same time, I'm proud of the individual that I've become thus far.
"Not everyone can say that about their lives and themselves" said a close friend of mine, Joel Nicholas Chua, when I shared this with him seven years ago. These words made me deeply appreciative of the positive state that I was in.
Today, that degree of gratitude has not wavered or decreased. In fact, there's so much more to be thankful for than there was seven years ago. With a family that I've fallen in love with and come to appreciate so much more in recent years than I did before, companions from different chapters of my journey who inject so much colour and meaning to life and who make me feel like the luckiest person to have known the great individuals that they are, and the educational experiences, talents and achievements that humble me, it feels like my life now isn't too far from complete.
TWENTY-ONE, HERE I COME!
Twenty-one may make me feel like an ignorant, naive child. Twenty-one may dawn upon me the realisation that there's still so much more to learn about life. Twenty-one may very well even introduce into my life dark realities that I've never experienced before. But whatever twenty-one and the years after that have to offer, I'm going to live them as fruitfully as I did my teenage and childhood years combined.
Here's to the next twenty-one years!
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