My first chance to sleep before 3am in two weeks and I end up lying here for more than half an hour, unable to fall asleep. I let my mind wander, from close friends to others who are beautiful. And my mind drifts to how so many people from the Philippines have such a calm but strong love for God. And then I recall the time a friend said his mum had paid for his maid to pursue her dream of going to graduate school.And I remember a friend saying her maid was a med school graduate, but decided to work as a maid because it got her a higher pay. And I thought, it’s so sad to do a job just for the money…where is the pride? The pride in knowing you can do so much more for society? Life is so much more than money; it’s about self-fulfilment, feeling like you’re doing something significant for the community.
And I think about my future. I think of offices I’ve spent days in, and I suddenly feel such a fear, and a strong rejection towards the possibility of spending the good years of my life in a big office, where each person is merely a cog in the machine, spending their daily 9-5 doing work on a computer, answering calls, meeting people purely for money-making purposes.
I mean, for people who are comfortable with that, that’s great. And if it's a cause I am passionate for, that'd be good. But that aside, I can't see myself in a quiet, rigid profit-centred corporation, with a sterile atmosphere, neutered creative passions and an endless amount of work on the computer that amounts to dust. Impersonal targets, goals that do not serve the greater good of humanity, goals that I do not personally identify with and share.
I stare at my bedroom wall. Here I am, in college, and I decorated this room, and I love it. I love every picture and my constellation glow-in-the-darks and Teressa's artwork and my guitar and how it's all placed. Here I am, my Philosophy prof saying that my comments in class were probably among the most insightful, original and thought-provoking that any student made in class last semester. (This means a lot to me because I thought I would hate and suck at Philo. Not proud, just very grateful to be made to study it.) Here I am, free to express and create, feeling like I'm getting somewhere, limited only by myself.
I don't ever want my mind to be dulled. I don't want to be forced into a box at the workplace or in society. I want to expand, I want to be full and bursting at the seams with life, I want it to spill out into the world.
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Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
If you're not from Yale-NUS, you have no idea how many times I have heard this poem quoted over the past year HAHA. Thank you :) :)
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