突然獨身

It’s been more than a week since I have moved out from my family home. I have barely done what I have expected myself to do when deciding to spend quite large an amount of money to rent a place and live by myself. Yet, what I have got in return of the money spent is quite something that I have not really expected either. Any of those people who are living by themselves should have already known what I have got in return. It is the freedom and responsibility of taking care of your life down to the tiniest bit of things.

It is quite something that I have never expected even though I have been thinking of living by myself ever since I have entered into adulthood. Living by myself at a relatively young age gives me the advantage of rethinking my relationship with my family while having the opportunities to undo the wrongs I have done to them.

The day I moved away from the tiny apartment I had called home for the last twenty something years, I got back home after working overnight and packed stuffs with a brain barely functional. After about five minutes I had left home with the luggage, I got a call from my mother. She anxiously asked whether I had arrived at the train station and told me I had left a bag of things home. She told me to stay where I was and wait for her. I did what I was told standing and waiting at the top of the stairs at a shopping arcade between my home and the train station. I saw my mother running all the way from the building where I lived and up the stairs. When she was half way up, I told her to wait for me to come down but she insisted that I should stay where I was because I was about to leave a baggage to walk down the stairs. Frankly, it was the kind of support that I thought I had never got from mother. How stupid I was! It was then I realized I had been hoping too much of my family, and asking too little of myself. It was the kind of appreciation I had been lacking not just in the way in which I see my family, but pretty much everything else. It’s no wonder why I have been so cynical.

When a cynic sees the world, he sees one that is full of bitterness because he himself is so immensely and unnecessarily bitter.

I am not saying the world is turning into a wonderland once one has learnt to appreciate. It is pretty much because we are living in a world imperfect. Learning to appreciate is in fact recognition of defects of the world. No matter how we see the world, it is still the same world. Bad things are still inevitable. Misunderstandings or even hatred between individuals remain, maybe forever. I hope not.

The change is not with the outer world, at least not instantly. It is with the inner world. When the change to the inner world happens, it is hoped that the way we deal with the world changes, and changes the world.

Suggested listening:
〈流星月台〉﹣藍奕邦
〈時候尚早〉﹣藍奕邦