The Backup Plan

My mobile phone died right before Christmas and I had to quickly replace it. After I got my new phone, I was trying to import my existing contacts to the new phone. However, as usual, with a wrong click of the mouse due to my misunderstanding of what I should be doing, I accidentally wiped all my contacts out. So I ended up with a new phone with no contacts, which defeated the purpose of getting a new one quickly to stay in contact. I managed to recover some older contacts from my computer but then my phone book is never the same.

When I told my friend about this, she asked me “Did you not back up your data?”.  When I thought about it, yeah I did, but only to some point. Life had become so busy that “backing up” is no longer on my priority list. When I was a student, I usually back up my essential files very frequently. But as life takes over, a lot of things, including backing up have fell through the cracks and being forgotten.

Backup, an interesting but often forgotten concept has been on my mind quite frequently lately. With the recent and sudden passing of my grandmother, I kept thinking what happens with me when my time ends? There is no backup option in life. We cannot put away a chunk of our lives and when the time comes retrieve it and live it all over again. Life is like a bird without legs. It just keeps on flying away with time and when it lands it is the end of it. We always said we only live once but as you grow older, time seems to run out a lot more quickly than we wanted to.  I remember when I was a kid I dreaded the time it took to get to the summer holidays and the Christmas breaks. But now, workweeks flew past and so does my life.

Most of us have plans for our lives but sometimes I do wonder how many of our life plans do become reality and worked out in a way we wanted. In one of my previous blogs, I discussed about expectations and options. We could be as flexible as we wanted to, but the one cold hard fact is that there is no back up for life itself. I tried to live my life carefully and responsibly but sometimes I do wonder whether I was too careful and responsible that I missed out other opportunities that were presented to me. I took leaps of faith from time to time but then I could not go back to a certain point in my life to live through it again when things did not work out in a way I want. All I could do is to soldier on and think of other options. The so-called “Back up plans” or “Plan Bs” are in fact just options to resolve current situations.

Sometimes with the advance of technology I did think whether one day we would be able to “back up” a number of years in our lives so when things did not work out we could go back and relive those years and make different choices. Some people might think this would make life less meaningful as what makes life so special itself is because of the fact that we only live once. But for me I would love to have a second chance in life as a back up just to find out how it would go if I made a different choice. Being able to do so in my opinion would make life more interesting. Further, since it is a back up, we would always have a choice to whether we want to use it or not. So for those who would prefer to live life only once, they still have a choice not to use it and live a meaningful life as they see fit.

Obviously this is not going to happen at the moment and I would need to continue to soldier on with what I have today based on the choices I made in the past. The fact that life has no back up plan did make me to make more careful choices, but this does not remove the fact that I would be very interested to know what would happen if I did make different choices at particular points of my life. Maybe I am getting a bit too sentimental because of recent events around me or maybe I am really growing older than I would like to think of myself, but at the end of the day life goes on and I will still need to be responsible for my choices because I do understand that there are no back ups in life.

The Farplane

9 January 2013 is a weird day. This is the day I received the first printed copy of my new novel from Amazon.com, and it is the same day the news of my grandma’s passing was broken to me.

Grandma has been sick the last few days. According to mum she was still very healthy last week. Then she caught a cold on Friday and suddenly it just spiralled over the weekend into an acute case of pneumonia. From falling sick to her passing, it was just merely 5 days. This is how fragile life is. She was a very strong will woman who would try to get herself out of tight corners no matter what. She had been through the wars, experienced the losses in the Cultural Revolution, and survived several major surgeries and recovered in her elderly years. She had a fall a few months ago again but after physiotherapy she managed to walk again, though not as good as she used to be but at least she managed to get back on her feet. Even during the last moments, mum told me that she was hoping to hold on to see everyone before she went. Her heart beat stopped and then rebooted for a little while again without any help, but she eventually did not manage to get herself out of this tight grip of life this time.

It is really weird. Someone you know just pass away like that. All of a sudden traces of her disappeared permanently in this world. We all know it is a matter of time in the last day or two but it was still hard to swallow the fact that someone whom I knew all my life is now no longer here. I had been to other people’s funeral but attending one for your immediate family would surely be an uneasy task. At the moment I am still dealing with the whole matter hundreds of miles away, but I do not know how I could deal with it up close and personal when I hit home.

Granny was a very sociable and out-going person. Despite dementia started hitting her the last few years, she still tried to get the most out of it. She might be hard to deal with sometimes, but then it was the dementia that actually was affecting her. Sometimes she had no control over what is happening and she felt frustrated she lost those basic controls in her life. Despite me living overseas in the last 10 years or so, every year when I went back to see her, I treasured my time with her as after all she was still a role model of how strong wills and determination can help you live a life you wanted.  Taking care of her in the last few years was not easy and sometimes was quite a challenge. But looking back at this I am glad that I had the opportunity to be with her and spent time with her. For at the end of the day, it is the time you spent with the living that matters.

I was hoping to show her my first published book to her in my next trip but now that is not possible anymore. It was just so much more disappointing that when this goal was within reach and it slipped away like that.

I am sure a lot of family members and family friends will moan the lost of a vibrant and determined woman in the house. My friends always talked about how impressed they were with granny every time they saw her. Granny loved company and I am sure at her funeral all the family and friends will be there to walk the last mile with her.

It sounds cliché but I do believe the impressions she made on other people while she was around will stay on. Nobody wants to see someone’s passing but at the same time we all know that death is something none of us could escape. I wish I could carry on with my granny’s strong will and determination in life as my ultimate tribute to her so she would be proud of me somewhere in the universe when I met my time one day.

This is my tribute to my granny and now I dedicate my book to one of the strongest woman I have met in my life.

I dedicate this book to my beloved granny.

May the Lord be with you

Capricious Perks of Being a Wallflower

One of the best things about the Christmas break is that I can take time to catch up with my outstanding movie catalogue. There was one movie called “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” that I had been planning to see since I saw the trailer. Luckily it was still in the theatre before the main avalanche of Christmas blockbusters rolled out so I managed to catch it before it dropped off the screens.

Classifying “Perks” as a coming of age movie is a huge oversimplification, for it deals with some quite serious stuff here. The movie dealt with how a teenager tried to fit into the high school culture, but behind the simple façade of this was something more deep rooted and haunting. I personally did feel for the main character as he was being set aside because of medical reasons. How could you get back to your normal life when you were practically living in a hospital for a year and completely disconnected from the people whom you used to know.  I did know someone with chronic illness back in high school but I never felt as strongly as I did now when I watched the movie. Maybe I was too young to understand. I did feel bad for them but I don’t think I did feel for them, which is something quite different.

High school days are scary for most people as this is a time where everyone tries to establish himself. This is a time when we are like curious cats trying to find out everything around us without considering the dangers involved. Some would establish themselves by treading over other people’s corpses, while others might try to live a simple life by staying out of other people’s way. As for me I picked a role I liked and stuck with it. I decided I didn’t want to be considered as belonging to any “groups” so I treaded along the middle line as much as possible. The good thing is then you dodge a lot of bullying bullets because every group knew that any group could come to your help. Not that I would need it as I was quite a feisty piece of work myself at that time with all the raging hormones inside me. Of course taking up that kind of role would mean that you might not get anywhere in terms of status in school but that was the last thing on my mind. I just wanted to be someone I was happy with and I couldn’t care less about what other people thought of me, which is still kind of whom I am nowadays.

In my very teenage worldview at that time, high school was a bigger playground that provided me all the space and facilities I needed to explore who I want to be. The price was comparatively small when things did not work out so it would be silly not to take full advantage of it.  I did have a blast at that time and a lot of things that I learnt and liked still form a solid part of my life now – and that include acting, playing music, being creative and thinking critically. Some people might not agree with me but I firmly believe these aspects of me have made me a more complete person.

In “Perks” the main character had a vision to become a writer to recount his story during this time of his life and eventually he did, although the journey was not a particularly easy one. As for his two best friends, they had their own problems, and they went through a similar ritual but through some different pathways. They might look strong on the outside but they were as battled as the main character in the inside. How did you balance what you want with what you can do? The whole ability side of thing was so abstract at that age that one bound to be disappointed at some point – and to handle those disappointments are quite some lessons to learn. I had my fair share of disappointment during my high school years too, some of which at that time I thought I wouldn’t have survived but then I lived on.

Maybe it is a bit too “tooth achy” when it comes to coming of age especially when we look back at them after we grew up. This is because it felt like that you were the only person feeling a constant pain that nobody else could feel and understand. But the question I kept asking myself is that does this mean this is of any lesser importance? Watching the story of the three main characters in “Perks” unfolding before my eyes reminded me that those were some real issues no matter from what angle you look at them. The most obvious question for me is if we failed to find our place in the world as we grow up, what would we become? That stormy patch in the sea might look like a small tide in the future, but we ought to surf through that to be able to look back.

I have never thought a “coming of age” film such as “The Perks of Being a Wallflower” would have such an impact on me but here I am babbling on about my toothache teenage years.