Grouses
It’s sitting like that by the window in the dead of the night, wine-intoxicated, that allows me to come to terms with myself. And the strength and frailities within. It’s on a nights like that that truly makes me realise what it means to be truly alive, to be nothing but a mind that cherishes dreams and memories alike, that thinks and laments concurrently, that maddening stream of thoughts that occupies the concsiousness, that surges forth with a rapidity that is hard to capture.
In my half-dazed mode, I’m trying to watch a movie – “10 Items or Less”. It could be that I’m too drunk, or it could be that it is making very poignant observations about life. Either case, I am thinking lots about how chanced encounters with certain people sometimes jolt one into thinking about one’s life. And considering how random such fleeting encounters may be, isn’t it amazing how our lives are absolutely governed by exceedingly random events?
I used to think that ‘Burn After Reading’ was a mega-cast with a stupid plot, but more than any movie I’ve watched, it kept resurfacing as a constant reminder of how absolutely senseless lives can be sometimes. The amazing, amazing bizarreness of it all. It’s like watching the random documentary in IMAX yesterday. It wasn’t much but just looking at Van Gogh’s paintings and his debilitating zeal for capturing everything that he sees with his glorious palette moved me so much that I was on the verge of tears. I thought it was so silly but the tears just wouldn’t stop welling. I kept thinking, how would life be like if we live with a passion that consumes us? How would it be like to put all of yourself into ONE thing, one thing that makes you burn so hard for it?
Cross-country training with Zehnder was the nearest I ever came to a passion. Those were the days when I would have just one uncompromising goal. One goal to centre all of my life around. Although it was the same terrain over and over again, somehow, with the years, it seemed like it could be a perfectible art. With every single run, you knew exactly when to charge and when to take it slow. It’s like you know when to boost your opponent’s morale and when to break their strides. I still remember how it was like in the final Nationals, it was almost like a song. The whole run was like a song…
