looking back..

I came across this insightful and warmly meditative quotation during one of my bedtime readings last night:

I want to do the right thing, but often I don't know just what the right thing is. Every day I know I have come short of what I would like to have done. Yet as the years pass and I see the very world itself, with its oceans and mountains and plains, as something unfinished, a peculiar little satisfaction hunts out the corners of my heart.

As I look back on my second year, I am initially at loss to find the exact sentiments to describe what it meant to me and how much has it affected me.

In second year, your sense of wonderment or or naive enthusiasm have been somewhat lessen; you have grown hardy from your experiences, critical from your shortcomings, rigid from your daily routine and a little cynical from the things you encounter.

You find that you are less impressionable and slightly more jaded compared to your first year.

You would like to think that you have grown a bit wiser since your first year but you are constantly barraged with challenges that stretches the limits of your preseverance and patience that at times you felt like you have learnt nothing from your share of missed opportunities and recurring regrets in your first year.

But as you thought long and hard about it, you begin to realize that there were treassured moments in your second year.

The long nights you spent in the library completing the lab book or feverishly trying to finish reading a limited copy of a reference book and the tiring walk back home that you have to endure after that, the times when you are forced to improvise, keep your cool and learn new skills overnight during the Malaysian Night rehearsals, the deep talks you had either with your confidantes or newly found friends and openly sharing your fears and hopes over a tandoori chicken dinner.

When I think about it, the thing that stands out the most about my second year was how much networking I have done - how old friendships have been further substantiated and strengthened and how new ones are forged and maintained.

Several of the old relationships have moved on to a new level of understanding and respect whilst the new ones are striding cofidently ahead.

If there is one thing I would like to remember about my second year, it would the people I have met; the times I spent with them and the things I learnt from their interactions.

It is dissapointing to think that for some people, it is their inability to express and open up themselves to other people to be the thing that is holding them back in life.

I realized that one cannot be too fearful when one wishes to make first contact with others.

One should not think too much about not being able to say the right things or construct the proper sentences to verbalize those things because those kind of thoughts will always come to nag you no matter how good you think you are.

Indeed, I realized that you can make a mistake and the world does not come to an end. No more is this notion more beautifully captured than in the following quotation:

Sunsets and evening shadows find me regretful at tasks undone, but sleep and the dawn and the air of the morning touch me with refreshing hopes. Strange things blow in through my window on the wings of the night wind and I don't worry about my destiny.

When you put it that way, you can go about your live, take the necessary risks and tread the less-traveled path with the innate knowledge that everything will be put right again - Insya-Allah.