Day 10,614

He who succeed, learns from others' experiences

and uses them to his own advantages.

He who fails contributes experiences to others

and don't learn fast enough.

Day 10,605

 Birthday present #01 from 军机大臣
K2 Moto 84 & Exo 8.1 Protection pads 

 Birthday present #02 from Bro
Calvin Klein be

 Birthday present #03 from 老佛爷
Ang Pow

Birthday present #04 from my dearest 琳琳公主

AX Watch, Passport holder, Birthday card & Lychee Strawberry Cheesecake

 Birthday present #05 from Vivi 兄
Alto saxophone ornament

 Birthday present #06 from Smiley
GV voucher & notebook

Birthday present #07 from KK
Restaurant gift voucher

Day 10,579

90% of the friction in life is caused by the wrong tone of voice,
especially in relationships.

- J. A. Holmes

Well, 95% for me...

Day 10,577 - Part II

In D's words:

"The war has already ended when she is planning a holiday behind your back."

* There is no relation in this post to the one below...

Day 10,577

When you feel like giving up, remember why you held on for so long in the first place.

Day 10,559

To quote a friend,

"Nothing worthwhile is ever easy, nothing easy is ever worthwhile"

~~~~~~

To achieve something you like, often you have to do something you don't like...

Someone who fails to plan, plans to fail.
And having no strategy is not a good strategy, so never just go with the flow...

Day 10,558

有知觉的偷只铅笔和
没有知觉的偷只手表，
哪个比较严重?

Day 10,542

Improving your life..

1. Don't compare your life to others'. You have no idea what their journey is all about.
2. Don't have negative thoughts of things you cannot control. Instead invest your energy in the positive present moment
3. Don't over do; keep your limits
4. Don't take yourself so seriously; no one else does
5. Don't waste your precious energy on gossip
6. Dream more while you are awake
7. Envy is a waste of time. You already have all you need..
8. Forget issues of the past. Don't remind your partner of his/her mistakes of the past. That will ruin your present happiness.
9. Life is too short to waste time hating anyone. Don't hate others.
10. Make peace with your past so it won't spoil the present
11. No one is in charge of your happiness except you
12. Realize that life is a school and you are here to learn. Problems are simply part of the curriculum that appear and fade away like algebra class but the lessons you learn will last a lifetime.
13. Smile and laugh more
14. You don't have to win every argument. Agree to disagree
15. Call your family often
16. Each day give something good to others
17. Forgive everyone for everything
18. Spend time with people over the age of 70 & under the age of 6
19. Try to make at least three people smile each day
20. What other people think of you is none of your business
21. Your job will not take care of you when you are sick. Your family and friends will. Stay in touch.

Day 10,520

Teacher's Day gift..

Day 10,512

aka L-Day 207, presents Barbara Kruger, a juxtaposition of imagery and text:

Barbara Kruger - Untitled (Your comfort is my silence), 1981.
Photograph, 142 x 101.5 cm. Daros Collection, Switzerland

Barbara Kruger - Untitled (Your Body is a Battleground), 1989

Day 10,503

Day 10,496

Recalled how we used to receive gifts in school during National Day?

Well, this is mine...

The surprise that wasn't really a surprise...

Day 10,486

Office joke of the day

Day 10,485

It had been a fast week...

Another colleague had just resign (or dismissed, depending on how you look at it) and will be flying back to his country tomorrow. I received a call from him earlier on and he expressed his gratitude to me over the phone. And it shocked me, cos I am not really close with him..

He had a criminal record back home and is deemed a "time bomb" by many colleagues. He never failed to hide his displeasures with his colleagues or superiors and had never say a kind word to anyone. Then it dawned on me that somehow or somewhere, I might have helped him before. Well, of course, during the 7mins of conversation, he did condemn his manager and erm. several others...

And so there I was, after the conversation, thinking over what he had said.
In today context of a fast-paced working environment, how many people really meant it when they said "Thank you" or "Sorry".. Was it a mere 'going through the motion' process to faciliate things? And how many people have taken others' kindness for weakness and have continue to exploit that?

Sad to say, I do know of people who are doing that and they do seems rather successful at first glance. Well, nevertheless, I do know that this colleague do meant what he had said...

Day 10, 463 - Part II

己所不欲，勿施于人

己所不欲，勿施于人，出自《论语》and is something which I have always advocate. Since 1998 when I started being an officer in the Boys' Brigade, I had always strived to follow the OCS's motto "To Lead, To Excel, To Overcome". It was not easy intitially and I didn't even adhere to it. However, these values never left me and in a way, they became part of the reasons why I left the service after serving 10 years as an active officer.

Recent incidents in work and personal life made me did some serious reflections, which brought me back to this issue...

3 years ago, a new overseas colleague joined my company. As I was then in the operations department, he was deemed under my charge and would seek my advices on much stuff. Knowing that he is alone in Singapore and is the type of person who feels lonely easily and needs constant attention, we begin to be close friends and went out occasionally during the weekends. However, as the company expanded and employed more employees, new rules and regulations were set to instill discipline and fairness and at the same time, I was posted to another department. In addition, my part-time degree course started and I had lesser time for friends.

Mr. Colleague is a good worker and over this period of time, he got into a slightly supervisory appointment and begin to leads a team of workers. However, when problem arises, Mr. Colleague would fail to lead by example and would exhibits undesired working attitudes. He would not practise what he preached and yet demanded that others do so. In addition, he assumes things and choose to listen to what he wants to while filtering out the rest. For example, when I had no time for him due to my school projects, he would assume that I would not go out with him anymore as I had new friends in school, in particular, female friends...

--------------------------------------

In retrospect, I believe I had failed to stick to my values which I had strived to follow from the beginning. Recent incidents had caused me to make assumptions, which had led to undesirable consequences. Similarly, I had not really been practicing what I had been preaching to others. Comparing myself to Mr. Colleague, its seems to me that we are displaying similiar traits but in seemingly different situations. Like what Mr. Colleague had done to me, I had unwittingly created great stress and anxiety to people around me...

Day 10,463

Chinese Parable of the Lost Axe by Lie Zi

A man who lost his axe suspected his neighbour's son of stealing it. To him, as he observed the boy, the way the lad walked, the expression on his face, the manner of his speech - in fact everything about his appearance and behaviour betrayed that he had stolen the axe.

Not long afterwards the man found his axe while digging in his cellar. When he saw his neighbour's son again, nothing about the boy's behaviour nor appearance seemed to suggest that he had stolen the axe.

--------------------------------------

Huang Fu and the Bottle of Wine Parable

Huang Fu was a very rich man who was deliberately tough on his farmhand, Hop. Huang Fu gave Hop a bottle and said, 'Buy me a bottle of wine.'

Hop, the poor farmhand enquired, 'How can I buy you wine with no money at all?'

Huang Fu replied disdainfully, 'Anyone can buy wine with money. It takes real skill to buy wine without money.'

Time elapsed and Hop eventually returned farmhand returned with the empty bottle. He handed the bottle to Huang Fu and murmured, 'Enjoy the wine, please.'

Staring at the empty bottle with some dismay, Huang asked, 'There is no wine, how can I enjoy this?'

Hop replied to Huang Fu, with a straight face, 'Anyone can enjoy wine if there is some. It takes real skill to enjoy wine when there is none.'

Huang Fu made a choking sound but was unable to utter a word.

Day 10,450

I bump into one of the SIA pilots from my batch at the Tampines Mall cinema just now...

6 years ago, 10 of us got selected for the final interview for a chance to fly for the national carrier. I got booted out after clearing all the interviews but failing my Class 1 medical. And I learned today that all the 10 of us passed the final interview and only I failed to make the mark for the medical. Thats pretty sad...

And yah, he is flying for the main line as a 777 FO...

Day 10,446

Day 10,431

In a magical and perfect way, their differences seemed to complement each other...

Day 10,409

Blind jealousy is a frequent corollary of passionate love...

------

Possessive love doesn't teach you to trust, it makes people insecure...
It's harmful...

Day 10,402

98天的回忆。。。

Day 10,398

Day 10,384

Day 10,355

Day 10,345

Why Do We Hurt Those We Love Most..

You love each other but can’t manage to communicate without arguing, fighting and ending up exhausted, each one in his corner, trying to lick his wounds and thinking of how to protect one self against a new attack. And in spite of that…you love each other? How is this possible? Why do people hurt most those they love?

How come we can’t express our love? How come we are full of good intentions but when it comes to reality we find ourselves again shouting and blaming the other one. And then that monster of guilt jumps out of nowhere to our throat to strangle us once again.

How to stop this infernal behavior?

First let me explain why this happens.

We all need energy. We need energy to live and to survive. Energy comes in many forms : love, attention, interest, food, friendship, money, approval, recognition…

We all need this to feel good, to build our personality and to find our place in society.

But here it is : as long as we think this energy has to come from other human beings, we will get caught up in struggle. Because human energy is limited. We have to fight for it. Human energy doesn’t last. There isn’t enough of it. So we have to be the quickest, the smartest, the most beautiful one, to attract the attention from the other and to pull his energy.

If this doesn’t work, we try another strategy. We try to pull attention by negative behavior. Every child learns this very quickly in his early life : when he is playing quietly on the floor with his toys, mum goes on cooking dinner or talking with daddy. But as soon as the kid hurts his little sister or is playing “sick", mums hurries to give attention to him. She shouts maybe, she’s angry or worried, but no matter, all this is attention for the child! He learns very quickly which behavior gives him the greatest amount of attention and energy. When his mother or father looks at him, even angry, it still is energy coming his way! When they shout at him, they give him energy. Negative energy, alright, but it is better than no energy at all.

When we grow up, and start to date, we discover a very interesting phenomenon : when we fall in love, we receive a lot of energy (read : attention, interest, time, love etc.) for free. The other person gives us freely and abundantly a whole bunch of energy. We don’t even have to ask for it, we don’t need to apply any strategy to pick this energy, it’s all for free! We let go of our mechanism to pull the energy of others towards us. We loosen up. We “fall" in love. We almost literally fly. We are high! Everything seems to have more colour, is more vivid, we feel lighter, life seems easy, everything goes by itself, we have the feeling we love everybody and everything, even our grunchy boss! Nothing can hurt us, we feel safe and boosted with energy. But this is his or her energy! We are flying on someone else’s energy, and human energy is limited!

And that is exactly the problem! This stream of free energy begins to slow down, because the other one goes back to his business and activities he had before. Why? The body is not able to handle this amount of adrenaline for a long period of time, they say… but the real reason is we need to learn to pull our energy from somewhere else, not from a human being but from the source of energy itself.

So our lover gives us less free energy than before. We were used to this energy-flow and now we have to do it again by ourselves! Free energy is so much easier! We don’t have to do any effort to get it! And now we are getting less of this free energy, we don’t want to let this happen. At this moment our old childhood-system of capturing energy is triggered because of the scarcity of energy (there is an alarm inside us that says : “Danger! Lack of energy!") and the old mechanism to capture energy from others starts running in our head and in our behavior. The mechanism that worked when we were a child to get the energy of our parents, will be triggered by the lack of energy now. We do what we did as a child to get energy flowing our way.

We can do this by playing the victim (“Oh poor me, look at all that I do and nobody is grateful! Look how good I am and still life strikes me with disapproval, disease and misery! Oh oh oh!"). Or we get attention by being aggressive, shouting and trying to dominate the other one. A third mechanism is harassing the other one by asking too many questions and controlling him. A fourth system is playing silence, refusing contact, not to speak and not to react, so the other one will do whatever he can to get in contact with you again and this will give you his energy.

These systems will of course make the energy of the other one flowing your way. But what next? The other one is now low on energy and wants to get his energy back. So now his mechanism is triggered by his lack of energy. He will now use the system that assured him the energy of his parents when he was little, to get his energy back from you. He will either shout at you, either playing the poor one that didn’t deserve your treatment, either torture you with a bunch of questions, or refuse contact.

This explains why we hurt the ones we love. First reason is we want their energy, energy they gave once for free. We hurt our loved onces most because they gave us love and energy and attention for free in the beginning and now we have to do it on our own and we are angry and want get back to them. We think we are entitled to have their energy still for free and start our mechanism to get it. Second reason we hurt them most is because of convenience : they are always around, their energy is available so when we are low on energy we try to rip their energy off, and hurt them by doing that.

Stealing energy from another human being is hurting him.

What can we do about this? We should only be in contact with other people when we are sure to be already filled up with energy, so we won’t steal theirs. When we are full of energy, and conscious of what happens between people, we can give the other one energy instead of ripping him off. We should not meet each other when we are low on energy. It’s the responsibility of each and every person to generate energy by himself and not to depend on other people.

How to do that? By connecting to the energy that is always available. That is the energy of the Universe. The easiest way to connect to this energy is contemplate the beauty of a flower. You also can contemplate the beauty of an object or a person. You can listen to beautiful music, take a walk in nature, meditate, pray, dance, paint, read positive texts, work on your mission on earth, love your cat or dog, anything that gives you energy.

Make a list of every activity and behavior that increases your energy level. As soon as you feel you’re in a conflict with your partner, boss, child, parent or whoever, do something to get yourself together and raise your energy. Don’t say anything until your energy-level is again high enough to be able to send energy to the other one. By sending energy, you are sure not to steal energy from the other one. This is an act of love. If you are not able to get your energy level any higher, go to another place, do something for you and wait until your vibrations are high enough to meet the other one again.

The important thing in a relationship is not to make the other happy or to expect the other one to make you happy, but to make yourself happy and offer this happiness as a free gift to the other! Loving another human being is giving him energy! See the difference? Do you want to love your loved ones or steal their energy?


10 Reasons Why We Hurt the Ones We Love
01. I love you, but I can't help hurting you. Why? What are the inner mechanisms behind such an irrational behaviour?
We're angry and frustrated with ourselves. By trying to hurt them, we try in fact to hurt ourselves. We think we don't deserve anything good, so we aim at the good things we have in life and unconsciously try to destroy them.

02. We expect too much from them. We nurture the secret hope that they can help us, that they can do all the things we are not capable of doing; moreover, that they have to do them, because of the love we invest in them. When they don't, we feel disappointed and the natural instinct is to make them regret.

03. They are the ones who have the courage to be honest and tell us the truth, even when it hurts. And even though we know it is the truth, it still hurts and the pain can cause violent reactions.

04. Yes, we love them dearly but there are things about them that annoy us terribly and we know we're never going to be able to change them. It's like living with our own body. Sometimes it is a blessing, other times a nuisance. Sometimes it gives us a lot of satisfaction, other times it drives us mad, but there is not much we can do about it cause it's ours.

05. We feel misunderstood. We wish they could make a journey inside our head and see things the way we see them, just because we think it is the right way. We simply can't understand why they think differently and how they can miss something that seems so simple and obvious to us.

06. We misunderstand them because we're not always willing to try to understand them. When we feel tired and tormented, burdened with our own faults and deficiencies, we find it difficult to deal with theirs.

07. We are influenced by what we see and hear on TV. Violence, melodramatic scenes, pain and suffering, self-destruction - they all can leave marks in our subconscious and develop patterns that make us think and react in a certain way. Sometimes we are tempted to do what our favorite soap opera character would do, even if that means hurting the one we love.

08. We love them but in the same time we hate them because they know our weaknesses and there's no way we can hide. The mask we wear in relation with other people is put aside and all the things we usually try to hide come to the surface.

09. We hurt them to give them comfort later. We all have the inner need to cuddle, to protect the ones we love and we feel we have the right to hurt them for the very reason that we love them so much and we'll make up for it later.

10. We trust them and we know deep in our hearts that, no matter what we do, they won't stop loving us. We feel safe to take our frustrations on them because we think there will be no consequences. We hurt them most of the times because they let us hurt them.

Credits to Nikos Deja Vu

Day 10,321

那天，我们望着海，
谈着没有未来的未来。

因为未知，我们对未来世界充满了期待和幻想，
很多问题现在无人能够解答，因此它更让我们好奇。

Day 10,310

Okie... Yes, this post is more than a month due... But anyway, better late than never...

Days 9908 -10,272: 365 days in summary, highlights of the year...

Started off the 2009 with a business trip to Abu Dhabi, UAE in February. School life was erm monotonous... In fact, pretty fast now that I am already in Year 2, semester 2.

My 3 years old Nokia 8800SE is buried in my cupboard after deciding that it will only speak when the bluetooth earpiece is connected and I was owner of an iPhone for a week before selling it away. Currently the owner of a sometimes crazy HTC Touch HD which likes to hang itself at times.

Renewed my First Aid license and finally got my Advanced Open Water + Underwater Photography speciality in July. Am looking forward to Rescue Diver...

Went for 2nd business trip to China in October, which was pretty nice considering I haven't been to China since 2000. A good 9 years gap...

My planned white Christmas in Harbin was cancelled or in fact never materialize due to erm... nevermind... Lolx...

In addition, I did not climb any mountain this year...
:(

Nevertheless,
Planned courses/ trips for the year (in order of priority):

• Rescue Diver
• Tibet and EBC, hopefully ABC

Day 10,279

Day 3 - Paris

More than 9999km from home

Co-ordinates of Tour Montparnasse

雪花