Living Walls

How things are traversing as the third anniversary approaches.

Walls pose themselves as important characters to a building. They function as dividers, mainly -- between the outside and the inside, here and there, his and hers -- aside from being structurally important. In a pararrel subreality, aside from these visible walls we do have the invisible ones being build in our lives -- ones that don't require bricks or wood nor exclusive skills and money to build.

I'm finding myself bumping into these walls in realisation, recently. The walls made by others who appear to be fond of my appearance within their personal confinements, but in reality I'm just another privacy invader to them. Being hit, slowly I'm building my own walls too, against the people whom I don't want my space to be shared with. These walls, however, as they're invisible, don't really have any strong foundations. Sometimes they just flew away, these walls. Other times they evaporate.

Suddenly I realised many walls have been built and torn down, again and again, since the first time I blog here. Some people still stay within the same walls just like they did three years ago, while some happened to have found their door towards their way out. Others make more walls, some so strong they're impenetrable. Others gave up their walls, letting them rambled down thus a new space is born. Meanwhile some still peek through my wall from outside, for reasons I'm not sure myself.

When I started blogging these walls don't really matter. It was a mere one year and a half ahead of my further studies, roughly a year before National Service, and months before SPM. That time, I should have thought that a 'butterfly effect' is just another feeling you'd feel when you're nervous. Who could have cared about crossing life paths? And the exhausting rhetorical 'what if's?

Sitting here today, I'm glad I didn't back then. For many reasons, at least I can see myself and the rest of us as a lot happier once. Those were the days where we would think twice about spending at Starbucks and Baskin Robbins; where my usual was still a Frappucino. When everybody actually go lepak at D.E during its heydays, the good ol' days when the food there was actually great, and they didn't put Milo 3 in 1 on a Milo Ais for a Milo Tabur (what a disgrace!). When a day out in KL or even mall is actually, well, a day out. A tame world of tuitions, ko-ko, sometimes impunctual Uncle Koh and of course, school.

These are the walls long gone, dilapidated and maybe just like I put it, flew away. We have built new walls, and within it our decided choices. And et voila, here we are today. Here I am, three years later with a blog I'm still unsure where to direct its way.

Three years later, I'm facing the fact that life can be inane, even though many things happen in it. Though best heard in manufacturing factories or maybe some political speeches, 'quality, not quantity' is somehow true. Just like how some onde-onde can be many and cheap in one set, but lacked a good inti. Being caught in this unprecedently caused me great cracks of agony on my walls, in which certainly leaning on them is not a good solution.

"Just do something out of your wall," a friend said. "Something simple that have made others happy -- even if they're underpriviliged." I tried it. It worked. And a very good pal of mine, a teh tarik companion at Syed just asked me to 'stay focused'.

"Just go home where you belong, forget everything, and when you're done, go back and finish your work," he said (I'm trying hard to make this as un-Readers Digest-ly as possible). A brave one, actually, quite achievable if you're not a studio-based student. Still, I quitely did this since it was a long weekend, so yeah. It worked, somehow.

In the end, one of my best blogger companion, who later becomes one of my best of friends, sums it all up -- when I thought an exit was a clearer option. "Everybody can write and take photos, if they want to. But you, you have talents. And combining that with what you learn now in architecture, it'll make you much a successful person later."

There's more to that, but I can't remember the exact words. Anyhow, I'm still betting on the last advice. Trying.

Invisible walls are as important as visible walls. Whose wall we decide to attach our walls to somehow will reflect who we will turn out to be, which depends on how strong are the walls jointed, anyway. While for those who we decide to keep our walls separate as in the case of our lives, that is just because we don't have enough bondings required to keep our walls together.

It sounds simple. At least, I hope, we can keep things that simple until next year -- as long as there aren't any clumsy contractors around. Besides, that was just how I got things started during day one, anyway: 'a simple day, today'.

Posted in Seri Iskandar. PHOTO Overlooking Manhattan. This is the first post on February 11, 2006.