An Eulogy with Wicked

Recently, I had the privilege to watch Wicked in Singapore. A musical that has been glorified by a few of my friends who were lucky enough to watch it in US. I am grateful Wicked managed to find its way to Singapore and I didn't need to fly so long to watch it.

Image courtesy of www.applause-tickets.com

Geez ... what an awesome performance it was. I was genuinely amazed. Love the story. Love the songs. Love the lyrics. But most importantly, I just love the lesson it tried to impart through the "perceived" good and evil, that some things are simply not what they seem to be. In the darkness there is light and vice versa.

Ideally, I would love to watch Kristin Chenoweth plays Glenda but I don't think that will happen as she has left the Broadway scene for quite a few years now. I first chanced upon her in Pushing Daisies, although she was not the lead actress but she sure made sucha big impact and you couldn't help but to love her so much. I remember her more than the lead actress anyway! At that time I was ignorant about her big role in Wicked.

Then, she appeared again in my momma Oprah's farewell spectacular and she sang "For Good". Another round of ignorance, I didn't even know that song was from Wicked. I only know,"Wow! What an appropriate song hor ...!" Then I dug deeper and found out ... damn, this is from Wicked! Damn, the lyrics is so awesome. Damn! I love this song to the core and then a light-bulb-moment dawned on me ... I want this song to be played in my funeral as an eulogy, as a thank-you note to those who have given me something in life.

Ok. Call me crazy. But those who are really close to me know that I have been really fascinated with "death". I love to visit quirky places that have relations to death and so far I have been to Les Catacombs (Paris), Cimetière du Père-Lachaise (Paris) and Trunyan Village (Bali). More to come.

Then a friend introduced me to a Latin phrase - Memento Mori which means "remember your mortality" or "remember you will die". What a beautiful and morbid concept. But how can it be morbid when that is the absolute truth about life? We will die one day. You will never know when, won't you? Unless you choose to take your own life by your own hand. But majority of us do think we are going to live forever. Going through everyday simply by ticking the to-do lists. Sure, nothing wrong with that actually. But on your death-bed, once you have fulfilled them, I just wonder, will all be worth it? I am not sure. I can't answer this question myself.

However, I do know for sure, up until now, quality relationships with people who are genuine and connected well with your souls are worth it. When you do look back, you will think of those moments how someone have touched your life, how someone have awakened you and pushed you to grow further. You will also think about the great happy moments that you have. Occasionally you may dwell into the dark sides but those will not last, unless you love to stay in the dark for long. I know I don't. Those happy shiny moments will takeover and simply make you feel so much better. Then you know, you do have a life well lived.

I have been really fortunate and blessed to be surrounded by so many wonderful souls in this lifetime. I have also been fortunate to be able to cut off the energy suckers, not easy but sometimes it is simply necessary to do. Hence to all the beings that I have been in contact, what else can be more appropriate then when I am gone from this earth, to thank each and everyone of them by singing "For Good" as an eulogy for me to you.

Here, I share a snippet of the beautiful lyrics and its video when Kristin Chenoweth sang for Oprah, while the men of Moorehouse College who had received scholarship from her, appeared. Hope you will enjoy it as much as I do while remembering those people who have indeed changed you for good.

PS. Apparently, having a rehearsal by singing to my best friend was not a very good idea. Many tissues were "killed". Guess I will keep the rehearsal session to myself.

I've heard it said
That people come into our lives for a reason
Bringing something we must learn
And we are led
To those who help us most to grow
If we let them
And we help them in return
Well, I don't know if I believe that's true
But I know I'm who I am today
Because I knew you

Like a comet pulled from orbit
As it passes a sun
Like a stream that meets a boulder
Halfway through the wood
Who can say if I've been changed for the better?
But because I knew you
I have been changed for good

The Secret Letters of the Monk Who Sold His Ferrari

One of my 2012 resolution, which I am rephrasing to a must-do list, is to read at least 2 books in 1 month. That's slow compared to what I could do long ... long time ago before I got too up-close and personal with Mr. Procrastination. However I am very glad that within 3 weeks, I have finished 3 books. One of them doesn't really worth mentioning. Quite a waste of one's time.

One of them was The Secret Letters of the Monk Who Sold His Ferrari by Robin Sharma.

Though this book is not really that fantastic either, still there are some gems to be collected from it. What I am going to list down below is the "spoiler" of the book. If you would like to enjoy "the journey" then I suggest you to read the entire book.

The lessons drawn are the following points:

1. The Power of Authenticity
2. Embrace Your Fears
3. Live with Kindness
4. Make Small Daily Progress
5. To Lead Your Best Life, Do Your Best Work
6. Choose Your Influences Well
7. Life's Simplest Pleasures Are Life's Greatest Joys
8. The Purpose of Life is to Love
9. Stand for Something Bigger than Yourself
   

The Power of Authenticity
We are encouraged to live our authentic life, to be true to ourselves which everyone knows, is not an easy task. We can learn this by understanding where we have been and then discover where we are going.

Personal take:
As I go through life, I realize being authentic has its own power. You may lose some people along the way, but you will gain more that will resonate with your true self. Speaking from my own experience, I really witness positive changes take place in my life. But the journey to be authentic is a long road and I am still traveling through.

Embrace Your Fears
"The more fears we walk through, the more power we reclaim. In this way, we grow both fearless and powerful, and thus are able to live the lives of our dreams."

Personal take:
I used to be a people pleaser. I valued quantity and quality (call me greedy or simply naive). I kept on growing the numbers of my friends and thinking they are all of good quality. My fear was losing the numbers, thinking I wouldn't be significant. But after I took the first step in cutting the weeds from the flowers, my life blossoms. I took on my fears and ever since I never looked back. My life has never been better. I let go of the quantity and focus on quality. Once you know how to do it, it becomes a habit and life gets easier.

Live with Kindness
"No action, no matter how small, is insignificant - how we treat someone defines how we treat everyone, including ourselves."

Personal take:
Pretty straight forward and no-brainer. For this I would like to share one of my favourite quote:

“Treat everyone with politeness, even those who are rude to you – not because they are nice, but because you are.”—Unknown

Make Small Daily Progress
"The way we do small things determines the way that we do everything ... Mastery then becomes our way of being."

Personal take:
Mastery in anything takes time. There's finding that to do well in something you need to put in at least 10,000 hours. If you do it 4 hours a day which means you need 2500 days = 7 years. Imagine. If you don't start something you would like to excel today, then you may need to wait longer. This is one problem I need to tackle, discipline, consistency and persistence are need to be the best. But alas ... I have ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) and ... the only mastery I have for now is ... hmm ... I don't even know what ... HAIYA!

To Lead Your Best Life, Do Your Best Work
"One of the greatest secrets to a life beautifully lived is to do work that matters. And to ascent to such a state of mastery in it that people can't take their eyes off of you."

Personal take:
I have a friend who organized a party pretty last-minute-ly and one of the thing I took away from it that even until this moment I am so very impressed, were her cheese platters. I remembered standing there being at awe of the arrangements as if I was admiring a piece of art. By far, she has put in the best work I have ever seen into a cheese platter. I am not talking about fine dining restaurants, some cheese experts, etc. Even so, I don't think I have seen something as beautiful as these. Guess I was so cheese-struck that I forgot I needed to eat more of them. -_-"


Choose Your Influences Well
"It's a mark of wisdom to choose to spend time in those places that inspire and energize you and associate with those people who elevate and uplift you."

Personal take:
Out of all of the above, I can 99.9% swear by this lesson. People who suck your energy, pour you with unnecessary negative dramas, should be casted away asap. Unless you are able to transform those negative energies into a positive one, then, good for you. If not, stay away, get rid of them, find yourself new friends, new work environments, or best of all, new perspectives. In the last 4 years, I have been seeing so much impacts just by associating myself with positively happy people. Or even if they are not all the time happy, they are enriching in their own ways. As a result, I am positively happier person too. I believe strongly, the people I know now and the people I am going to know next are going to be awesome. Because if life is not uplifting most of the time, then you will miss out on the views life has to offer. I wonder if the monkey in Sangeh (Bali) agrees with me or not ...


Life's Simplest Pleasure Are Life's Greatest Joys
"Most people don't discover what's most important in life until they are too old to do anything about it. ... While society invites us to fill our lives with material objects, the best part of us knows that the more basic pleasures are the ones that enrich and sustain us."

Personal take:
13-16 November 2011, will be when I graduated in this life lesson. I booked myself to one of the not-so-cheap villa in Ubud, Bali, thinking I would like to spend my birthday on my own and pamper myself with the facilities offered by the resort. May I say, I regretted that decision ever! The villa even though it was so big and had all kind of things you need - even a coffee maker - was one of the most horrible stay I have ever had in my life. The first night I arrived at the resort, alone (stupid), I was cursing and swearing on why on earth I did what I did. Because after I have parted with my friends (also thanks to my own decision), then I realized, beautiful places mean nothing without the company of friends. Sure, we need our alone time once in a while, but when something is awesome, it's much pleasurable when we are able to share it. Even though it's as simple as,"Oy! Don't you think this tea is very nice? Don't you see the monkey is so cute! Oh come on, I think you look like the fat one."

The Purpose of Life is to Love
"How well you live comes down to how much you love. The heart is wiser than the head. Honor it. Trust it. Follow it."

Personal take:
Well, well, well ... sure love is nice. I love you. You love me. World peace. That's very nice. I just had a lengthy discussion 2 days ago with 2 of my wise and mature friends over this topic. One is very heart. One is very brain. Personally, I think one needs to balance between the heart and the brain. If you love without the brain, you may fall into dangers as you didn't see it coming before. If you think without the heart, you may miss out on life's miracles. If I could rephrase that, I would say the purpose of life is to live it by loving, thinking and sharing.

Stand for Something Bigger than Yourself
"...become successful, on your own terms rather than on those suggested to you by society. But above all else - be significant. Make your life matter - be of use. And be of service to as many people as possible."

Personal take:
This .... I have no comment. I don't know what I am standing for. But I know I am learning and slowly creating my terms day by day. I know my life matter but I don't know what service I am able to give to as many people as possible yet. Time to go to my dark corner to reflect or to sleep as the clock is not very friendly anymore.

---

I hope you enjoy my sharing from what I have read. The next book will be a brainier one and I doubt I can remember what I have learned from it! HAH! Ho-boy ....

For those who will be celebrating Chinese New Year, I am wishing you a new year filled with love, joy, peace, health and abundance. May all your goals come to fruition and stay happy always.

Au Revoir 2011! Bonjour 2012!

Hello readers

2011 is finally saying farewell to us. 2012 will enter in few hours time.

How has 2011 been to you?

What have you learned?
What will you leave behind?
And what will you bring with you to 2012?

I have learned that not until you love yourself, the world won't love you the way you think. I have learned that those that really matters tend to be the simple intangible things in life such as relationships. I have learned that what you feed your mind affects how you view the world.

I will leave behind the thought that the elements outside me need to change before I can be happy and contented. I will leave behind that I have no control and not responsible for all aspects of my life. I will leave behind the naive concept that there are somethings can be forever.

I will bring with me into 2012 the "me" that is slowly evolving and revealing to its truest expression of self. I will bring with me my intuition, my gut feel, to listen to them more after listening to kind advices from others. I will bring with me my blessings and feeling of constant gratitude to things / experiences I have already had and those that will come my way at their own time.

I am saying goodbye to 2011 with a great smile on my face knowing I have lived an awesome and colorful life and I am looking forward to 2012 for more awesome experiences that I believe will come. Good and bad are really relative. I wish everyone a life well lived, a lesson well learned and laughters well shared.

Happy New Year, Everyone!

11 Dec 2011 - With Models of Abercrombie & Fitch.
See! Told you my 2011 was awesome and "colorful"! *wink*

The 3 Letters that Live After Death

De-clutter: to simplify or get rid of mess, disorder, complications, etc
(Taken from www.dictionary.com).

Thanks to my "big forehead" bff, this time I welcome X'mas and New Year by de-cluttering my living space. I threw quite a bit of stuff and organized the others that I would like to keep. Though I am not a hoarder (Thank God), I can be a keeper of stuffs! It's a bad habit that I am slowly unlearning.

While embarking the journey of de-cluttering, as I squatted on my floor, opening boxes after boxes, I discovered 3 envelopes that I received from Tante Gunawan. Tante in Bahasa Indonesia means aunt - just like in French too.


Tante, that's how I love to call her, was my childhood friend's mom. My age gap with my friend is big. She was already in secondary school when I was still learning to read her magazines - Bobo. Some of her magazines were dated even before I was born. Tante and Om (her husband) doted on me. They were like another set of parents who stayed in a big classic house and spoke Dutch occasionally. In the early 90s, or so I think, we were separated. Tante and her entire family moved to Jakarta. I hardly met them since then. Almost never, even until Om passed away.

In 2006, I met Tante in Jakarta when I went back for Chinese New Year reunion with my entire big family. I insisted to meet her and I was so glad that I couldn't hold my tears and hugged her. I didn't know why. She teared too. I also didn't know why. There was just this raw emotion in us that we couldn't contain. We really didn't know why.

Then, as the busy-ness of life caught me again, I didn't keep in touch much until I received a packet of cards from MFPA (Mouth and Food Painting Artists), an organization that my parents and I have been supporting on regular basis. So I have bunch of cards but didn't know who to write them too. I thought of Tante. I wrote to her again in 2008.

I received my first reply on the 6th of August 2008. She expressed how delighted and surprised she was to receive a letter from me. I was equally delighted to receive a reply from her. Until the day she passed away in 2010, there were only 3 letters being exchanged. But these 3 precious letters, never fail to bring me to tears every time I re-read them.

What started out as a tradition of sending cards during festive seasons, turned out to be an avenue to reconnect with people from my past. What started out as cleaning out my space, turned out to to be a way to enrich my soul.

De-clutter, my new definition is to get rid of things that don't matter and to be connected to those that really do.

Wishing all of you an enriching festive season ahead. Try going back to a time in your life when someone or something has brought you joy and love. You will be surprised, they were there in our memories, just buried beneath all the recent noises of our lives. They are very much still alive.

The World of Scrubs

When someone gave me this link - http://www.blueskyscrubs.com/categories/Scrubs/Scrubs-for-Women/ I thought there exists a special type of low shrubs for women. Dang! I really need to improve my vocabularies. Once I clicked on the link, I realized it refers to a type of uniforms.

The word "scrub" always reminds me to the once popular song by TLC - No Scrubs, that up until this day I still don't know what it's all about; like most songs that passed through my ears. But the melody still lingers.

Then I heard this term very often in Grey's Anatomy when those surgeons yelled,"Scrub in!" and the next thing you will see all of them rushing to save a life on the operating table. Who knows from all these medical themed TV shows, the once just a uniform, can be a fashion item to the mass. That will make quite a handsome costume and you may call yourself McDreamy, McSteamy, Doctor Yang, etc. I feel like having one too but I guess it will just become my pajama.

Jakarta - Penang - Yogyakarta - Bali - Kuala Lumpur

WOW!

DD is mad! Or, was mad.
Listing those cities out as the title of this post made me realize I might have been out of my mind.

For those of you who don't know what I have been doing recently, well, those are the cities I visited in October and November! I flew so much in those 2 months than I have ever done in past 2 years!

Most of them were on impulse. I didn't use much of my brain when I decided them (hmm, I don't think I use it a lot anyway :p). Let's just say, I have been living at the safe and boring side of life that suddenly I needed to wiggle myself and do some mad travel stunts like that.

So what was I doing there? In summary (and more to come next time) I was:
- visiting my bestie and hunting for my favourite childhood food @ Jakarta
- accompanying my parents and learning about my ancestor who was an awesome man @ Penang
- learning about Buddha's teaching through artifacts and stories + made aware that my country is super awesome @ Yogyakarta
- spending my birthday with besties and finally visiting the island of non-smelling dead bodies (yup, you read it right) @ Bali
- reminding myself that I have great friends and forever grateful for such wonderful souls in my life @ Kuala Lumpur

I am not a travelling sort, normally. Very comfortable where I am. I do occasionally getaway by myself to reset my mind, thought my Bali trip is going to be that way.

But what I learn preciously on all my trips is that people (and not places and things) make travelling more meaningful. You may have seen the most beautiful thing and eaten the most delicious thing on earth, that is wonderful, but to have another living being witnesses or shares that experience with you, make it more exquisite.

I am really grateful that in all my trips, I have never once lacked of the people element. From great friends, to great tour guide. From the daughter of friend's friend to the mother of a friend. They all have made me feel enriched in a way that money can't buy.

Now I really understand fully when Suze Orman says,"People first, them money, then things." Without people, money and things will simply resemble a body without mind and soul.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Even though I don't normally celebrate it but this year, 2 besties of mine are and we have a list of items we are thankful for.

Here are my list of things that I am thankful for:
1. Having a healthy body, mind and soul
2. Having a wonderful roof over my head
3. Having awesome parents who are knowledgeable and have great sense of humour
4. Having great friends that I can turn to and there are more than 10 for sure
5. Having the chance to learn and discover a lot of my country this year
6. Being able to use the French language and strike basic conversation with strangers
7. Having a job and great bosses to work with
8. Having many blog tasks to support my charities
9. Having the ability to give tips to people who provide awesome service
10. Having the access to information online and offline
11. Living in a country that is safe, well organised and resourceful
12. Friends who love me even though I'm so selfish (One of them is still nagging about how selfish I am as I am keying this in into my Blackberry)

I believe there are more things that I am really grateful for. I would love to list them all but alas, I need to pack for my KL trip. Can't wait to meet my super wise friend who just got her own "castle" in KL. See her in few hours time.

Once again I would like to wish everyone (in French) - Bonne Action de grâce.

Never stop counting your blessings no matter how small they may appear. Sometimes, those small things have the biggest impact in life. Don't take anything for granted, start with the roof on top of your head.

If I Can Only

If I can only speak two words
Let them be "Thank You"
To all the souls who have taught me how to live

If I can only move one part of my face
Let them be my lips
To smile upon the blessings which have chanced upon me

If I can only give one thing
Let them be my question
To realize that answers are there all along

If I can only feel one emotion
Let them be love
To let me know that all is supreme