harmless? bananas!

past lives
the luxury of comfort is pushing the screams of mercy back into the troves of malcontent. we're too small for our seats
too big for our strollers
withering away as it slowly decays,
holding on to that which fades away
(holding on to our past lives, our past years of glory, of who we were to make up for who we weren't)

is it a sad thing? is it a pitiful thing? or is it the only thing that we could feel?

i wrote that on my way back to perth earlier this semester. i think its something that has been brewing in me for a pretty long time, this feeling that my entire life has been a mistake. that everything i've ever done has been the result of one mistake, one failure after another. and again i stress that people remember your failures more than your achievements.

in a way, i see the perpetual looking at the past, longing for nostalgia as well as remembering achievements as a sign of weakness. it sometimes shows how we remember our glory years, and only walk in the past, never moving forwards. and yet for so much of my judgement, today perhaps i'm reminding myself just how important certain lessons from the past are.

if you see me today, you'll probably know that i was just an average corporal during my stint in the army. and in perhaps in admiting a bout of my insercurity, i think i still believe that people seem to give more credit to officers, that to a certain extent, in a credentials sorta way, people respect them more. i might be wrong, i'm probably paranoid, but today i say things in the hope of exorcising them.

and everytime i feel this way, like why are officers getting all the credit and respect? is it something to really be proud of? spending 9 months getting rank that professional soldiers spend 4 years slogging for in a military university to achieve? before it gets discredited as sour grapes, i'm believe i'm telling it like it is as well.

my time in the army was spent this close getting my chance to be an officer. if i were to remember an achievement, i was the best recruit in my company, i was supposed to have a future (in the Singapore Actors Federation though). the thing is, because i don't wanna wallow in the past, i don't like talking about this. but i recognise that maybe i'm not all that over it.

and that's my point exactly. people spend more time harping over the fact that you screwed up, not wot achievements you had in the past. you may have recieved top class honours, or a daymn nobel prize, you may have saved the world, but all you need to do is to destroy it and everyone will be blaming you, and nobody cares two cents about all the good you did before that.

and i wrote those lines above, because i recognised in myself, and in life in general just how obsessed we are at attaining future credentials so that our past may speak for us.

but i'd just like to say that all we have is now. we remember the good in our lives to make up for the bad in our past. but all we have is now. it is now that we have a power to create or destroy. i wish i could mean it when i say we are free of the past, its something that i believe all of us need. salvation from our pasts, its one of the things that has a solid grip of fear on us and paralyzes us. and yet, if we are truely free of that past, then all we have is now, and that's worth living for sometimes. no fate save for wot we make of it ourselves.