Yesterday was an interesting day for me.
After my church worship practice, I went down to Beach Road to get some stuff. After doing my shopping, I went down to the hawker centre to eat my all time favourite glutinous rice ball paste. I bought that $2 bowl of rice ball with peanut soup and sat down at one corner, enjoying the hot tasty dessert. It was really enjoyable, sitting there alone in the hawker centre eating my favourite dessert.
I then went on to The Concourse, only to realise that the shopping mall was closed. The whole place was closed and I found a corner with a bench. It was facing the south, where The Flier towered in the afternoon sky. It was breezy and the view was not bad. I just sat there alone, feeling the afternoon breeze. I then decided on reading a book there. It was so quiet and peaceful. I was reading "The Five People You Meet in Heaven". Quite an enjoyable read.
After an hour of reading, I felt tired and decided to do something that I would never have done. I took off my bag, laid it on the bench and I just lied on the bench like that was my bed. There was no one there, just me and the wind. I took a 20min nap there and got up feeling rather refreshed. Wow, that was fun...
I then decided to go down to Suntec to take a look at the PC show. IT WAS A HORRIBLE CHOICE. I went there only to be sandwhiched by an avalanche of people. Seriously, I never thought it would be so bad. It was either people trying to squeeze me away or me pushing them aside. I tried so hard to enter the exhibition area only to find myself looking at people and more people. I couldn't see a single set of electronics! Apart from the larger LCD TVs. There was a F1 car in the exhibition with some show girls. It was really funny because you see all the guys standing there taking out their cameras to snap pictures. I don't know whether it was the car or the girls that attracted them. You can see that every single guy had their head turned and STUCK on that exhibition area and the human traffic there just slowed to Lorris pace. I was trying to squeeze through the crowd but the guys just stood there rooted to the ground. It was a funny sight.
As I was typing this, it appeared to me that this isn't really interesting. But somehow, at the ground, it felt interesting. I think I enjoy solitude. It makes me feel like the whole world doesn't care about me and I can just take a step back to look at the things happening around me. It is just so interesting being a spectator as compared to a participant.
在过十四个小时, 我就要飞到"香鸡扒与奶茶乐园"去了。这三个星期我会想你们的，我的家人与朋友。上帝与你们同在。再见！！！！
How much do you understand someone when he or she talks to you?
It seems to me that people can never fully understand people. Maybe we weren't made to understand each other? I don't know about you but sometimes I feel myself hearing people speak but never listening.
When people tell me their problems, I hear them. But I always ask myself this one question, do I really understand how they feel or the situation they are in? To me, no matter how hard I try, I can never feel the full extent of the pain being felt by someone else. It's just a mental register of what the person said but not how he or she feels.
The same goes when I tell others my problems. Sometimes, I really doubt if they are listening or do they even feel what I feel. When people say, "I feel for you.", it just doesn't strike me that they really feel for me. Their words feel empty. It carrys no substance nor does it carry any promises. It is only when their actions testify for their words do I feel comforted for their presence.
I asked myself, how much do I actually mean it when I say "I feel for you."? Many times I feel a sense of guilt welling up within me when I say those four words to someone in extreme pain and suffering, be it physically or emotionally. It just seems to be the most logical thing to say when someone is feeling bad. But we can never fully phantom the pain and agony that person is going through.
As usual, I started pondering on this issue. I came up with this drafted observation and analysis...
1. People's thoughts are either logical or emotional and emotional thoughts can be furthur classified into internally expressed and externally expressed.
2. Logical thoughts are thoughts that are tagged with practicality. They do not involve any feelings. They are basically the kind of thoughts that we produce when engaging with practical problems such as mathematical sums. Logical thoughts are structured and systematic. They are fed with indicators, like how a doctor does his diagnosis. He ask certain specific questions in a structured manner to attain indicators indicating that a person is suffering from a particular illness. Or it could be a student solving a mathematical question. He or she start by looking for indicators that may point to a certain method of solving the question. Does the question allow me to solve it upfront or do I need to engage it with an algebraic method? What are the data that is given to me and what formulas can I apply? A logical thought cease to exist upon the lack of indicators. If the student is unable to sieve out any useful information or data needed for a particular method of solving the mathematical problem, he or she will just give up on the thought of using that method and move on to look for alternatives.
3. Emotional thoughts are thoughts that are filled with emotions (duh..). With that I mean they consists of emotions such as anger, sadness, happiness etc. But the very nature of emotional thoughts makes it hard to explain it in words. It is not something that can be explained. It can only be understood by the person producing this thought. It is like when I tell someone I love this girl, it could simply mean this wonderful connection I have with her. I feel this immense attraction to her and that's why I love her. But to the person I am telling this to, he takes on a very different approach. He'd probably be analysing the factors involve, like asking why does Young love this particular person? Maybe he think she is hot, or maybe he likes her intelligence. Maybe he thinks her eyes are beautiful or maybe he likes the way she talks to him, you know, after knowing him for years as a friend, I know what type of personality appeals to him. I think I know what kind of character he is being attracted to. As you can see by now, this friend of mine I am speaking to is unable to understand how I feel. Why? It is because he is trapped in his logical state of mind. To me, it simply means an attraction to the girl but to him, he is unable to feel the attraction because he is not me. So he resort to his very logical state of mind to try to understand what I said to him. He studies the subject, which in this case is the girl and he starts putting in his own inputs and deductions. These are called indicators. He starts studying things like the physical features of the person, her character and he starts bringing in previous experience with me such as previous conversations or MSN exchanges to form a linkage of indicators, spot a trend and finally come out with a conclusion, his own conclusion. But what he came out with may or may not be what I feel! Because his thoughts are bias towards his own opinion and deductions, not mine.
4. Internally expressed emotional thoughts are what you keep within yourself, like guilt and admiration towards a person. Externally expressed emotional thoughts are like anger and happiness. It is relatively easier to identify externally expressed thoughts as compared to internally expressed thoughts. This is due to the inherent weakness of our thoughts. If you haven't already notice, the point I am trying to drive at is this, we are logical thinking bias. Our thoughts need to be fed by indicators. Simply put, we tend to take the logical approach because we prefer to begin with a platform. We do not like thinking without basis. We like to have something concrete, commonly known as evidence to arrive at a conclusion. Just like a doctor doesn't like to feel that the patient is suffering from cancer. He needs evidence such as tests to show that it is indeed cancer. Thus, with this obsession with indicators, it is easier for us to identify with externally expressed emotional thoughts because these thoughts are tagged with more indicators. You know a person is annoyed if he is frowning. The frowning is an indicator. But for a person feeling guilty, you may or may not see it because the outward expression of his guilt isn't that obvious. That is more of a internally expressed emotion.
I then realised why we don't really understand each other. I also realised why I can't understand others. When we lock ourselves in this logical state of mind, it hard for us to understand things that are not logical. I am not trying to say that logical thoughts are of a lower class of thinking. It is just that logical thoughts has its limits to its application. When it comes to trying to understand the needs and feelings of someone, maybe taking the logical approach isn't that feasible. I think a balance of both would probably be helpful? It is like when my mum ask me about her new hairstyle, logically to me it is just a few alterations to her curls or colour. But that is not what she is looking for. When she asked the question "How is my new hair look?", she doesn't want me to analyse the hairstyle, she just wants me to acknowledge her effort in improving her looks. So probably saying that this hairstyle doesn't suit her isn't a very good idea because that is not what she is looking for. If we use out emotional thinking abilities to approach this question, we would have identified that she is not there to gain logical deductions of her hair but to gain emotional support and acceptance of her new look.
It seems to me that it is not easy to understand people. But I realised there is somebody who is able to phantom exactly what we know and how we feel. For those who knows me well enough you would probably know who I am talking about. To some of you out there, he is your best friend too and you would agree as to what I am about to say. This person understands me totally. He knows when I feel depressed or when I am feeling happy. He listens and he understands. He really do understand. When he says "I feel for you.", he means it and I feel comforted. He keeps to his promises and never fail to listen to me. He has also proven to be true, and he goes all the way to help me or should I say save me. Which of you out there would lose your life to save me? This person speak with his actions and his words are not empty. He lost his life just to do me a favour, and this favour saved me. When I talked about understanding people's pain, he is the one who sets the perfect standard. He is always there for me.
I don't know if you know this person, or do you even bother. This person understands us totally, yet we can never fully understand him. Why? Because you and me are just not worthy enough to do so. We think so highly of ourselves, thinking we are able to understand others, but are we really capable of doing that? It is this arrogance that blinds us from understanding him, even denying him. This person is more than a person. He is not a person because a person can't understand people fully. He understands every single thing about us. Internally expressed emotions are of no difficulty to him. So who is he(He)......? He lives with us, He lives in us. But we threw Him out of us because we didn't understand Him, we didn't understand Him, our fore fathers hated Him because they didn't understand Him.
I don't know if this post of mine made any sense to you. But those who truly understands me would be able to understand what I wrote here, if not, this post would have probably wasted 10 minutes of your life, especially the last part because the last part isn't something logical, it is very emotional and very integral part of me and only those who truly understands Him would understand what I've written.
Really, this is just me, do you understand......?