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Fatty Bom-Bom says:

I can't ever get sick of posting up the Marevellous photos. Exams herald in another cycle, another epoch of eating to your heart's content till it becomes painful. Oh well, get gym membership loh.

Leaving Paradise... Thankfully

Arriving home from Bintan, it did not dawn upon me yet that I had left a beauitful little island that had been the playground of my closest mates and I. The food was cheap and in copious quantities, the nights cold with the incoming breeze from the sea and the company warmer still.

But what was also a getaway with comrades became also a precious life lesson - that I cannot ever retire like how the West or the media often envision it. Doing nothing but sleep and eat made me a restless soul wanting to get back to the fast paced battlefield called home. People who yearn for a slower pace of life might then get a shock when they actually get the slower pace they had been pining for. There is simply no fufilment.

Instead I suppose that there lies a truth that seeks to reconcile the relaxation of a slower pace of life and yet also the purpose and satisfaction behind work well done. The Christian and Jewish God gave Man the instruction to keep the Sabbath free, which begins to make great sense to me. While there should be purposeful work, there should also be a day or short interlude of rest before we go on working again.

And our trip was exactly just that.

A Year To Love

Life Revisited

Exams are finally done but the nice happy feelings associated with it has not sunk in yet. The brain is still having an exam hangover as the body tries to cope with new found freedom.
Yet certain things are already looking a certain way for the month of December. More gigs combined with more church activites seems to be for certain this month. Also there are many things I would love to do like brush up on my personal development, build up my endurance and body in preparation for IPPT as well as a life-time committment of physical balance and maintenance. When the people compete for your attention, the harsh law of economics kicks in - Scarcity.
Scarcity of time is a problem we all face. And decide we must. To give one person your time is to deprive another person of it. But here the bias falls in the direction of quality of time; we forget that time also has a qualitative aspect to it. The amount of engagement, interest, passion, contemplation and love we put into the time spent with people is much more important than the actual amount of time we put into it. Yes yes, some people and activities require more time than others; but how they feel after spending concentrated and undiluted time with them is simply beyond one's control. Therefore the most one can do is to simply go to sleep at night with a peaceful heart and mind, free from any guilt that one has not been fair or generous with time with others. To give a minute of the utmost love, attention and presence to people around you is the best gift one can give to friends everyday. I believe that is what one ought to do with friends.
Family and loved ones however deserve more since their destinies, no matter how seemingly remote and independent they are, are intertwined with ours. If we do not devote selflessly to them, we then do not do justice to the role they play in our lives and hence we obstruct the unfolding of our life's Tale and the necessary events that make it up.
There is a modern axiom that 'time is money'. After obtaining money, they become generous with it but how about time? They become miserly with time and hoard it to themselves, unwilling to be an active agent in the spending of time. Like money circulating in a economy, time too has multiplier effects. The time you spend now with your child might be the crucial foundation by which in later life he leads the world. Time is a gift from God and so let us share and be generous for it is in giving that we receive. And this will never change.

Creatures Of The Night

"If an elephant can hide behind the bushes...who knows what else might be lurking around your feet..."
45 mins of skin-crawling as Mare and I looked left, then right. Right, then left. As we sat on the tram that took us around the whole Night Safari, the sound of a nail scratching against a blackboard would have been tons more pleasing than our tram-guide's voice. And script. Mare and I were giggling to ourselves, and the 'ang mohs' behind us were puzzled as to why Singaporeans were speaking like that. Smelly bearded-pigs, giant rats and beautiful cows. Tapirs and ant-eaters that were stripped brown and cream, looked so delicious and rich. Animal show where otters could put recycleable litter into the respective bins. Harems of cut-throat restaurants serving $15 laksa with a few tourist customers price-oblivious. Thank You Night Safari. (Thank you STB -wink wink-)

Mastery Of The Breath

I have recently been dabbling in some abstract, exotic, Indian arts. The Art of Breathing or Pranayama as called by the Indians. Breathing is something we do all the time and more frequently (or less frequently) than we think; so that means it applies to all of us mere mortals and not just the 500-year old Himalayan hermits.

First if you have ever observed a child or a person sleep, you will observe his abdomen rising and falling. Now compare it with most waking adults and you will notice that their shoulders rise when they inhale or they breathe in a shallow manner whereby the area above the solar plexus fills with air only. When we sleep we breath in a deep manner, meaning that the area around the belly button and lower back is filled with air. This area is larger than the upper or "shallow" area and has a larger capacity for air. Learning to breathe deeply and filling up that area allows a greater oxygenation of the blood and hence more oxygen flowing to the brain which uses alot of oxygen.

Now filling the lower abdomen with air is one thing, but the way one sucks in the air is another.

Rule 1: Don't ever use your mouth. Using the mouth invites pathogens into the body, together with dust and even insects. The nose also warms the air before it hits your lungs- this is due to the fact that warm air is best for the body. Extremely hot or cold air is bad for the lungs. Another factor that the yogis' take into consideration is the belief that "prana/qi/bio-energy" is absorbed into the body from the surroundings only through the nose. Hence tapping into the unlimited and free source of energy is via the nose.

Rule 2: Don't use your nostrils too. The nostrils should not be tensed as much as possible and should remain inactive during inhalation. Instead the cavity at the back of the mouth should be used as a suction pump to pull in the air through the nostrils. This methold also allows one to fill up with air more quickly.

Aside from this basic primer of beginning Pranayama, there are other more abstract or advanced forms ranging from "Skull Polishing" technique to "Alternate Nostril" technique and the benefits from what I understand are numerous. It is said different forms of Pranayama can increase awareness, lead to greater relaxation, increased creativity, lessen pain and the massaging of cells at the micro level.

So with the hope that when I meet my friends, one or two of them might be "inspired" (witty pun right? its deliberate) to be a Himalayan hermit and outlive the planet, I shall sign off now and get back to getting me some skull polishing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9onI92OxBHY