"Hell is waking up and dreading the day ahead." DukeI've posted a random picture of my church youths, friends and I at a camp sometime back but the point was to emphasise the fact that life is full of colour, full of people, full of craziness and full of smiles.
Well, at least that's what it is to me.
However, there are many, many people out there who feel that life is dark, bleak, painful and overflowing with sadness. And that's hell.
Yesterday, after floorball training, I had the chance to catch up with one of my team-mates, a post-graduate student at NTU. He is Indonesian and he so happens to be at the EEE faculty that has been in the news lately so I asked him whether he knew that student who attacked his professor before killing himself a few months back.
Well, he did not but it really got me thinking about life and what it means to be alive.
I realised that there are people out here who wake up one morning and realise that their life has become meaningless and that they have reached the end of their tether, that they cannot bear or dare to live on. I guess that is why people start randomly killing others around them, in their schools and neighbourhoods, before killing themselves.
To me, the most troubling aspect of this recent spate of cases in the news is that all these killers have tended to be very young and seemingly with their whole lives ahead of them. It must have taken a really huge blow or a massive series of blows to have made these young men (many of whom are students of one kind or another) feel that they have nothing else to live for and they want to go out, literally, with a dreadful bang.
I understand that it is so much harder to be a student these days. All kinds of commitments, distractions and priorities cry out for their attention these days and the pressure that must build up as a result of constant emphasis on achievement must feel horrible. Thus, there is a need to see things from the right perspective.
Yes, there are so many more demands on students and young people these days, but with these demands, also come great opportunities. I feel no shame to admit that young people these days are so much more capable and intelligent these days than my generation was, but surely that is a result of greater exposure and higher expectations.
At the same time, life is more than just studies and school. This is merely a phase of one's life and, while almost everyone will look back with a smile in the future, young people just need to realise that they will live through this and move on to other things in their lives. The key is just to knuckle down, do their best and try their hardest. That is all that anyone and everyone can ask of them. The second key is to always look to their God-given abilities and believe that they can make something of themselves and make good in their lives, especially when things are not looking too good.
Hope enables you to go through the worst things while hopelessness pushes you to do those things. Life should be filled with hope for, as Nature shows us, even the worst of storms and earthquakes come to an end. We just need to make sure we are there to make a fresh start once the winds die down, the rain ceases, the ground stops trembling and the air is still again.
Life is full of colour, full of people, full of craziness and full of smiles. I would not have it any other way.
