Monday, October 20, 2008

I am back

I am back to KL.

Glad to know that Chua Soi Lek is back to helm MCA, and most likely, back to cabinet. Chinese can accept a leader who is courageous to admit his own actions. He deserved to be the deputy president of MCA. I hope he can reinvent MCA. However, he may face difficulty as he has to work with Ong Tee Keat.

I need a rest after five grueling days. Both of my legs are in great pain, probably due to stress. The coming week would equally be hectic and grueling.

Before I say goodnight (ah, it's good morning), I just like to share an abstract of the philosophical thoughts by Grayling on friendship, relationship and parting:

Friendship & Relationship: Human beings are essentially social animals. Relationships are vital to our well-being. Intimate relationships may be few in numbers and idiosyncratic in character and plays a deep role in making us what we are. But friendship have the majority influence in determining the shape of our social personae, especially in the formative period between the second and forth decades of our lifes.

Therefore, one good way to know what sort of person someone really is, is to examine not the friends but the friendships he has maintained through time.

However, it is important not to restrict the idea of friendship to current living beings, for, one can have friendships with those dead and gone, including those characters in the books, historical figures, animals and in particular, those whom we have not met but has somewhat become friends in the cyber-world.

The key lies in who we talk to, and who we listen to, on what really concerns us. What we discuss with friends stays alive in the relationship thereafter, affecting its course and influence the character of the parties to it.

Aristotle described a friend as "another self", and that is sometimes true enough to make a friend the deceiver we need when we need to be deceived, and the absolver we need when we need absolution. But more importantly still, friends are the others we need, and who need us, for the sake of the difference and connectedness which give us the feedback, the testing ground, the support and the acceptably modulated challenges that condition us, and the companionship and merriment that keep us sane.

In a world full of enmity it is always interesting to contemplate the nature of friendship. A friend is a person who gives without being asked; who understands, or tries to, who rejoices at good fortune and supports through bad; who tells unpleasant truths and pleasant untruths when either is necessary; whose affection is freely given, and who makes the innocent and proper assumption that all the claims, expectations, rights and duties of this vital and valuable human bonds are reciprocal.

To treat a friend as another self is always to will the best for the other person for his/her own sake. However, friendship, once made, need tending and nothing replaces time together, in circumstances where other pressures are lifted so that the gates of communication can spring open, allowing free trade to pass between.

Parting: Partings might be endings, or new beginnings; they might be too temporary for the sweet sorrow they are poetically identified with, or, they might leave wounds that either take too long to heal, or never do heal.

The idea of parting of the ways offers a conundrum: you come to the parting, and do not know which road to take in order to reach your destination. You do not know which is, yet you are allowed only one question: what can you ask?

No matter what the circumstances, to part from anything of value, whether people or things, is to forfeit something of oneself. It is as if the other entity has grown into one, suggesting the reason for describing oneself as attached to it. Like the well known lyric:

To leave is to die a little;
It is to die to what one loves;
One leaves behind a little oneself;
At any hour, any place."

Every progression through life is a parting from what went before. Parting do teach us that, to gain you have to give up, that to be alive is to change, and that change involves the death of current so that they can become the past.

Optimistically, we see a fresh beginning in every parting. However, too many beginnings make for few endings. In fact, rather few partings are endings.

The answer to the conundrum of the forked road is: you ask one of the men to point out the road that the other man would say is your route. And then, since the pointed road will be wrong, you take the other road.

The right road is usually clear to anyone who will give some thought to the puzzle of which, among so many wrong roads, is the right one, for truth and falsehood combine to give truth whenever ways reach a parting.



Reference: A.C. Grayling: The Heart of Things.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

dear mave:

Kambing here after a few days' hard day's night2, I feel your philosophical rumination GOoD for sundae's rumination.

But it's o'lady 8AM MOndae, butt no hints of blues.

So today I bollow your ries OK -- vellakum to Furong and I'll serve thee the bestA kambing at Lingam's -- don't bring the CJ, olde or newBye, by and by, buy:)

YL, Desi, knottyaSsusual:) or :(

Unknown said...

it is difficult to have a handle on what is a friend as it is as difficult to describe what is mind.

some of my friends, even cousins, bros and sis have heartaches becos of their friends, family members reaction/helpfulness/helplessness during their predicament / or their time in need.

this is becos they have "set" expectations of how their friends, family members "should" react when they needed help.

what most of us dont realised is different people with different path of live will view friendship differently and will contribute differently and so we should never impose our expectation on them.

i learnt my lesson early in life when i impose my "expectation" of what friends should do or how they should react and how willing they will help in difficult time.

my expectation was a result of our teens-war-cry posturing that say we will stand by each other come fire or hell.

then one day, 2 school bullies came a hassling - i stood up to them - got whacked - another of my fren came to my rescue and both of us got whacked.

the other 10 of my so called buddies stood by the ring side and watch the whole episode without honoring our "pact"

i was bitter for a bit but slowly i realized my mistakes.

from thenceforth i know - in a friendship - we should not impose our expectation.

friends will only give what they can give emotionally and materialistically and we should respect it.

and if we give we should give willingly and unconditionally without expecting the same returns.

if we cant then just dont give and avoid being bitter.

that's why i am not into politics :-)

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Anonymous said...

Soilek is back in MCA, Of course he can reinvent in MCA this time around. He has experience which position is best to go. Mind you MCA members must pay close attention in order to full fill objectives.