Sigh, nothing is constant in life. Everything changes everyday. It's human fallacy to believe that there are permanence in life, that something in life will stay the same forever.
YY and i used to talk about the transience of life (人生无常), whereby we knew that life that seems to be going well at this minute may pretty well just take a sharp turn at the very next minute. One moment you are on the top of the world, the next you may just fall into hell.
When we talked about this, we were only referring to our career and financial situation. We never really realised that even our relationship and his love for me would change. We had thought that our love is gonna last a lifetime, despite knowing that nothing stays the same forever. How ironic that is.
Yet the events in life will really give you a knock on the head, so that we will face the reality and wake up to the fact that no one is spared in this aspect.
Last evening, i was feeling miserable after the video conference with US counterpart. I took a cab home and again the cab driver chatted up with me (i always met cab drivers who like to chat with me!). He told me to direct him the route, as he was new to driving cab, just started one week ago in fact.
He told me that he has a daytime job actually, but due to economic downturn, he suffered a pay cut from $2.5K per month to $1.5K per month. So in order to cover the loss of monthly income (he probably has family commitment), he has to drive cab in the night for 7 hours (from 8pm to 3am) and sacrifices his sleeping hours. He sounded cheerful nevertheless, saying that he was fortunate that it was just a pay cut and not retrenchment, so he at least still has a job. He also said that despite the income from driving cab nowadays is not as good as the old times already, at least he manages to make ends meet with this additional income.
What he told me hit me actually; while i was immersing in my self-pity, there's someone out here who's working hard to support his family and never gives up on life. I know that we should not compare sufferings; i mean, after all, everyone is different. We have different life experiences and the level of endurance is also different. So what seems to be insignificant to one person may be the end of the world for another.
Yet, this does tell me that there's always way to make life the way we want it to be. All we have to do is just to seek for it and do it, even if it means that we will have to live through difficulties to get what we hope for life. Life is suffering indeed, but we can make a choice on what we want out of all these sufferings at the end of the day.
On a related note, the life event of this cab driver reaffirms my belief that we get to choose how we earn our money. YY had justified that woman working in a sexual-related job with her sad story, saying that none of us know how pitiful she is, and probably she is very "noble" in doing the job that she does not like because she needs money to feed her poor family. He has the utmost sympathy and admiration for her "perseverance" and "sacrifices" that she made for her family... bla bla bla...
But then, it's back to the same thing as what i said before, there are things that you do for money, but there are things that you do not. I've known China women in SG here who worked two jobs at hawker centers for their family back home, whose stories may be hundred times more heart-wrenching than YY's mistress. Yet they chose a different ways to earn their money.
The same for this cab driver; getting the pay cut was not something he could control, but how to cover the loss of income to make sure his family can still live the same life is definitely something he can choose. There are always indecent ways to earn fast and easy money, but is that something that you want to do for money?
To be born in a poor family and not having the opportunity to be highly educated or build a promising career are not something we can choose, but we do get to choose how to overcome these unfavourable conditions in life. The question is just that do we choose to do it with dignity, in the right and good way, or do we choose another path that disregard everything else just for money but disguise it with the noble reason of "i'm doing this for my family"? That really goes to show what kind of persons such people are and what the priority is in their lives, but then countless of foolish men still keep falling for it. And in the end, let those foolish men reap what they sow.
On the same token, i gotta tell myself too that i get to choose how my life wanna be. It is not of my choice to have my beloved 贝 changed so much into the heartless YY, and i just gotta accept that this is the way it is already. Yes, i am hurt deeply, i am depressed, and i lost my husband, my marriage, my dream world, my trust in love, my money and my home. But i still have so many more other things that i should treasure. I can continue on in licking my wound and whine about it as one of the stages of the healing process, but that gotta stop at some point of time and move on to the next stage.
And i know it won't be long already.
Labels: introspection, opinion
