for all its worth, it was worth all the while

Sometimes I wonder if it's all that much worth it.
For all the times, the joys, the friendships and ties that bond.
So much has changed, so little has stayed the same in the passage of time.
For now it's a fine ground between what I really want and how I know it can benefit old friendships.

You never needed me there in the first place.
And that trust I had in the friendship was just washed away in the trickling stream of time.

Things change.
People change.
Mindsets change.

And for all it's worth, it was worth all the while.

I have people I trust, people I know really take me for who I am.
And maybe I enjoy their company cause I don't have to try so hard.
Try so hard to what?
That, I'm not exactly sure.
To what ends, I ask.
For that, I have yet to find an answer.

of the freedom of choice

I once heard in agama class on the official stance of freedom of choice in Islam. The question was: Do humans have the freedom of choice?

Most of us in class said, yup, totally.
Our reasoning was:
We can choose to do good, and choose to do bad, only we'd have to face up to the consequences as well. Like let's say (hypothetically) we'd decide to go clubbing the night before our final A level paper. We'd have short term fun, and like, totally screw up the paper the next day. A consequence we'd have to face. Of course, lucky smart ones can do both. They're the few that are truly blessed.


But our ustaz then told us that Islam is brought to us such that there are guidelines that us humans have to do so as not to harm ourselves. And constantly move in a direction that would bring out the best in ourselves.

So by reasoning that out, we'd have the freedom to choose how we'd like to spend our time, resources, wealth and energy in the domain of "good". Like you can do a million things with your free time. Just don't waste it off.

We can't choose to do bad, because that would mean doing something useless and harmful to us, and we'd have to face the repercussions.

This idea kinda stuck to me, but I didn't really understand it totally until recently, when I tried considering our choices we face on this earth. Like, why do we choose to face the consequences in the first place, and to be subjected to such guidelines or repurcussions?


And then it came to me... that that's cause we never actually HAD a choice in the first place. We couldn't choose to be born into this earth, and we didn't have a choice when we faced Allah as the first time as souls, and acknowledged His presence as our Creator.


In the larger picture, we were never given a choice.

Following this, we are in this earth because Allah wills us to be here, we're forever indebted to Him, and would have to follow the guidelines He has brought to us.

It's that simple, and scary at the same time. Because as much as we want to be in control, we're only in control of our lives in a way that we can put in effort towards a certain direction, and we should very much have faith that our efforts will pay off but at the same time that He has overall control over our lives, our destiny.


And then we realise that freedom of choice, like many other things thought up by man and his (usually secular) intellectual constructs, is merely a western concept that can only be used in the miniscule region of "goodness" that has been given to us by Allah.



So which direction would you choose?

The pain of stepping forward

And so I turned down yet another direct sales job again. There's too many, I tell you, people clamouring to train you to sell their products, with promises that you'd be given the best training, in the best corporate environment. Some with a lot of genuity in their tone, others with a slight sharp edge even years of training to be a suave salesman cannot remove. AND THEY DON'T ACTUALLY TELL YOU IN THE AD THAT ITS DIRECT SALES.

The person could have been a little lighter on his I-don't-think-you're-really-cut-out-for-this-at-all tone though. I mean, I might be able to totally describe to you in excrutiatingly clear detail what I understand your company does if not for my hesitancy in applying for the job and your painfully vague website.

Even my mom tells me I'm not cut of for sales. You'd need to have patience, a lot of it (and she says this extremely pointedly) apart from the polished speech right from the beginning. The ability to understand the customer's concerns, at every turn of speech, and turn around the sales in your favour.

The truth is I'd always admired businesspeople. The tenacity, positiveness, confidence that they exude, their guts and charisma.

And I know I'd wanna learn more about business. I've been telling myself that for so long.

And I know I'd wanna set up my own social enterprise someday giving work to people who badly need it. And train them if need be.

Idealistic, I know.

And another truth about me is that I do love getting myself into new situations. Drama, debates and whodahelloads else in JC, ODAC and dikir in secondary school, looking back I've always been very much into personal development and growth. I mean, I may have totally screwed up my first emceeing for HEARTSOUT and second for drama (which they told me like 30 mins before the show and wrote out my speech right then!) but I learnt and moved on. I may have sucked on the job, I hated admin work, gritted my teeth through bitchy people I've met, but in all it was all for good. I mean, we were in SCHOOL. Nobody cares if you screwed up your part on the presentation, flunked a really important paper, embarrassed myself in front of the class for saying something totally off the board or messed up bad in trying to make yet another out of point point.

My point is, I hate shoeboxing myself in. I've a whole lot of experience in a varied lot of things, but I don't exactly need to parade it in my resume or prove it to my friends or every single person I meet.

I hate being told what to be, what to do, how to do things just because I have a life sciences degree. I want to be able to do a million and one things and be good at them.

I wanna be able to live by my own ideals. And at the end of my life, know that I've lived a meaningful one and would have made the people around me better, and my parents proud.

I'd also want to know what I'm really really good at.

And about sales, maybe I'm just a wuss for not being able to have the guts to sell.
But maybe too I actually care about whether my target client actually needs the product as badly I would have to make it seem.
And maybe I'd like to actually believe that the product would make their lives really that much better for what I'd sell it for.

And maybe I'd like to actually devote my time learning so that I could actually make a product that would make lives really that much better.

Am I being too idealistic, or is this actually called living out my dreams?