In the middle of the week last week, while I was nursing a cold and couldn't sleep because of my sore throat, I came to ask myself which activities simply bring joy to me after a long day at work.
But I couldn't even answer my own question. I checked if my roommate had the same problem. But she immediately pointed out that, to her, watching television gives her a sense of satisfaction before ending a long day.
I have noticed that I have nothing to look forward to after work. To me, it's just routine to go home and sleep. And this is coming from someone who has just gained full-time employment for a little more than six months! I wonder how a wife and a mother would feel during the day. Would she be motivated to finish her tasks at the office efficiently so that she can have a chat with her husband and mentor her kid at home? I wonder.
Then I started to recall what my life was like when I was fresh out of college. If I am kinda dreamy and sentimental now, I was more so six to seven years ago. I lived on Erich Segal's and would be easily affected by the novels that I read, thinking that these books would change or direct my life to a particular path. And I would imagine living the life of one of the characters, usually the lead one, in the stories that I read.
I was pretty idealistic then. Whatever happened to that lady who told herself never to let money overpower her dreams? I have become more materialistic - at some point, I finally understood how shopping can give one some relief; I have become more pragmatic - thinking that I should get a job in an investment bank and be highly compensated for the work that I do. Not that it's wrong though, but more than the compensation, it must still be one's heart, one's passion, that should direct one's life, with hopes that one will be compensated well. Usually, money will follow if you love the work that you do. I would like to believe so.
I once told myself when I was younger, that my personal legacy would be to become someone who simply pursues what she desires, regardless of what most people choose to say or believe - that one should achieve financial stability, get a stable career, etc. To my thinking then, we're all bound to some stability - personal or material - towards the latter part of our lives so why hurry. Let's enjoy life while we can, even to the point of being reckless at times (while we still can afford it).
So there I was, one night, chatting with my roommate while at the back of my mind, reconsidering my purpose of going back to Manila and leaving a financially better-off life in Singapore when I can't even go back to the lifestyle of my youth (six to seven years back in Manila).
So I started with an activity that would excite me to go home after work. And I thought one of the things that give me joy is reading a book that would keep me engrossed. Every now and then, I find books that I can easily relate with, depending on my emotional state. Last year in June, it was Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert.
This time, it would be One Day by David Nicholls. I just got lucky to have spotted the book's cover before I left Fully Booked last Saturday. My weekend was fulfilling - I got to finish watching Love in the Time of Cholera and got to start reading One Day.
Maybe, I am getting older (and maturing?). I once fancied crazy night outs and nerve-wracking moments. I used to think life without major ups and lows is simply boring. Nowadays, it seems that I am slowly yearning for calmness and serenity in life. I once told someone, when a friend brought up the topic of faith, that to me, true faith actually happens after all the emotional high or euphoria of praising the Father has died down and you're still left with your calm self, praising the Lord, this time becoming more aware of your current state of being. In short, I am saying that you cannot just make the excuse that you were simply carried away by your strong emotions.
I'm finally done reading the book. And I'm sharing excerpts of the novel that struck me - those personal thoughts that I think were better articulated by the author.
Excerpt from One Day by David Nicholls:
And they did have fun, though it was a different kind now. All that yearning and anguish and passion had been replaced by a steady pulse of pleasure and satisfaction and occasional irritation, and this seemed to be a happy exchange; if there had been moments in her life when she had been more elated, there had never been a time when things had been more constant.
Sometimes, she thought, she missed the intensity, not just of their romance, but of the early days of their friendship. She remembered writing ten-page letters late into the night; insane, passionate things full of dopey sentiment and barely hidden meanings, exclamation marks and underlining. For a while she had written daily postcards too, on top of the hour-long phone calls just before bed. That time in the flat in Dalston when they had stayed up talking and listening to records, only stopping when the sun began to rise, or at his parents' house swimming in the river on New Year's Day, or that afternoon drinking absinthe in the secret bar in Chinatown; all of these moments and more were recorded and stored in notebooks and letters and wads of photographs, endless photographs. There was a time, it must have been in the early nineties, when they were barely able to pass a photo-booth without cramming inside it, because they had yet to take each other's permanent presence for granted.
But to just look at someone, to just sit and look and talk and then realise that it’s morning? Who had the time or inclination or energy these days to stay up talking all night? What would you talk about? Property prices? She used to long for those midnight phone calls; these days if a phone rang late at night it was because there had been an accident, and did they really need more photographs when they knew each other’s faces so well, when they had shoeboxes full of that stuff, an archive of nearly twenty years? Who writes long letters in this day and age, and what is there to care so much about?
She sometimes wondered what her twenty-two-year-old self would think of today's Emma Mayhew. Would she consider her self-centered? Compromised? A bourgeois sell-out, with her appetite for home ownership and foreign travel, clothes from Paris and expensive haircuts? Would she find her conventional, with her new surname and hopes for a family life? Maybe, but then the twenty-two-year-old Emma Morley wasn't such a paragon either: pretentious, petulant, lazy, speechifying, judgmental. Self-pitying, self-righteous, self-important, all of the selfs except self-confident, the quality that she always needed most.
No, this, she felt, was real life, and if she wasn’t as curious or passionate as she once had been, that was only to be expected. It would be inappropriate, undignified, at thirty-eight, to conduct friendship or love affairs with the ardour and intensity of a twenty-two-year-old. Falling in love like that? Writing poetry, crying at pop songs? Dragging people into photo booths, taking a whole day to make a compilation tape, asking people if they wanted to share your bed, just for company? If you quoted Bob Dylan or T.S. Eliot or, God forbid, Brecht at someone these days they would smile politely and step quietly backwards, and who would blame them? Ridiculous, at thirty-eight, to expect a song or book or film to change your life. No, everything had evened out and settled down and life was lived against a general background hum of comfort , satisfaction and familiarity. There would be no more of those nerve-jangling highs and lows. The friends they had now would be the friends they had in five , ten, twenty years' time. They expected to get neither dramatically richer nor poorer; they expected to stay healthy for a little while yet. Caught in the middle; middle class, middle-aged; happy in that they were not over happy.
Finally, she loved someone and felt fairly confident that she was loved in return.
