What exactly is the peace we wish to achieve in our lives?
Stripping away all obligations and responsibilities and looking at our dreams at its rawest form without an ounce of second guessing; what do we hope for?
The adventures we crave for, the lifestyles we're intrigued by - the desires we have in our head right now are all bound to change, everything merely a reflection of our current joys and afflictions. But I feel that these passing winds, these easily swayed wants, these products of thoughts are the most interesting to ponder on. It might end up surprising you what your heart whispers to your head at your highest highs and lowest lows.
I bought a new book recently, Haruki Murakami's Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. I've been eyeing this book for so many months and finally brought myself to buy it because I had no other priorities to spend my time and 80 bucks on. The things I could do with 80 bucks.
Just like in most of his books, the characters have a similar need for solitariness. They're all tied down by routines that they make it key to follow, almost like the shift from one time slot to another was a religion that needed to be worshipped. They all wake up, fix themselves simple meals or have not much of a want to have meals at all apart from a cup or coffee or juice and slices of plain bread, spend their free time listening to classical or jazz music and enjoy walks around the neighbourhood in the evenings. They're always enveloped by a calm thats so still its almost suffocating for me to imagine.
But it's intriguing really.
I've always wondered on an alternative way to spend my days if I were alone. Taking away the need for a job or even the existence of money. An imaginary realm where I could do whatever I wanted, however I wanted it, without having to worry about a time limit or a shortage of resources.
Shoot me for imagining all this in a setting that does not seem to resemble Malaysia one bit.
I would travel to little towns. Towns with cramped shop lots and washed out tar roads, whistling tunes twinkling in the air and lots of greens. I would town-hop (I suppose I should call it that) spending a few weeks in each tiny confined town, spending most of my time in a public library on some days and walking out of town on other days, jotting down the things I've learnt once I reach a little room I've rented to spend my nights.
I've always wondered - if I was surrounded by this quietness and this lack of distraction, how far could I push my limits? Could I actually be an author, finding blooming bliss at watching blank pages being filled up with words boiling out of my head from the pressure of having a writing style that screams individuality? Because I've never written anything original of my own longer than a 2134 word fan fiction, and honestly that was such a long time ago that I read it back wondering how 14 year old me could sit still and come up with all that content. I can barely make it through 500 words now without feeling like my stories are going no where and I end up watching YouTube videos instead followed by the speeding of my uneventful holidays.
When I get back to a city, I imagine my apartment being white and organised. In other words, in my dreams I imagine myself being less of a messy wreck that my parents label as me being a "FAILED WOMAN". I mean, I can be neat for a week, like, that's pretty long.
My apartment wouldn't have a coffee machine because I like Milo so my kitchen would have a nice little water heater next to a cute pastel mug rack placed under a cupboard filled to the brim with packets of Milo powder. I would have a portion of my kitchen dedicated to different types of bread because I love bread too and I love them wholemeal.
I've always wanted a green potted plant on a white table too because that's a nice backdrop for me to uniform my Instagram feed so I'll have that in my hall.
Again, I want to spend most of my times dwelling in books. If it's a novel, heavy literary fiction that blurs the line between what we know and what we think we know - emotional yet logical stuff that really make you think, in simpler words. I want to spend my evenings and nights like the characters in Murakami's books. Roaming the neighbourhoods - the silent alleys between houses and the bustling streets down town, the empty playgrounds and the packed coffee shops. If I had all the time in the world, I would spend hours walking or sitting in each of these places. I would look at the sky and watch the people that walk past me, soft melodies from my earphones dancing around my eardrums. I would write down every little thing I notice. I would sit next to lonely people I see around me and make new friends. I would write about that person as well.
I would go back to my apartment and look at what I've written and link them up together like society was one huge experiment. Investigative journalism where I investigate the mechanism of human beings. If everything was quiet, if I had no distractions, would I see something that everyone had been missing? Would I be able to answer unanswered questions?
Who knows?
All I know is that all these dreams, these wants, these desires, these hopes - right now, that's all that they are to it. I can't imagine a point in my life where I would be able to find this lack of distraction, abundance of freedom and non-existence of time. But I do have visions that I can adapt into them, and I'm looking forward to living them out despite the differences that are vividly going to be there.
There's always a beauty in uncertainty and spontaneousness. To me, that's something that needs to be found by each and every one of us. We need to have that realisation that dreams don't always come true but we can change them and still find what we're looking for.
We're alive because we've been given the chance to make our life our kind of perfect, right?
