trisected

Tag: personal

  • a day at a time

    Woke up early today to go sketching at a mall, and it was interesting to think about many things I’ve gone through in life. I’ve had a lot of near death incidences since I was young, not by anyone’s fault, just some bad luck in some sense.

    At the end of each of those moments, life seemed to rolled on immediately, because I had no visible scars, or nothing really showing the close shave.

    I was recounting this to a friend, but I remember the people who have passed before. There’s nothing to show anymore even, because they’re not here. But the pains of the memories are still there. It’s hard to go on sometimes. But we just have to go on with it.

    Remembering the days, the memories of before. And now living a day at a time.

  • Multiple Directions

    I’ve been told the need to focus, more than once. It’s not easy to a lot of the time. I just get really bored sometimes, in the middle of a single thing. Maybe because I put on this laser focus of sorts, and I can’t multi-task at that time. But the moment I lose that focus, I suddenly run in five different directions, as if my mind is taking revenge for being held captive for that one task for that long.

    I think the best way to explain it is how I can run long distance quite happily, but half way through the run, my mind starts to plan the next week ahead, I recap the past week and the things I had done, I start to look at my breathing and my footwork, I’m still listening to an audio book or podcast through this time.

    I’m still running, but then all of a sudden my body is just moving, but my mind is just not there anymore.

    Imagine this scenario for every part of life. Like half way cooking, I think of what it means to travel through time and space. I was just slicing onions seconds ago, and my brain said, hey what about theory of relativity. Thankfully, I still finish cooking and I actually don’t hurt myself. But man, I need to pull myself back so much.

    So when it comes to art, I feel like one medium is never enough. I feel like visual arts, music, writing, they’re all pulling me out of bed everyday, making me do more and more with them. I try my best to feed their crazy appetites of my attention and energy, but there’s only one me, and there’s only 24 hours in a day.

    I’m really being pulled in multiple directions, and sometimes, it’s fun to just let myself not go anywhere, in rebellion to all the creativity around. I just read, play games, and take naps. I actually hate doing that the most.

    Today started out with that, just chilling and not doing anything, and now it’s ending with a blog post. Because I just can’t help myself, I gotta do something, in one direction or another.

  • Be Myself

    How does one approach personal growth and understanding? One of the hardest things that any artist actually has to do is finding their own style and their own feel. The artists have to deal with this as part of their occupational stand, they have to express themselves in the most personal way possible. But it’s something that we all have to deal with actually.

    How do you know what is you, and what is not you? We’ve got different influences, but we have to navigate how much of the influence has become part of us.

    For example, I’m born in Singapore, but I’ve been influenced by the British Colonial powers that once were. So because of that I express the best with English. Does that mean that I’m English? Not necessarily. But it’s become part of who I am. And that’s ok, it’s fine.

    Hobbies add to this too, and currently with the keyboard things, I’m really part electrical engineer. I’m able to now see more electrical based things, like circuit boards, and the wiring and stuff like that. It doesn’t make me less of Joel, but I’m getting more level ups, and more skill equips.

    But was it part of me already? Like was I this way before this? I think that I might not have gotten a chance to experiment with it before, but my inquisitive nature was always there. Now I just dare to take more things apart, and put more things back together.

    So being myself would have led me down this path anyway. That’s an approach I currently take, “What else is part of who I am?” And I just keep adding on more to who I am instead.

  • Creating for Me

    There are some days when I wake up and think about all the random projects that I have done, even this blog. And I wonder why or who am I writing all this for? There might be one or two people coming in to read, or to see because they were linked to it from before, but really, it’s not that much.

    So at the end of the day, I’m making for me. Am I interested in the things that I’m making? Because if I’m not, then what’s going to to keep me going in the stuff that I do? Because of that, I find that my content that I created is very closely linked to the hobbies that I’m interested in doing. I don’t have that deep drive that pushes just because. I would like that yes, but I find that my hobbies push my content, and along with that, when I feel like I have nothing I’m wholeheartedly interested about, I don’t create anything.

    I enjoy the processing of making things. I really do. I like putting my thoughts out on these posts; I really like drawing and seeing lines form an image; it’s therapeutic. Maybe its cathartic. It’s the feelings of excitement deep down inside me that is spilling over, and I desperately want tell everyone everything that I currently know about the topic that I’m reading up about.

    And at the same time, I only want to tell me. I want to hear myself saying the things that I already know, and I want to see what I have been thinking about, and to applaud myself a job well done. I have become my own echo chamber, and honestly I’m quite okay with that. Because at the end of the day, if I do work that is for someone else’s approval, I end up being reliant on people for what they think.

    But I think I really just need to finish the Seth Godin book about Tribes. It might be great to find my tribe. Until then, I’ll just be making for me.