Parental Guidance

Warning: Do not be too Extreme after reading this.

I have just turned thirty-three a few hours earlier. The unbelief that time really zoomed through space leaving nobody noticing any trace unless one take some precious moments to stop whatever mundane businesses of these world to stop and look deeply at those paths that had been walked and many turns that one about to take.

Many say that life is full of ups and downs, well, I would add my past life was full of extreme ups and extreme downs. With both parents working, I have extreme freedom since I was a kid, and I spent a free happy childhood with my two brothers playing “catching and hide and seek”, marbles, climbing bars and walls of carparks, playing soccer with the aim to smash someone’s shopfront, graduating to freestyle cycling with my younger brother. Those were the extreme happy times, only ended with an extreme down time where I experienced a first death of a cycling buddy we had. Till now, I still remembered his eyes.

School was a chore then when I wanted to grow up quickly and earn some money. However, as problematic as I was, like being punished for dirty shoes, “ponteng” to earn some bucks as a golf caddie, and an incident which smeared my heart and indented my mentality then to swerve more towards to extreme, I always managed to handle the subjects well and finished the O levels. Maybe this point would be the turn before the extreme downward drop started.

The spiral started when I worked in a nightclub then while waiting for Os. I had my first drink, a brandy, first cigarette, Marlboro and gamble, though I was not very keen then. I got into Poly, but not for long, the poly or me become a soccer ball that got kicked out for not attending lessons and exams. “What the use of studying anyway?” was the voice that kept banging my head then.

Eventually, this wayward kid went down a path to a looming dungeon. All known, weed was the key that opened a life of careless living that turned into a police and thief game where the police always win. Faced with the opening doors of the dungeon life, I held my sunken heart hoping it would be the end of the extreme down.

Every inmate knew that there were two things that would bring you to the lowest dungeons. One is falling sick and die in there or someone you loved decided to leave this world without a chance to say goodbye. I touched that walls of that dungeon and stayed there for many months before I could actually see a little light forward. I love my mum.

The light guide me to self-study in there and eventually got a dream place in SMUgging Marathon. I wondered what kept me going throughout the marathon, it was a sense of hunger or maybe the survival instinct bred in the dungeons, of me wanting a better tomorrow where I did not even dare to think of during the fugitive years. I was living a dream.

I crossed the finishing line of SMUgging Marathon and now about to start on a career. A good friend said that I had come a full journey home, though a long one climbing away from the deepest dungeons since. I am extremely happy.

Paths taken are your guide to choose the turns before you. Some looks easy like a straight road to heaven, some need to climb over huge mountains, but you never know which one is the right one to happiness. It is easy to turn back for the familiarity of the past but you know you cannot just stop and stand there and let time zoom away. You got to take a turn.

So on this fine day that I am thirty three, I realized that I need to feel hungry again, to be hungry for finding paths and turns that would make me smile when I looked back and say to myself, “ it was all worth it”, unlike those times looking back would meant silent tears. I need to plan and start dreaming again. The light would always be my guide.

Happy Birthday to me.

Jimmy BOH