a daylight dream

The world surrounding us frequently nips safety away from us; we constantly fear getting fired from our jobs, not sustaining our lifestyle, getting bad grades at school or even get mocked by others for our views and opinions. These cues shatter our sense of safety, making us afraid, in perpetual worry and doubt of what tomorrow will bring. Personally, I’ve been raised to fear life. I’d always hear advice like: “prepare for the bad days”, “expect the worst”, “life is hard” , etc. I’m not saying that those pieces of advice are irrelevant— no, they reflect truth in miscellaneous ways, only the fact that they instil so much fear is what I don’t agree upon. In retrospect, I wonder about the root cause of my anxiety and think: is it because my mind is unconsciously befuddled with this fear? Though it’s substantially better, I do often fall into lapses of being scared from growing up, becoming an adult and having to face such ridiculous situations and be traumatised by them, like the...

You tell me I grit my teeth while I sleep and often clutch at the skin of my arms unconsciously, murmur inaudibly in my dreams some time after midnight, just before the dawn breaks in the short summer nights. You tell me I must be dreaming of bemusing things; ones that add up to the list of questions already bustling in my head. I wake up unknowing of the events of my night, but you’re a patient evening-listener, unwilling to sleep as you organise your erratic thoughts and pay attention to the voices in your head. The distance between us is measured in the appreciated proximity that allows us to part in distinct parts of the day, wandering purposefully in our dreams and inner universes. It’s often quite ironic how at the same time, we could be miles away yet intimately close in the instinctive pleasure our thoughts of each other bring. We are companions of soul, understanding the fluctuations in our dispositions; ones that we had spent so much time paying attention to, ...

Since the beginning of the second semester, I’ve been involved more and more at work, letting it take up most of my time in proportion to my university courses. Of course, it’s beneficial and an impacting experience that revealed a lot in terms of who I am and what I’d like to end up in the future. I won’t say that I will surely become a teacher but, the idea is highly appealing now. In the past, I thought teaching was such a mediocre career that would never water my thirst for ambition and greatness. It’s true that teaching can become a sedentary job, but it doesn’t have to be. The past few months proved to me how much eye-opening it can be designed to be. Teaching is not about being a teacher, because if we really thought about it so stereotypically, it would become “spoon-feeding”, basically. The authority teachers have in the classroom sometimes allows them to forget the purpose of what they’re doing, and we humans are inclined to put ourselves in control. But this isn...