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Being the fish in a really big ocean

Surround yourself with the highest-calibre people you can. In this environment, you become both highly accomplished, but don’t view it as important both because it’s normal, and because it’s humbling how much better so many of your peers are at thing than you are.

How to do this? Don’t seek adulation and respect, because the easiest way to get that is to choose a pond small enough that you can be a big fish. Seek the biggest hardest pond you can, such that you struggle merely to not lag too far behind. This will haul you forward further and faster than you could otherwise manage, and simultaneously ensures you have enough perspective that it doesn’t go to your head.

Side by side, the tiny fish in the big pond is bigger than the “big” fish in the small pond, but unlike the big fish, knows how small he really is, having swam in the ocean.

Run with the big fish. Hang out with the kind of people you talk about. Hang out with the kind of people that they hang out with. Not just socially – get involved in projects or collaborations with them. Become their peers, though you may involve struggling to keep up.

Struggling to keep up is how you grow, and in growing, you find you can handle adversity. And in learning that you have the resources to handle adversity gives you that calm self-assurance.

Forgetting

“It was a little like Into the Sands, with Claude Barron, which she’d seen a couple of weeks ago. In that picture Claude Barron enlists in the Foreign Legion because Rita Carrol marries another guy. The other guy turns out to be a cheater and drinker, and so Rita Carrol leaves him and travels out to the desert where Claude Barron if fighting the Arabs. By the time Rita Carrol gets there he’s in the hospital, wounded, or not a hospital really but just a tent and she tells him she loves him and Claude Barron says, “I went into the desert to forget about you. But the sand was the color of your hair. The desert sky was the color of your eyes. There was nowhere I could go that wouldn’t be you.” And then he dies. Tessie cried buckets. Her mascara ran, staining the collar of her blouse something awful. ”

-Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides

Where our hopes and dreams come true

Tonight, I am prouder of my club than I have ever been.

I am unspeakably proud over what we’ve achieved over the last few years. How we’ve rebuilt ourselves, to become better and stronger. How we gutted ourselves from the inside out to re-establish ourselves on the shooting scene, to show everyone that we were a force to be reckoned with. How we endured the torturous training sessions to be back on top again.

Today, we showed everyone that Hwa Chong is back.

If I am hyperbolic, it is because what we’ve done in the past few days has defied imagination.

-

C’Div Boys Rifle – Gold

C’Div Boys Pistol – Bronze

B’Div Boys Rifle – Bronze

B’Div Boys Pistol – Silver

A’Div Boys Rifle – Gold

A’Div Boys Pistol – Bronze

A’Div Girls Rifle – Gold

A’Div Girls Pistol – 9th

-

Of these, the A’Div Boys Pistol medal and the A’Div Girls Pistol placing means the most to me. We’ve waited so long for this day. We promised ourselves that one day, it would be our time in the limelight, that the promised day would come. And it finally did. Words fail me. I can only say this – that I was utterly glad and nostalgic that that I was there to witness this.

Their medal win will undoubtedly mean a lot to the shooters, but for my batch of pistol shooters, this carries another meaning altogether. It is the sum total of all our efforts to mould this club and make the pistol division a viable one, when from the get-go it was merely a bastard child. By laying the groundwork for this team, by pushing for everything we could, by fighting for attention in training, we did all we could to make sure this team would grow. Our contribution to this club did not lie in our medal wins, however meagre they were. Too, they did not lie in our mentorship and guidance of our juniors, I admit. No, they lie merely in the setting of that critical first step. So this day, is the ultimate vindication of our efforts and faith in them.

This day, history has been made. They have not failed us. This day has been a long time coming, but it has come. And there will be many days just like it to come.

-

Though they will never read this, I wish I was capable of elegant and grandiose prose to immortalize what they’ve done. To the juniors:

You’ve made everything we’ve worked for possible. You’ve showed everyone that we can make this work, if only we try hard enough. You’ve realized our dreams, beyond our wildest imaginations.

And for that, I can only offer you this: thank you.

At the -

Red string, pomelo leaves, jossticks.

Because no one should have to do it alone.

Click, thud

You remember how the lens squeezed
unimportant details into stillness:
the essential trail of rain down glass,
the plummet of autumn dead leaves,
your grandfather’s last blink when
the breath moved on.
Your startled hands compressed
the shutter when you realized: this is it,
this is the last movement he will take
away from the silent fall of morphine,
beyond the soft gasp of the nurse,
past the sick, slow thud of your heart
moving in the luminous silence.

-How to Photograph the Heart, by Christine Klocek-Lim

Everything is possible again

Browsing in Borders earlier, I came across Jonathan Safran Foer’s new book on his journey in vegetarianism. He writes that on the birth of his son, a friend commented that “everything is possible again”.

While this quote is not attributable to Foer, it nonetheless speaks powerfully to me of hope – hope that with a new beginning the slate is wiped clean, and a new journey begins; a marker that the past is left behind.

Ah. Maybe a little too sentimental, then.

Staying, going

My house says to me, “Do not leave me, for here dwells your past.”
And the road says to me, “Come and follow me, for I am your future.”
And I say to both my house and the road, “I have no past, nor have I a future. If I stay here, there is a going in my staying; and if I go there is a staying in my going. Only love and death will change all things.”

-Sand and Foam, a poem by Gibran Khalil Gibran

The paradox of money, credit and debt

In a sleepy European holiday resort town in a depressed economy and therefore no visitors, there is great excitement when a wealthy Russian guest appears in the local hotel reception, announces that he intends to stay for an extended period and places a €100 note on the counter as surety while he demands to be shown the available rooms.

While he is being shown the room, the hotelier takes the €100 note round to his butcher, who is pressing for payment. The butcher in turn pays his wholesaler who, in turn, pays his farmer supplier.

The farmer takes the note round to his favourite “good time girl” to whom he owes €100 for services rendered. She, in turn, rushes round to the hotel to settle her bill for rooms provided on credit.

In the meantime, the Russian returns to the lobby, announces that no rooms are satisfactory, takes back his €100 note and leaves, never to be seen again.

No new money has been introduced into the local economy, but everyone’s debts have been settled.

More

On Love

I hope that one day you will have the experience of doing something you do not understand for someone you love.

-Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer

On dying, and memory

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

-Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut