What if I could see a day through the eyes of God?

 

A Sabbath Morning Meditation.

What if I could see a day through the eyes of God? I wonder, what would I see...?

I guess I would see the beginning of dawn, the first light of day. And I would see everything is uncovered by the light. From the darkest corner to the edge of the expanding universe, light chasing light, nothing escapes His sight.

I would see the rich and the poor, and everyone in between. I would see them taking their first and last step, their first and last breath. I would also see their lives stripped bare, nothing is hidden, beyond humanity’s thoroughfare.

I would see the fig leaves they cover themselves with; some are made of royal cloth, others are worn and torn. But, whatever the coverage, they all return to the buried soil just the same. Naked they come, naked they go. God sees them all. 

I would also see their struggles, the rich and the poor, with success and failure. I would see them paying the same price for it, the price of a heart unsettled, unhinged. 

Through God’s eyes, I would see the rich building their babelian towers. I would see the sweat of many offered up at the altar for those crowned at the top. I would see their ambitions, their hunger, their turmoil and pain. I would see their desires to race to the top, some striving to be god. 

Maybe at this point, God’s sight would take a subtle turn and allow me to see their desires through their own eyes. And I would see what they see, and see that the more they possess, the more they see what they want to see rather than what they need to see. 

Alas, at the speed they are travelling, everything around them is a blur. I could see that too, though it’s a sight of limited clarity. And I could also see many being pulled by the undertow, driven and riven by a chaos from within they can’t fathom or control. 

Well, at this time, I could see the poor too. I could see that their lives are largely defined by what others have and what they don’t have. It is an existential gap they are constantly struggling to bridge; most times, in vain. 

But here’s where the sight of the rich and the poor converges. They are driven by what they want to see, not what they need to see. And their drive is fueled by the same heart, a heart that is never enough, unanchored too.

And yes, I would also see how they live. Between the rich and the poor, the contrast is heartbreaking. 

I would see their worries, their anxieties. I would see their tears. I would see babies left to die. I would see the innocent groping for justice and the guilty escaping from it. I would see wars, in homes and in public. I would see daily abuses and grief unspeakable. I would also see those who take their own lives, by the reassuring nudge of death, and that moment they take their last breath. 

Peering into what God sees, the light of dawn indeed unravels all. Nothing is hidden. Not the pain nor the sorrow, neither the grief nor the joyless tomorrow. 

But at every corner of despair, I would also catch a flickering light. Even in sheer darkness, the light still shines, refusing to give up. And I sense this is the part of the day where the tears of God turn into rivers of hope. This is the part where the light of righteousness uncovers what the heart longs to see, or needs to see.

This longing opens my eyes to a world where the darkness is wavering because the light is unwavering. A world where the darkness is retreating because the light is advancing. 

At this point, the first light of creation becomes clearer. I could see that it is doing His work, pressing on, never letting up. I also see hope rising and pain overcoming. Most of all, I would see lives restored and reconciled, over a lifetime. For even the shadow of death gives way to what is resurrected light. And as I behold it, I tell myself, “Oh, what wondrous sight!”

As the world is unveiled, through His eyes, I see the struggle to finish the good race is unyielding. Light and darkness pitting against each other, but darkness eventually bowing to the light. Indeed, at this point, the horror of the fallen has given way to the awe of the risen. 

I guess that is what I would see in a world fallen into darkness. It is a world illuminated by the light. A world struggling towards the light. A world redeemed by His love through the eyes of His son. 

Indeed, from the heights of Golgotha, I see the world through His eyes. I see what he meant when he said it is finished. His finished work is taking the world towards the clarity of a new morning. Through the lens of Calvary, I see enduring hope emerging.

And amidst the chaos and darkness, the first light of dawn has always been there. It has never left. We are not forgotten. We are all held together by it. That first light that unravels all. That first light that enables me to see what the eyes of God see, and so much more.

And that light is still doing the good work. It is still journeying with us. For no matter how dark the night, it still shines. For the darker the night, the brighter the light. And it pierces the darkness to light even the darkest night. 

Like a lamp unto my feet, it is enough for me to take that first step of faith, followed by the next step, and the next, until I finally see the full light of Day. It’s hope undimmed. It’s truth unfolding. It’s love unyielding. 

Indeed, while my flesh and my heart may fail, but He is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

 

A requiem for a lost civilisation?

 

A requiem for a happier civilization?

Anthropologist James Suzman has been studying the lives of the Ju/‘hoansi people of the north-western Kalahari for 30 years. What he discovered is a more contented time in the past where people are happier, with less wants, and more time to enjoy the simple things in life. 

From the Ju/‘hoansi people’s point of view, James wrote that “very little about the relentlessly expanding global economy makes sense”. And they once asked James these questions: -

“Why did government officials who sat in air-conditioned offices drinking coffee and chatting all day long get paid so much than the young men they sent out to dig ditches?”

Or, “Why, when people were paid for their work, did they still go back the following day rather than enjoy the fruits of their labour?”

“And why did people work so hard to acquire more wealth than they could ever possibly need or enjoy?”

I guess ignorance here is bliss. With more understanding, the tribal folks will come to see that our world works very differently from theirs. While the Ju/‘hoansi “spent only fifteen hours a week securing their nutritional requirements and only a further fifteen to twenty hours per week on domestic activities that could be loosely described as “work”, we in the modern world work more than 40 hours a week, and some of us work full day on the weekends. 

The working hours are however not the only difference. The Ju/‘hoansi is a society where “any individual attempts to either accumulate or monopolise resources or power were met with derision and ridicule.” 

Pride is frowned upon. Any member of the same tribal community who boasts about his catch for the day would be shamed, mocked and even exiled. And by some comic extension, people like Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos of our world would not last very long in such community. 

One member of another tribe, namely, !kung, in the Kalahari said: “We refuse one who boasts, for someday his pride will make him kill somebody. So we always speak of his meat as worthless. This way we cool his heart and make him gentle.”

Everyone in the tribe knew the communal code of permissible behaviour. Of course, there will be some rogue members or free-riders/loaders, but when they become unbearable, the community will exact their own collective justice on them. 

In the book, Humankind, by Rutger Bergman, he wrote how such justice was meted out to those grew increasingly unmanageable: -

“The group was fed up: “They all fired on him with poison arrows till he looked like a porcupine. Then, after he was dead, all the women as well as the men approached his body and stabbed him with spears, symbolically sharing the responsibility for his death.””

Well, maybe such tribal retributive justice doesn’t accord with our modern sense that much, but the point to all this is that there are a lot of things we can learn from these tribal community about living a life that is underscored by contentment and driven by compassion and humility. This learning journey starts with dispelling some misconceptions about them and their society. Here are some. 

We often see them in some documentaries or movies as “nasty, brutish and (having) short” lives. But according to James, “the Ju/‘hoansi were revealed to be well-fed, content and longer-lived than people in many agricultural societies, and by rarely having to work more than 15 hours per week had plenty of time and energy to devote to leisure.” 

In other words, they generally lead happier lives, enjoying prosperity that is not dictated by endless wants, and as one author puts it, theirs is a kind of “Zen road to affluence” through which they were able to enjoy “unparalleled material plenty - with a low standard of living” (per Marshall Shahlins). 

And that’s not all. Even the way they organise their society shows how natural it is for them to share the fruit of their labour. 

James wrote: “It revealed, for instance, the extent to which their economy sustained societies that were at once highly individualistic and fiercely egalitarian, and in which the principal redistributive mechanism was “demand sharing” - a system that gave everyone the absolute right to effectively tax anyone else of any surpluses they had.””

Somehow, our ancestors then valued equality more, are much less competitive, are more close-knit as a community, and largely lived without that endless strife unlike now where we are desperate to prove ourselves, and in doing so, risks leaving a trail of broken or neglected relationships behind.

Yes, one may argue that comparing our time with theirs is not comparing apple with apple, because after the industrial revolution, after the creation of the state and its sovereignty, where boundaries are clearly drawn out, and with the advent of technology and globalisation, our world and its population have all expanded/risen dramatically. There is just too much to manage, too many diverse interests to satisfy or pacify. As such, things are much more complex and complicated than the things a tribal community nestled in one corner of the globe has to deal with. 

That may be true, yet, we make the laws and the rules, we pass legislations, we carry out policies, we decide for ourselves what is best for our children and our children’s children, and we create the community best suited for our present and future. Ultimately, the same hands that created the nuclear bomb liable to destroy the world with a push of a button are the same hands that created the civilisation we are now enjoying and thriving in today. 

The reality is, we have been striving for and creating utopias for centuries as things get more and more complex, yet there is one effort or discipline towards a certain utopian world that we have not given its due attention and address, and that is our endless appetites for material possessions. And I believe if we address that, the world, regardless of its size and complexity, will be a whole lot more manageable, slower, smaller and surely saner. 

Let me end with this thought from James’ book, “Affluence without abundance”.

“Imagine a society in which the work week seldom exceed 19 hours, material wealth is considered a burden, and no one is much richer than anyone else. Unemployment is high there, sometimes reaching 40% - not because the society is shiftless, but because it believes that only the able-bodied should work, and then no more than necessary. Food is abundant and easily gathered. The people are comfortable, peaceable, happy and secure.”

Alas, most times, what we truly need is some imagination, and the courage to carry out the conviction of the heart empowered by that imagination.

 

Love of a mother and agelessness.

Recently, a lady in her late fifties came to my office. She was concerned about losing her job. She told me that all those who were older have been asked to go. Mind you, some of them desperately needed the job to support their aged mother or grandkids whose parents have dumped them on their lap. 

Most of them left because the pressure was just unbearable. They were bullied by their newly appointed superiors who were no more than their own children’s age. 

These youngsters felt they could do the job better and can’t take correction from someone who is supposed to report to them. They just can’t accept the reality that their older “subordinates” are just more experienced, or have stayed in the company longer, much longer.

So, this is the dark side of ageism. It is not just about the discrimination one gets because of age, it is also the fatalism in ageism that hastens one’s despondent faith in a society that is supposed to be fair, kind, respectful and understanding to one’s elderly. 

Somehow, once you cross that chronolgical threshold, you are viewed as a person not valued for your experience and maturity, and valuable past contributions that built the company, but someone going downhill from there. There is no Pioneer or Merdeka generation status for them in the private sector, or even public sector. 

It is a fatalistic gap because you are deemed spent, used, and unless you have wealth and power, you are seen as someone who is just standing in the way of others busy and blindly making their glowing mark in the corporate world.

Julian Assange has this interesting equation, though simplistic, which I would like to borrow to sharper my point.

“Capitalism + atheism + feminism = sterility = migration”. 

Maybe, in our case it is this: -

“Capitalism + atheism = ageism = disillusionment = migration (that is, suicide)”.

SOS exec director Christine Wong said: “It is very worrying that many elderly are turning to suicide as the only choice to end their pain and struggles, when they should be enjoying the lustre of their golden years.”

Alas, we have effectively closed our eyes to the dark side of capitalism because its glittering promises are just too irresistible for us, especially the young. It promises fame, recognition, wealth and power, and these dangled carrots drive us into the enchanted but dark forest of greed, materialism, and individualism.

Adam Smith has duly warned us about its deleterious effects, but the mirage is just too seductive for us to pay any attention. 

As for atheism, I am referring to it in a way that the young, or majority of them, no longer feels bound by traditions, meaningful disciplines and self-denying rituals and over-arching meta-narrative. 

Sadly, there is even a certain emboldened rebellion against all that. So, from others-centered, some are increasingly becoming self-centered. 

When duty, honour and respect for others that find its deepest and most anchored roots in religion and traditions are sidelined or trivialised by the broad road of wealth and fame, most are therefore freed and free to pursue whatever that makes them happy and satisfied even if it means using others as a means to their own self-enriching ends. 

This of course caused our younger generation to enjoy the potent cocktail mix that leads to ageism, that is, discriminating against those who have gone before them because if they take the credit, what is left for them right? 

Is it any wonder that an economically developed nation like Japan has been hit by a crime wave of elderly shoplifters? 

Mind you, “a staggering 20 per cent of the entire Japanese prison population is now aged over 60.” (compared to 6 per cent in the US).” (p 212 of “Extra Time” by Camilla Cavendish). 

In the book, author Camilla wrote: “One prison inmate, a Ms F, 89, told a Bloomberg reporter that she had stolen rice, strawberries and cold medicine. 

“I was living alone on welfare,” she said. “I used to live with my daughter’s family and used all my savings taking care of an abusive and violent son-in-law.“”

Let me end with an inspiring story about a former cleaner named Mdm Ang Swee Huay. 

She is 91 years old. For 40 years, she has been caring for her two mentally ill children who used to live in their four-room flat in Hougang. 

The story is reported by Janice Tai. 

Mdm Ang’s son, 56, has schizophrenia, and her daughter, 57, has polio and depression. “Both have been afflicted since their teenage years.”

“Madam Ang would wake up at the break of dawn to prepare their breakfast and lunch, remind them to take their medication and then leave for work. Once she returned home, she would cook dinner, and go down on her knees to bathe (her daughter) on the toilet floor as her daughter is paralysed from the waist down.”

But 8 years ago, Mdm Ang was diagnosed with breast and colon cancer. And 4 years ago, she showed signs of dementia with mood swings and memory loss. 

Yet, battling all that, Mdm Ang simply refuses to take her medication for fear that it would make her sleepy and she can’t take care of her children. 

“In the past two years, however, she kept collapsing from exhaustion and had to be taken to hospital in an ambulance.”

Mdm Ang’s life exemplifies what I read in John: “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down your life for loved ones.” 

And her daughter said: “I am worried about my mum. I hope she lives until 102 or 107 years old.”

To which, Mdm Ang, who now has stage three cancer, replied in Hokkien, “I am getting old, and I know I need to start letting go of them. That is why we moved (to the nursing home), so they can get used to life here.”

Alas, there is surely no fatalism in ageism. The only fatalism I see is of those who display an attitude of self-superiority, one that treats others with little or no dignity and respect. 

Mdm Ang has taught me that ultimately, character trumps knowledge, hope overcomes despair, and love conquers self.

Jackie Chan - dark side of the moon.

It is no surprise that Jackie Chan’s memoir does not tell a clean tale. He has a dark side. In fact, everybody has it - some are just darker than others. There’s no perfection, just degree of imperfections in our life.

Here’s the tally for those bent on keeping karmic scores?

Jackie Chan admitted to a time when he abused a child. In his memoir Never Growing Up, it reports that “his fans will likely be shocked to learn that the action star once threw another toddler - his own son, Jaycee - across the room during an argument with his wife, former actress Lin Feng-jiao.” 

But Jaycee was not hurt as he landed on a sofa.

Yet, that’s not all. Jackie Chan further admitted that he “used to visit prostitutes and drive when he was drunk. Once, he crashed a Porsche in the morning and a Mercedes-Benz later at night.”

And his marriage with Lin was not exactly unblemished either. It was a marriage not so much out of love as it is out of necessity. She was pregnant in 1981. So, to legitimise it, they registered their marriage. 

However, he was paranoid over Lin because “he believed his friends when they told him Lin might have got pregnant on purpose.” As such, he “constantly thought of ways to keep (his) money from her.”

Then came the affair. He broke Lin’s heart when “he had an affair with actress and former Miss Asia, Elaine Ng.” They had a love child from that illicit affair. 

Although the memoir is quiet about the affair, Jackie Chan told Lin and Jaycee this: “I’ve made an unforgivable mistake and I don’t know how to explain it, so I won’t.”

Jackie Chan recalled that Jaycee just stared at him when he confessed while Lin cried. But they had over time forgiven him. 

Lesson? I guess tallying life’s scores like this can go on and on for a life as complicated as Jackie’s. 

He is a multimillionaire, world renown, and I would expect such a life to be a sizzling magnet not just for media attention and scrutiny, but also controversies, scandals and temptations of all earthly kinds.

Jackie Chan “pins his wildlife down to his work as a stuntman.” He wrote that “we all knew that if something went wrong, we wouldn’t live to see the sun rise the next day. We had a short-term mentality, which means recklessly spending our money.” And that accounted for his splurging on “gambling and prostitutes.” 

So, there you have it, it is a life (at 64 and still counting) with all the ingredients of a good movie plot, that is, action packed, drama filled and seedy as usual. Well, they say fact is stranger than fiction, but in Jackie’s case, it is hands-down juicier too. 

Some may call it our “skeletons in the closet”, while others call it our dark side, but whichever way you cut it, our secret life and the mental processes that run through it is always the massive iceberg underneath the seemingly calm waters.

It is an undeniable fact that what is conscientiously projected in public is seldom what happens most habitually in private, and for this reason, it is convenient to call it the hypocrisy gap. But maybe, we might just want to consider calling it the ”being-human” gap.

It is curious that being human invariably comes with many rules and regulations about how to live our lives. Religion composes it. Society presupposes it. Our government in maintaining law and order superimposes it. 

And needless to say, we break any of them with dire consequences to our conscience, to our reputation, and to our freedom. 

But the truth about life, as Jackie Chan’s 64 years has shown, is that the greatest test of our character is not so much how we try our darnest to live up to them (rules and laws and all), but what becomes of us when we fail to live up. Do we then continue in our destructive ways or do we turn around and change? 

As a human being, expect to disappoint, expect to fall and stumble, and expect to do things we will regret, and for some of us, regret most painfully. 

But if God has us a lifetime to get it right, or at least come to our senses, then don’t expect to change in an instant. And we should always be wary of such confession of overnight transformation, because that which is given a lifetime to live out invariably takes a lifetime to change for good. 

In the end, Jackie Chan had a point when he said “I’ve made an unforgivable mistake and I don’t know how to explain it, so I won’t.” 

Some deeds done are indeed beyond explanation. No words suffice because it is the life lived thereafter that counts more than any explanation one can ever offer. 

That is the finest and truest test of our character. It is a test that comes closest to closing the hypocrisy or “being-human” gap. 

And I believe that we will get it right one day - for in this journey of life that each of us is accountable for, it should never be our failings that define us. Instead, it is our comebacks, however long it takes, that should inspire us all. Cheerz.

The extraordinary life of Paul Allen.

Paul Allen dies of cancer, aged 65. 

That’s the end of a life, an amazing life. 

It is said that you are not enriched by what you possessed, but by what you can live without. By any measure, Paul lived with a lot of possessions.

He had investments, institutions named after him, ownership of several professional sports teams like NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers and NFL’s Seattle Seahawks, and at his passing, he had a net worth of US$20.5 billion. That places him at Forbes magazine’s 44th richest.

If you don’t know him, maybe you know the company he cofounded...”Microsoft” in 1975 after dropping out of Washington State University. 

A heartbroken Bill Gates said of Paul that he was “one of my oldest and dearest friends. Personal computing would not have existed without him.”

Paul died two weeks after “publicly revealing that the cancer he fought into remission nine years ago had returned.” He had been suffering from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, “the incurable cancer affects white blood cells.”

For a man who never married and had no children, his sister Jody paid this tribute: -

“My brother was a remarkable individual on every level. While most knew Paul Allen as a technologist and philanthropist, for us he was a much loved brother and uncle, and an exceptional friend.”

After Paul left Microsoft in 1983, he “set up the investment firm Vulcan Inc in 1986 to manage his multibillion-dollar portfolio.” 

Everyone at Vulcan was proud of their founder. “All of us who had the honour of working with Paul feel inexpressible loss today”.

The current CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, said: - 

“As a co-founder of Microsoft, in his quiet and persistent way, he created magical products, experiences and institutions. And in doing so, he changed the world.”

If you must know more, Paul in fact “invested US$100 million to the Allen Institute for Brain Science in 2003. A decade later, he founded the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence to study the impacts on society of new technology, and the Allen Institute for Cell Science to find research for treatment of diseases.”

Lesson? Mm...just one, and this is the scoreboard of life: Death 1 Life 0. 

Why zero? Because when you are dead, how are you then alive? That’s stark reality...I know. 

But when you are alive, death is by default zero and life is really what you make of it. So, it can be 2 or 3 or my god, infinity like many realised dreams. 

For Paul, there is no doubt that he lived an abundant life, a life that touched many and continues to touch many. 

He was fortunate to have lived at a time where the flush of money comes most inordinately to those who break the mold, push the limit, risk the moment and persevere in hope - not to mention some luck along the way, because Paul’s technological savviness and entrepreneurship would be completely redundant in a largely feudal state or during the early stages of the industrial revolution where the closest thing to a microchip was in a thinly sliced fried potato. 

At 48, I have always been trying to solve this puzzle about life, about living. I have written much about it, but never came close to really understanding it. 

What makes a rich man perpetually sad, and a poor man eternally fulfilled? What causes one to be buried with hands clenched and another with hands opened? What kills a man even long before he dies a natural death and what steels a man even when he faces and overcomes insurmountable odds, the worst that life can offer? 

What is an empty big house with custom furniture as one’s closest kin and a small, modest dwelling but there is never a lack of joy, hope and resilience? How do you reconcile all that?

What is success that never seems enough for a lifetime? What is failure then that brings one closer to a success that satisfies deeply and completely? Is it truly the way of life that success is a necessary misfortune in life and it is to the really unfortunate that it comes early?

I sense in my spirit that the search like Titanic will go on and on. My life, my self, my appetites are different from yours, hers and his. My encounters, my circumstances are all different. 

And the most paradoxical thing about life is that we try our darnest to deny it. We all want to live it, yet we cannot accept it as it is. We constantly issue terms and conditions to it before we will ever live it. 

We will be happy only if we reach a certain level of success, recognition and/or fame. We will be content only if we are without needs; yet, we are tormented by the tyranny of wants that makes “needs” a necessary good. And we will be at peace only if those who hurt us or those who differ in their views from us come to their senses and ask for forgiveness (or god forbid, come to a certain misfortune).

Alas, if we are the landlord of a well-furnished mansion from the outside, no life as a tenant will ever rent it from us because it would be a living hell to reside under the roof of a landlord like us (who own or have things we are incapable of enjoying). And that is a life we would be wise to do without. 

I think I should end here with the simple words of Paul. There is never a better advice than from someone who is no longer with us but has lived a life that will always be remembered.

This is what Bill Gates recalled about Paul: “He was fond of saying, “If it has the potential to do good, then we should do it.” That’s the kind of person he was.””

Maybe that’s how we should live our life - whether we are rich or poor or middle income. We may not have the great fortune of a fortune but we can have the greatest fortune of character, that is, a life that when we die, leaves a trail of good behind. 

Alas, I may still be figuring out life as it is, but one mystery I know I have unlocked and that is this: you may die young or old, rich or poor, but the difference you make counts and it starts counting the day you live, or from the moment you read this and the many moments thereafter. 

Now, not all the good we do is unqualified or untainted. Some good achieved may be through means or intentions we may regret. But our redemption comes not from that, but from a spirit that never stop trying, learning, admitting and correcting. In other words, a life that never ceases to chase after the good despite the stumbles and falls.

That is for me the most important lesson this morning and the many mornings to come. Cheerz.