BURST!
One of the water pipes in my room toilet sprung a leak since godknows when and finally decided to 'inform' us by flooding the room early last friday morning. To cut a painful story short (how painful? exactly $900 worth of it), pipe was fixed, toilet turned ugly and frankly, no one knows if there were any other burst pipe in there somewhere. I am a water sign creature, you would have thought all that water would be good. Perhaps it was good for a while till it got too much and I started to “drown”...
I think god, whoever she/he is have a real funny sense of humour. Just when I thought about how life sucks at work, I finally woke up to a whole day where work was miraculously peaceful and the kids and teachers were happy, being the last day of school. But everything else OUTSIDE of work decided to go ape-shit on me, starting with the flooding, and then my auto-gate decided to go bonkers and start shutting while I was driving the NEW Honda Fit out.. Just when I was halfway through the gate. Of course, the day wouldn't have been complete without the carpark at Cineleisure being full just as I was rushing to catch a movie. And while parking at Mandarin's carpark, I just HAD to go down the stairs marked "exit" only to find that after 5 flights of steps, the ground floor door was locked up tight. That was when my phone started to ring with people asking me where was I and 'chasing' me to hurry in time for the movie.
Suddenly, I felt like bursting too.
This week was a "bursting" week as well, filled with training and screening and reports to complete. The school router chose this auspicious time to go bust and its only today that the computer guy managed to get it up. Not that it was his fault cos' a new router was already available, just that no one in school knew what's the password for our account. Duh.
Human-relations wise, the tension simmering between co-workers decided to join in the merry-bursting that's been going around and erupted spectacularly over the weekend. Heck! I am a Pisces and we require tranquillity to thrive! All this 'heat' is just steaming this fish up. Every senses within is telling me to butt out of it and just chill since it isn’t my call nor my business. I guess I agree… and if just looking at how things stand, its probably better for me since I’m not gonna be helpful to anyone.
The thing is, I personally feel conflicts are all but unavoidable wherever we may be. The key is, was it worth the hassle to enter into them, for what ends and finally what do we do resolve it. Perhaps I am getting old and cranky so can no longer see things as clearly as I use to. On the other hand, perhaps I am just not as impetuous with my actions and my opinions, because sometimes it is just not worth my hide to get involve between others' "personal" issues, even if it may be 'work' related.
It might seem uncaring but I suppose everyone is entitled to their own views and ways of doing things. I am not in a position to judge who was right, who was wrong. I just feel sort of bad for everyone. It was unfortunate that it involved people I happened to work with and care about, and at times it is difficult to say anything without sounding 'judgemental' or coming off a high-horse. On my own personal level, there are things that bother me about what's happening. It is definitely not how I would do things but again, I am in no place to say much because as a 3rd party observer, I would be viewed as someone who doesn't know the real story. Frankly... who does know the real deal? The elephant will always look different depending on where you stand.
If we have access to every single information... every single incidents, every single thought, emotion, motives, views, passing thoughts, images that passes through everyone's head, then perhaps we could say we knew why people do or say the things they do. But if that's true, we would truly be gods. The fact is, we are not omnipresent and omniscient. We can't speak of others so unequivocally, as if we truly and fully understand them and we shouldn’t. If anything, it's at best a clever assumption, a lucky guess, a calculated view based on experience or a skewed perspective depending on what I had eaten for lunch. Yet, it is something that I myself would readily do…
Life, as you grow older, becomes more keenly felt as you realized that time isn't just an abstraction, but a loud sounding buzzer constantly bombarding your senses (if you would pay attention to it, is of course another matter), telling you that if you don’t make the most of it now, there ain't no second chance. The youngsters fly by things and sometimes do not stop to consider, believing that there is always another opportunity to do good around the corner. There are also others who just focus on what's right in their faces and failed to look beyond and consider that sometimes things are not just defined by the parts they see, but a sum of parts and more. Like they say, hindsight is always 20/20. Pity my myopia now… but I guess further down the road, I would see this point of time with more clarity with my “20/20” hindsight vision.
Still, right now, instead of the ill-will, anger and apathy bursting all around us, I wish that in its place we could have more understanding, patience and empathy... But with humans, that’s really a tall order. At the end of the day, people will still do and say the things they do from where they stand. Just like me choosing to write on this blog now... perhaps against the better judgement of some, who knows?
