Travel Time of The Year.

Starting my morning with a cup of warm camomile & lemongrass tea, I feel so English (well, maybe not).

For the past few weeks, I have been dealing with myself a lot, the thoughts, the mental issues and everything related to what I feel and what I want. I just don’t feel right with everything I am and everything I’m doing right now.

I was going to book myself a flight to Ambon and stay at Ora Beach for a week, away from anyone, hoping to find an epiphany about my life, but instead I decided to check a flight to Gothernburg, Sweden. If it’s really happening, this is going to be my first solo trip abroad. Crazy huh? Yes, I do think so myself. But somehow, I just need to get away from everything that’s been busy hustling and buzzing inside my head and planning the trip seems like a good distraction.

Why Sweden? Simply because one of my favorite singer and songwriter, Jonas myrin, originally came from Sweden although he’s been living out of a suitcase here and there but, maybe (just maybe) if the time is right and Heaven is so kind, it would be possible to accidentally bump into him in Stockholm, well just as how many people are there living in Stockholm? It would not be that imposssible right?

And why Gothenburg? Well, around two years ago, when I travelled to Phuket, Thailand with some friends, we met this sweet lady from Sweden who was also having her vacation there. We went to Phi-Phi Island together and caught in some great conversation (i love making new friends on vacation!). In the end, we exchanged email, addresses and added each other on facebook. She told me that I am welcome to visit her at any time in Sweden, so when I was contemplating in choosing where to go, she suddenly popped in my mind.

After checking what I would need for visa application and everything, I decided that Gothenburg will be the destination for my first solo traveling abroad. I have to say that it’s kind of scary and exciting at the same time, it’s a long time feeling that I’ve been missed since life has been so boring and only evolving around my frustrating feeling and broken heart. I know that this trip might cost me A LOT (and possibly draining every penny that I have in my saving accounts), however, I need to set a goal in my life and this trip is definitely going to help me to focus and get me excited to have something to look forward to.

Getting away from the familiarity seems like something that I need to recover and figure out what I want to do with my life. I’m going to be 30 this year and still struggling in figuring out what to do with my life (for goodness’ sake) or maybe I’m just trying to find some courage to really take the direction to the kind of life I want.

Well, I don’t know. We’ll see since it’s still in the next six months. My plan was going to get married mid this year but since I don't think it's going to happen unless Heaven is snapping the magic fingers on the situation, I'm sticking to the travel plan to Gothenburg. However, things could change in between and I’m being flexible. So, let's just see how it goes :))

The Unrequited Love.

“Lesson Number One: All the time traveling in the world can't make someone love you. “ – About Time.

Charlie Brown once said, “Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love.”  -- Charlie loves peanut butter and when he experienced unrequited love, even his favorite peanut butter tasted bitter.

When you fall in love with someone, it is easy to remember everything about them.

You remember their favorites, you remember their favorite songs, you remember their favorite movies, you know what makes them laugh, you remember their scent, you know how they would eat their toast, you know their habit, you would recognize their signature movements, your world simply evolves around them and you are aware of every single thing that they do or feel.

Then comes the fact.

They don’t feel the same way as you feel about them.

The world crumbles. All of the sudden everything you remember, things that used to make you smile, now they make you feel sad. Something is broken inside, unseen but the pain feels so real.

The kind of pain that would take any kind of taste out from anything you’ve ever liked.

And nothing you can do about it because there’s no formula on how to make someone loves you back. 

My pastor’s wife once said this face slapping truth, “Even if you wear an oversized bando and running around to get a guy’s attention, it won’t work. Why? Simply because he’s just not that into you.”

Yes, we need to deal with that fact that the other person is just not that into us.

When someone doesn’t love us back, it doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong in us. It doesn’t mean that we are not smart enough, not beautiful enough or not worthy enough to be loved.No, it’s simply because they just don’t feel the same way about us.

We might see someone else in their eyes and they might never look at us the way we look at them, those will break our heart but eventually, we will learn how to let go and move on.

When someone doesn't love you back, wish them all the best and let go because you are worth to be loved by someone who would treasure all the qualities in you and love you for who you are.

Live your life to the fullest, enjoy every moment and appreciate everyone. Keep your heart open and don't be bitter.

Remember that it is good to be happy with someone but it is better if that someone is happy to be with us too :)

Jumping Over The Fence.

Most of my cousins studied abroad. They speak fluent english and often use english terms while speaking. For the record, I live in a country where english is not first language.

Growing up, I’ve always been compared to my cousins. There’s always a competition going on and this “speaking-in-english” thing was included. So, my mother got me a private english tutor when I was in the third grade, she was an university student majoring in english literature. I owe her a lot, because I was already learning present perfect tense, conjugation and conditional if when my other school mates still busy with “this is an apple”.

I love to challenge myself and prove that I can do something other people think that I can’t. Thus, in order to prove that I could also speak fluent english without having to go study abroad, I practiced. How? I translated my english story books into indonesian, I read lots of english book to improve my vocabulary, I watched english movies with english subtitle to improve my pronounciation, I listened to english songs to improve my hearing, I wrote journals in english to improve my writing and I talked to myself to rehearse the conversation. Once I was introduced to the internet for the first time, I signed up for friendship sites to find friends from other countries to further improve my english and start blogging in english to improve my writing skills.

The result : I can speak and write in english well and many chances were given to me just because of that, including the international assignment.

That goes the same with my singing ability, my mother used to say that I always sing off key and in attempt to prove her wrong, I practiced singing all the time. I sang whatever I can sing, I listened to a song and tried to follow the song, I recorded my voice and listened to it again and again until I could sing it on key and with a bit of improvisation.

The result : I was selected for the school choir to sing on independence day, I was a singer and also a worship leader at my previous church (and to add some craziness, I just register myself to my office singing competition – HA! I might not be the best but at least I have the guts to try)

My mother is an excellent cook while I’m nowhere near her. Living in Asia, people often say, “A girl should know how to cook, how come you don’t know how? How can you feed your husband and children?” – tiring huh? Well, to prove that I can. I decided to learn how to cook (I have to be honest that somehow the motivation was also coming because I liked someone and wanted to cook for him) :p) – So, I searched for recipes in the internet, bought the ingridients and then I cooked. I know then that I love to make desserts, cakes and simple western food (because Asian food is too complicated for me).

The result : I’ve made cheese cake, steamed brownies, baked cheesecake brownies, chocolate truffles, pudding, lasagna and spaghetti aglio olio with white wine, mushroom and prawn or simply with pork sausage. I often took the result to the office and shared it with my colleagues to get their review, well, so far the review is always good.

Now, I’m challenging myself to run regularly. One of my goals is to enroll myself in a 5K running competition. No, not for the hype but to challenge myself. I don’t like running. SERIOUSLY. I hate running. I lost my breath easily if I run, I’d rather do any other sports than running. But that’s the challenge, I need to prove to myself that I can actually run, that I can actually beat my limit. Of course with a wise preparation, I don’t just go throw myself to run 5K (I might die) but I try to run regularly at the gym on the treadmill to begin with. It’s super hard and very inconvenient but hey, I need to prove that I can. It’s a goal that I set to also help me with the other goal. If this one works then I would set for another one and another one in larger scale.

Why am I sharing you these stories?

It comes to the title of this post “Jumping Over The Fence” – A fence is often used to limit something. Either to limit the person inside from going outside or from the person outside from going inside. Point is, a fence is a limit that surround something, usually a house or a building, but for this post let’s put it a house. A house is a representative of our comfort, our safe haven.

A fence can be illustrated as a limit, something that keeps us from going out of our comfort. Either it be our own fear of what’s on the other side of the fence or the limitation that other people put so that we won’t go outside the fence.

It’s pretty much like us. We tend to love our comfort zone, our “house” and when we want to step out of our comfort zone we are faced with the fence in form of two things 1) our own fear 2) what other people say / do that prevents us from going out of the comfort zone.

We would never know what it feels like or what is there on the other side if we never get over the fence. Our fear of the unknown might keep us from getting over the fence, what other people say about us and our dreams might keep us from getting over the fence. In that case, we need the courage to jump over the fence. It might take an effort to pull our body up over the fence, not to mention if the fence has sharp points, we might even get hurt. But, all those efforts and pains would be paid of once we get over the fence and see what’s on the other side.

I can’t guarantee that what you see would always be beautiful, in the past, some of my best attempts also fail miserably but it gave me a certain kind of proud feeling that I have the courage to do it anyway regardless of the result. Besides, it’s better to die trying that do nothing at all and keep wondering what if.

Pointing A Gun At God.

Revelation can come from anyone and anything including American Dad tv series (another tv series from the maker of Family Guy – so you know what to expect right? ;D)

If you don’t know both series, I suggest you to google it.

It was a christmas edition where Stan being a know it all person that led to his own death. As he got to the after life, he went to heaven trial trying to get his second chance to re-live his life.

Since his life wasn’t as good as he thought, he couldn’t get his second chance. Knowing that and the fact that his family on earth was threatened by cold and could die at anytime, Stan tried to get to God by taking his heaven lawyer as a hostage to get away from the court.

After quite a series of events, he finally managed to see God. Stan forced God to let him back to earth, threatening Him with “heavenly” gun that had the power to kill heavenly being. God commented, “Okay now, you’re pointing gun at me because you didn’t get what you want?” (Haha, we do that quite often aren’t we? :p). Then God told Stan that everything happened according to His will and His time. He told Stan that he couldn’t go back to save his family and that his family was going to die. Stan finally gave up and he said that he felt sorry to have been so arrogant and acting like he knew everything.

And what happened next? God granted Stan’s wish. He gave Stan a second chance, all because Stan showed an act of humility. God told Stan that it’s exactly what He wanted to see from Stan.

As the ending credit rolled, I thought, the story hit close to home. It’s definitely like the usual thing we do when it comes to God and our will.

Like Stan we often think that we know it all, we know better and we want everything to go according to our will. We sometimes even try to threat God just to get what we want. We tried so hard to get things to go our way when it actually only takes a little humility to admit that we don’t know everything and trust from our side that God knows the best for us and that everything will be alright in His time.

Is it that EASY? NO. Not at all. It's hard to deal with things when you can't even see the big picture. It's so easy to think we know what's best for ourselves when in fact not everything we think as best is good for us.

I remember one speaker at church said this, "it's my job to pray and it's God's job to heal" - yep, there are things that we can do and there are things that only God can do. We can't try to do the things that only God can do.

We need to be humble enough before God to let Him take control and to work on our behalf, we need to let go of our pride and let Him direct our path and we also need to trust Him and let Him help us to overcome our unbelief.

Besides, life would be better if we can be a little flexible with the process ;)

Singlehood.

I am single and I have been enjoying myself so far except for the fact that the people around me are quite annoying enough. I believe those who have been living in singlehood would understand what I mean.

There’s nothing wrong in being single, of not having a boyfriend or a husband. What I found as wrong is the society who thinks that it’s wrong. I think I’d rather have a late marriage than having a marriage that would drive me insane because I choose the wrong person just to fullfill society’s expectation of me.

I have quite a number of male friends that I can confide in, that I can trust, that I can get crazy with, those who love me enough to let me be me and those whom I love with my whole heart although I don’t have romantic relationship with them. And so far, I’m content with that. (besides I also have great female friends).

Don’t get me wrong.

It’s not that I don’t open my eyes to every possibilities I encounter. Those who know me, knows that I am a hardcore lover and I always love without hesitation. I have fell in love with several men before, I have been in a close to more than friends relationship with several men, I have been feeling miserable because of love and got all those painful side of romance relationship. Some leave marks that stay for quite a long time. Even so, I haven’t given up on love. Only, I have decided not to put my happiness solely on my status.

Those experiences have taught me to carefully guard my heart and not to just put it on the table because the drama in a relationship can leave you exhausted and tired. It can worn you out. Those experiences have also taught me to really give my time and effort to someone who is really worth it. To someone who thinks that you are worth of his time and effort as well.

Charlie Brown said it well, 'Nothing takes the taste out of peanut butter quite like unrequited love.' And nothing is time wasting quite like giving time to someone who’s not even worth it in the first place, because if you use your time to do something else, you would have done many things instead.

While you are still single, there are a lot of things you can do. Don’t get stuck in the mindset that no one loves you just because you’re still single. HEY! There is actually a lot of people who loves you and waiting to be loved by you. LOVE is not limited on the relationship between a man and a woman but LOVE is an universal language that can be understood by everyone. Don’t waste your love on people who only knows how to take granted of it but share your love on people who really need it.

When you give and sow love in the right place you’ll be amazed on the amount of love you’ll get back.

Don’t put the worth of yourself on your status, when you’re still single it doesn’t mean that your worth is less that the people who has a spouse. NO, it doesn’t work that way. The fact that you were born into this world should give you the idea that you are worth to be in this world, you are worth to live and you are worth to be who you are. Nothing should ever change that fact. YOU ARE WORTHY JUST BY BEING YOU and you DON’T NEED ANYONE ELSE to VALIDATE YOUR EXISTENCE.

Do something you love, create, dream and make it happen. Be happy, be yourself and be grateful. If the time is right, the right guy will come and if the right guy is not coming then don’t worry, the value of your life is not measured by who you’re with but by what you’ve done to contribute.

And if you should love and like someone, why not love and like yourself because in the end, the one person who will always be with you is yourself. Enjoy yourself, pamper yourself and treat yourself right. You can never love other people if can’t even love yourself completely.

So, screw what people say about being single. I’m single, I’m happy and I’m living myself to the fullest.