Learning to let go

Today I learned to let go. I learned to let go of the photos and everything else that were stored in my harddrive. It would be nice for me to have the photos of my European trip, or those taken during my late brother’s wake, or the things that I did at various church activities this year. However, as my friend Anton rightly said, I had my memory to bring me back to those events in my life. Besides, reading through my old blog posts also helps me to remember. The pictures are always nice as proofs to others that I was there, surrounded by lofty mountains in the islands of Lofoten, or in the medieval Brugge. However, I know that I did it, and that was enough. I don’t need to prove anything to anybody.

I am still sad when I think about the lost photos and documents of course but I can’t keep on lamenting the loss and foregoing precious hours of my life moping and feeling bad. I will bring the disk along with me to Indonesia in January – if I can recover the photos, it will be a bonus – but if I can’t, well, I have my memory, my blog entries, as well as the various souvenirs to remind me of my trip. 🙂

I bought a new harddrive from a shop in town – 160GB Seagate Momentus – the same type as the one that’s broken, for $75. Money that I could’ve spent for something else … haha. Ah well. I am rebuilding my macbook again with the MacOS X operating system and with the softwares that I had there before. My macbook is always handy when I travel so I can post my blog entries and capture the moments. A fresh start to capture my life starting today … *grin*.

I also went to a surprise birthday gathering for one of the girls from church, who affectionately called me ‘Papi’ (Dad) – well, had I been married at 22, I could’ve had a daughter as old as her. She’s only 16 – so she is everybody’s baby sister at church. A group of us met at a townhouse in Norwood, an eastern suburb of Adelaide around 7pm. Initially I didn’t feel like going at all but I was persuaded enough to go by Yani – haha. The girl, was told that she would be going to a badminton practice, came later and ended up having a surprise birthday party in the house. She was sooo happy – and that made us all very happy as well.

The birthday party and the lesson learned from my harddrive remind me that truly life is great as it is. Each experience is etched in our mind and in our heart. Photographs and material things are only there to help us remember – if there aren’t enough reminders for us to unearth past incidents, well, perhaps those moments are not important enough to remember in the great scheme of things. Life is full of new and exciting things to experience along the way.

Sometimes enjoying life is also learning to let go of the material things that we hold on too tightly, and grab on to new opportunities and curiosities along the way … I have learned that with my photos.