Author: Rebecca Toh

Two parts of an inspiring post:
Part I
Part II

Thank you Brandon!

1. My current favorite emotion is JOY. It’s light in the body and bright in tone, yet not overly so – a nice balance between happiness and excitement.
2. Big dreams, small steps.
3. When you feel lonely, it’s because you think nobody loves you or loves you the way you wanna be loved. But accept all love as love. Understand that no one knows how to love perfectly. And that at each point in our lives someone is always trying to love us. Accept the trying as being enough.
4. Enough is hard but always worth gunning for. (I have eaten enough. I have rested enough. I have worked enough. I’m loved enough. I have enough. Etc etc).
5. You can’t love everyone in the world, but you can love the ones you love harder. (Similarly, you can’t have everyone in the world love you, but you can ignore these people harder😂)
6. Wisdom accumulates in the person who tries their best to wake up from the slumber of life.
7. Money is just a game. Play it well, play it badly, it’s up to you.
8. The most interesting person you can be is… drumroll… your good old boring self.
9. Read fewer books but fall more deeply into each book.
10. Lesson #286 from skateboarding: If you’re coming down a slope, lean forward, look ahead and enjoy the ride. (If you’re still leaning or looking backwards, you will fall!)
11. Pay your bills on time, but apart from that, remain a kid at heart.
12. Whenever you can, be thankful for a seemingly ultra-trivial thing in your life. (Today I’m grateful that I can move my fingers and type this!).
13. Stop looking for your purpose in life. There is no purpose, but there is what makes your heart SING.
14. Nothing is scarier than empty beautiful photographs (or art).
15. If you find yourself saying “Aiyah cannot one lah” immediately change it to “CAN ONE LAH!”
16. Make no distinction between hard and soft, art and business, life and death.
17. Listen > talk.
18. We are not more special, but we’re no less special.
19. Wander aimlessly – it’s okay.
20. We all view the world through a particular lens. If you’re unhappy, change/discard the lens.
21. Force yourself to do hard things. Then enjoy the easy that comes after.
22. In the end, the highest goal is effortlessness.
Bonus 23. You or I can go anytime. We can lose everything, anything, anytime. There is no guarantee in life or death. Change is constant. Life is transient. It’s all impermanent. On this basis, let’s stop resisting joy. And may all the suffering in the world be transmuted by time. From dust, to dust. Let’s enjoy being here for now.

“Unless you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” – C.G. Jung

“Do not struggle. Go with the flow of things, and you will find yourself at one with the mysterious unity of the Universe.” – Zhuangzi

“Walk as if you are kissing the Earth with your feet.” – Thich Nhat Hanh

In a way writing is a desperate attempt at organising what cannot be organised – life. But we all valiantly try because what is the alternative.

*

My cat Bunny has died. She was already dying when our friends, who housesit for us when we travel, called us to say they were bringing her to the vet. We didn’t know she was dying then – and we hoped not – but we cut short our trip anyway and flew home, because the vet said her condition was serious.

Her heart stopped the moment we reached her side. And now her body has been cremated and she’s a jar of small bones that sits on our bookshelf, next to a photo of her.

A couple of days after she died, the sunlight spilling into our balcony created a double rainbow on the floor, and the water splashes from the kids who swam next to our balcony created random patterns that looked A LOT like cat paw prints.

I took that as a sign that Bunny was trying to communicate something to me, which is that she still exists in a form that I might not currently understand, that she’s okay, that we’ll see her again, that we travel together in every lifetime anyway, and that in every dimension and every universe we’re always a team.

*

I really enjoy hiking now.

I used to be a reluctant hiker because I didn’t know better, but now, I find hiking in the mountains one of the most life-giving things one can do.

If I have the chance I’ll write about one of the many wonderful hikes we did in Europe. Till then, here are some photos…

Photographed in Italy.

Revisit parts one, two, and three.

My current favorite writer is Yevgenia Belorusets, a photographer who publishes daily diary entries from Kyiv. It’s surprising to read in her writing that even during what feels like the end of the world, people still take walks when the weather is good and they still sing and give out flowers and keep their cafe doors open. It seems in a war zone we need coffee and hot bread and flowers and a good song even more than usual. But that’s in Kyiv, where things are not the worst. In other cities and villages in Ukraine, the sky has turned dark. So have the buildings. So have the streets, their pavements smeared with dark dried blood. It’s gonna take a long time before the light comes back.

*

These days I’ve been trying to change, but I’m also trying to be as gentle about it as possible.

Self-improvement can be insidious and a source of stress, because for many people, self-improvement is actually self-dislike in disguise. If we’re not careful, we can spend years on the self-improvement treadmill trying to reach our goals but feel utterly, utterly empty at the end.

There is simply no imaginary day in the bright future ahead when we’d wake up in the morning transformed, an ideal version of ourselves.

There is only transforming in the here and the now.

Which also means we have to do the work NOW and not tomorrow, but for us to truly transform, we have to do it with an attitude of non-striving, of not wanting to control the outcome exactly.

This is what I mean by trying to change, but also trying to be as gentle about it as possible.

*

Flying to France and Italy for 1.5 months in a couple of weeks. We are planning to visit Paris, Lyon, Florence, Siracusa and a few places in between. Hopefully there will also be a lot of time for reading and for shooting some new images. I look forward to hunting this guy down in particular:

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Reading/studying Jon Kabat-Zinn’s “Full Catastrophe Living” carefully and earnestly and genuinely interested in signing up for a Mindfulness-based Stress Reduction program just to see how it’s all done.

*

Till the next update!

is to never see anything as a chore. Even if it’s on your to-do list, even if it’s an errand, try your best to see it through a “this is enjoyable and fun” kind of lens.

Actually, what’s more insidious is how even interesting and fun things can sometimes seem boring or difficult once we put them on our to-do list. We forget that we’re supposed to be having fun. That life CAN be fun.

Let’s intentionally choose to see the fun in life today.