THIRTY-FIVE, AND GOING STRONG...

I'll be 35 this Friday. It's scary when I look back and wonder what I'd done with my life, and worse when I wonder what I want to do with my life after.

It almost seems as if every direction I take is going to lead me to some form of regret. It's terrible. I hate regrets. The reason I'd got so far in life all the time is because I'd always known exactly what to do that would not lead me to regrets. Or at least, i think so. But this time, I'm judiciously stumped.

Very confused.

I'm good at a lot of things, for that I'm grateful. But that doesn't mean I have a passion for the things I delve in, be it cooking, sports, singing, dancing, acting, performing concertos, reading, writing and anything else I've tried. It also doesn't mean I'm a master of any of it.

My Mum could have called me Jack when I was born, so then I would truly be a Jack of all trades.

What does it all mean?

That I'm accomplished, but not developed enough, or that I'm developed, but not accomplished enough. Which way should I see it?

In the movie, "I am David", one scene really touched me (I'm not quoting this verbatim, but the essence is here). It was when Joan Plowright (Sophie) says to Ben Tibber (David), "You look like you're going to be someone great," to which Ben replies, "I don't want to be someone great!". Then Sophie comforts him with the wisest words: "That's ok. Then be happy knowing that you could be if you wanted to be."

I think I really needed to hear that. I always wanted to be someone great. Someone who've touched the world in some way, changed someone's life for the better, made a difference somehow to renew mankind.

I think now, in a way, it's really vanity. Meaningless vanity, as Solomon says in Ecclesiastes. I never thought of it as vanity before though, cos vanity to me had always been a chasing after money, promotions, good looks, a gold-and-silver type of pursuit. But really, all my altruistic ambitions have well-cloaked my latent need to feed my self-ego.

Today, I feel the need to run. To run free, without burden, without care, without thought to what another man might say or judge.

I wonder if that's what heaven would be like. To run free, light as the wind, fast as lightning, through lolling, lush hills and over mesmerizing, blue oceans. Till I visit heaven myself, I can only imagine.