There was a hammock tied on the tree next to our house, facing the Kinabalu Mountain; it was the space where I spent a good portion of the afternoons of my childhood singing, reading and daydreaming. I remember trying to take a nap but failed because the air was so uncomfortably sultry. With sticky, sweaty skin, I whistled the tune my mother had taught me--a tune that could magically summon breeze.
When my grandfather cut down the tree, my chest was as hot as the afternoon sun, blazing with anger I couldn't express. Yet, it didn't stop me from singing, reading and daydreaming. The hammock was moved to our wooden verandah, facing the one-way-street and our neighbors' houses. Sometimes in the weekends my sisters and I would draw and paint mountains, trees and the sun on this verandah.
In school, I told my Bahasa Melayu teacher that I wanted to be a scientist because I wanted to invent. She was in her purple baju kurung, and her small, round glasses looked small on her round face. With her plump fingers she took off her glasses and looked into my eyes, "and what do you wish to invent?" she'd asked. I had no idea what I wanted to invent, but I knew that I was hungy to invent.
A girl came up to me one day in High School and asked me, "What happen next?" I wrote a ghost short story and it was published in the annual school magazine. The ending of the piece was so open that it demanded the readers to make their own ending. This particular girl couldn't came up with an ending and asked me for an ending and I was amazed by how fictional words--stories could haunt one's mind.
Mr. Gilbert--one of my English teachers--nurtured his students to journal. He encouraged us to write everyday, and I did, but it had never crossed my mind that writing was inventing, expressing and a spiritual devotion; in my head it was merely an assignment, a habit that supposed to improve my writing technique. At that time I was still pursuing my childhood ambition to become a scientist, and when I got into college I felt an emptiness, a hollow deep in my soul, a childhood hunger that had never been satisfied for a long time. I was in my micorbiology lab, working on an experiment, playing with algae and detergent--it was fun but it was not truly an act of inventing, but rather felt like solving a jigsaw puzzle. I realized in this moment that what I wanted was to create the jigsaw puzzle rather than solving it.
I told myself it was just for fun, but my teacher Judy Slater unlocked a chamber in my soul that I'd locked long time ago. I wrote my first short story in this fiction writing class after years of not writing creatively and I felt satisfied and it brought me back to the boy on a hammock, daydreaming, and the boy who enjoyed sketching and painting mountains, trees and the sun with his sisters.
Maya Angelou told me over youtube that "When you learn, teach, when you get, give." Like Oprah, I believe life is a class, we are learning everyday about this one, great mystery that we don't even know what it is (only God knows what it is). Every step I've taken, every experience I've experienced and am experiencing is preparing me to fulfill the purpose of why I am here in this world. What that purpose is I'm not sure, but I know that to be the best version of myself is my aim for today, and tomorrow and the next ten years, and until the end of my time, I will always be learning how to be a better human being. Living what I believe to be true, what I've learned and am learning, and what I want to teach is--I believe--an act of teaching; and it is important to me to live in truth (which I'm constantly learning what and how).
Having lived on Earth for 25 years now, I've learned that every human experience matters (Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto--I am human being, nothing human can be alien to me -Terence); that my spiritual relationship and fellowship with God is unique and personal; that I am a student and a teacher simultaneously until the end of my life; and that I'm a writer, and writing is my home.
Age is just numbers, what matters is what I have learned so far and what I will learn in the future. I will always see myself as a student, a teacher, a writer, and the boy on a hammock, whistling a magical tune to summon the wind.