four letters

I think it was two days ago, when he put my shoes on the second shelf of his plastic shoe rack.

 My red shoes seems as if it had been there all along. Against the blue plastic, on the left side, just calmly sitting there.

If my shoes could be so well adjusted to it's place, there was no way I was not. I felt so at home, so comfortable, so stripped bare at where I was that time. It felt like a revelation, where you suddenly found out that you belong there in the first place, and stupid you just barely realized it.

Like you've been painstakingly selecting text in word and right-clicking them to choose 'copy', then placing your cursor at the right place to right-click again and choosing 'paste'. All that work when you realize that there's CTRL+C and CTRL+V. You smacked your forehead real hard when you first found the shortcut, then of course, you never bothered to right-click and choose the drop down menu ever again. That kind of feeling.

Getting there involved being blind and ignorant.

Years ago, my Chinese teacher, and old, blind in one eye man once told his students, including me, a phrase which meaning I won't forget. He'd just came back from Singapore and brought along scrolls of calligraphy to put up on our classroom wall-- which was his garage. While showing us one of the scrolls, he translated the artistically unreadable Chinese characters. Sadly, I was 12 at the time and I could not remember the exact phrase now.

The phrase meant something like, 'Man will avoid bitter and find sweetness'. Unlike any other preaching type of proverb, the saying was some type of reminder of how human nature is like. I was a kid back then, but even I did realize that the four letters showed how simple us humans are.

Eight years later, I realize that the aforementioned reminder is not just talking about human character, it's also a reminder of a mistake, and I had fallen into it.

A lot of things in this life are bitter, and everything worthy of your efforts WILL be bitter. Duties, assignments are not very pleasurable, but it's what you live for. What if humans were not given any challenges, any tasks, any temptations? Humans will not have will to walk, to breathe, to stand up, to even live. What is there to live for when everything tastes sweet? A mixture of bitterness followed by sweetness is what I'm living for. Sweetness is sticky as it is, and no matter how much I feel at home in it, I do not want to throw off the balance of my life. I haven't worked hard enough and endure all the bitterness to taste the sweet.

love, noirette.