Have you ever wondered where life will take you and where will you be in the next five years?
For quite a long period of time, I have this strong conviction that life is going to take me out of my country. I don’t know why, but I was born with a dream that I will see the world and that dream hasn’t been taken or replaced by anything else until today. The older I get, the stronger this dream is planted in my brain, in fact in my every cells.
So when life deprived me of my childhood reverie and sent me back home from Berlin 5 years ago (and I can’t believe it’s already 5 years!), I was so broken-hearted. I think it took me about a year to start everything from scratch and move on with head held high and finally be able to function fully like a human being, with ambition and passion. (Funnily, I don’t think that I develop a new dream in life. I still want to travel and speak lots and lots of foreign lingos and live in a place where I have to think about some grammar to buy a cup of coffee.)
But here’s the irony. I was offered a chance to go back to Berlin recently and I didn’t take it.
I used to think that I will give up almost anything here if somebody said they would pay me so I can live abroad and have the life I always desired. Yet I turned down the proposition to just do that. For days I’ve been pondering if I made the right decision and whether I should have thought longer about it. I made my own justification, of course. The job is something I would hate. I’d be working with people I know I don’t like and perhaps would never like because they’re the kind that would make me pull my hair out. The worst thing, maybe, is the thought that I’d end up going to an Alcoholic Anonymous meeting if, after several years, I still couldn’t give up that job to do things I want to do in life.
My teacher/mentor, whom I always turn to everytime I need advise, said that I should stay and continue what I’m doing here, which is another vote for my decision.
Today I’ve found my answer.
I read Viktor Frankl’s book about his time in Ausschwitz, and in one page I found this line: “You shouldn’t expect something from life, because to find meaning in life is to let life expect something from you.”
I learned from the book that people who survived the concentration camp were those who, despite indescribable sufferings, still managed to find meanings in life. I think when life took me back to Bandung, I learned, in order to ease the pain, that everything happens for a reason and that my reason would be that I have something to do here. And if it’s only as sordid as developing classical music in my country, for me it carries a great weight. Maybe it’s not as noble as developing villages destroyed by Tsunami, but I believe God wants me to do things that I do best. And like people who has found their true calling, I’ve found myself feeling generally elated every day (except when my students come and said they haven’t practised anything throughout the week, or when a sponsor said that they unfortunately have no sponsorship scheme due to internal consolidation, whatever that means.) The great thing about finding the meaning in life and knowing what life requires from you is that you never runs out of hope. And hope, said Emily Dickinson, “is a thing with feathers.” It gives you wing so you can fly no matter how bad the weather is.
So I’ll stay, for the time being. Maybe life will take me somewhere else sometime, when there’s a greater cause to serve, like developing classical music for the Eskimo community in North Pole. Maybe someday I can leave this place feeling ever so content because I have finally built a proper concert hall for our fantastically-sounded chamber orchestra and their internationally-renowned professional members. Sure I’ll miss Berlin and all its concerts and its superb Philharmoniker and their wonderful conductor, but since life is more about making a difference and fulfilling that shitty-but-true sense of duty, I will do my best to remind myself from time to time that I’m here because life needs me to be here.
"Et moi, je prends la vie comme elle vient…" (from Le Divorce)
(Imported old blog, originally written on April 7, 2009)
