Articulating your dreams

is a skill. And believe or not, you get better at it with sufficient practice. Then comes a point when you realise, the exact act of articulating these dreams, these things that you want to do, is a way to justify them. Sometimes it feels that these dreams are only justified because they are verbalised enough. Are these dreams, dreams, then?

Feeling the need to do some arts and crafts again. The feeling only arises when the urge to create something from scratch is more urgent than what I am supposed to do in school. Usually this happens when there is so much to do, so much to articulate and explain, so much of 'see this is what I can do and what I want to do.'

Last week I made a small card with the saying by Yoyo Ma which was on a Starbucks cup -

"What I look for in musicians is generosity. There is so much to learn from each other and about each other's culture. Great creativity begins with tolerance."

I spent a good chunk of my afternoon cutting alphabets from a random brochure and pasted them together on the card. The culture part seems a bit out of place, but the generosity and tolerance parts do speak to me. I guess especially with all that talking that I have done in these two weeks, I am perplexed by why these occassions never stop popping up. Luckily there are always friends who keep things creative and fun.

It is so easy to get caught up into all that articulations of dreams one has to do, e.g. department dinners, professor's office hours (the important ones, you know, those who sign your forms), emails to professors and the registrar, scholarship applications, internship applications, personal statements for various things... It is so easy to get caught up in these formalities that the dreams themselves are fogotten.

And then all of a sudden the dreams have to be 'meaningful,' 'professional' to enlist support from others and sadly enough, from oneself. Yet beneath the surface what one wants to do is to simply feel, to experience the world as it is.

When in reality, a musical phrase that may last less than three seconds still moves me to tears.