Five minutes for redemption

In the center of a room,
Is a lady in the palest white,
From dress to body,
Except her blood red lips.

Her angled expressions like that of precarious geometry,
Her eyes blink slowly as her lips open slowly,
Every part of her movement dissolves into the surrounding,
Moving,
Yet not moving.

In my right hand is my blade,
Dripping with the blood of innocents,
Of the souls I’ve sundered,
Hopes and dreams I’ve plundered.

I lift my head and think about the moment when I swung,
And cut the heart,
Like a coup de grace,
I fall to my knees,
Into her arms,
Her tears of black flow down her dress,
Lines of black all over,
I feel myself lost within.

Drowning in my crucified sanity,
The thirteen within pull me in all directions,
I find myself counting down five minutes to midnight,
Where the gates of damnation call,
Five minutes for redemption.
-Five minutes for redemption

In a world where there is a doomsday clock, where the minutes to midnight change constantly, it’s impossible to truly tell when the clock might strike twelve. Why do we concentrate on a doomsday clock, when we forget the more immediate problem, our own clock, the minutes to our end.

Consider this, we all have our own life clock which countdowns to the moment we meet our end. It’s a counter that we can never see, never know and it also means that we have limited time. Life is not infinite, thus the pursuit of immortality is something that people fantasize about so much, some even spends fortunes to try and find it, but then they forget what they can do with the time they have and they can make a difference in this world.

This is a quote I’ve used many times, “Life is strength, we live and we affect our world.” Our very lives give us power, power to affect our world, with our actions, with the translation of our thoughts into various mediums and machinations that affect those around us and to a certain extent the world. With that limited time we have, our strength is limited, but how we channel our strength, harness that “potential”, our influence over the world, is the biggest question.

For me, I am someone who wants to affect lives on both a large scale where many would benefit, and also to affect those who matter most to me on a profound level where my “strength” matters most. The very knowledge and fact that I have limited strength, makes me want to not waste my strength, my potential.

Our potential can be increased and amplified by how much we prepare ourselves and equip ourselves and work towards achieving the goals we set. Imagine our lives in the form of a multilevel shelf.

The shelf can be filled with any kind of book, but the shelf has a limited space, and when the shelf is full, one has no more time to fill that shelf. When we are first come into existence, in the safety of our mother’s womb, our shelf is empty; devoid is knowledge of the outside world, with no relationships and only the experiences we get from within the womb. And when we come into this world, we are exposed to various things that our family and relatives teach us, and our shelf starts to fill up with the languages they teach us, that we hear, objects we see, touch, taste and smell.

Our initial world till adolescence is controlled by teachers and parents on subjects that we learn and as we get older, we are given more responsibility to choose what we experience. From the relationships we make, the subjects we take, books we read, lessons we participate and observe, skills that we pursue, activities that we do, they begin to fill up our shelf.

With the choices given to us, we can choose to fill our shelves to the brim, until we have no time to fill it up anymore, due to it being too filled up, or we can choose to take our time to find the better “books” and spend more time to know each book we place in our shelf.

If we were to fill up our shelf to the brim, during the times when we need to find a certain book, we may have trouble finding it as there are too many things in that shelf. In real life, it would be that your so involved in different things, you have trouble figuring out which is more important or not being able to understand something due to the lack of time spent reading that “book”

Also, if our shelves are too full, we are unable to find time to look for new books and put better books on the shelf. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t try too many different things. The first book you pickup may not be the best for you, nor will the fifteenth or hundredth. Its ok to try different things, but what you put on the shelf must be something that is worth one’s time, and that person would gain more out of that book in terms of experiences, memories and lessons learnt.

If you spent your time looking at each book carefully, before putting them on the shelf, you would prevent books that aren’t useful, or good for you from being on your shelf. Of course, you can’t be too sure, until enough time is spent, thus if after the initial “browsing” one can put in the shelf, but should make sure that spend the time to return to that book to read it. Neglecting your books would cause it to be covered with dust, and some books don’t handle well to neglect, they may whither, break apart or even gets stolen.

To give you a better outlook of the shelf, the kind of books will broken down into these categories:

Relationships
Skills
Wisdom
Fitness/Health

The first point of relationships covers family, friends, lovers and partners. By filling your shelf with the right people and spending time with them, and understanding them, will allow you in times of need or help to lend a helping hand or give your advice or support.

The second point of skills is the subjects you will learn, from mathematics to science, marital arts to cooking. These various skills in life allow us to achieve tasks in the world, and help us affect our world according to the proficiency we have learnt these skills.

The third point of wisdom is what we come learn from all the relationships, skills and experiences in life we have. What we learn in terms of how to handle people, concepts that can be learnt from the skill or in learning the skill help us to understand the way the world works, how we can be more effective at something, or where best to apply these skills in a manner that avoids negative outcomes such as failures or negative reactions from the world.

The fourth is Fitness/Health, this isn’t actually a book, but rather your maintenance of your actual shelf. Imagine your shelf getting attacked by termites, cooked in the sun and drenched in the rain day in day out, won’t it just fall apart? Along with all the books inside.

Fitness and health doesn’t just purely talk about health, although it’s a main part of this concept. In order to have the ability to find the books that you can choose from and put on your shelf, you need a certain level of health or fitness to attain them, and if you were in poor health, it would be difficult to maintain these books or even find new books.

That’s why, the time we spend taking care of our shelf, through exercise, healthy diet, ample rest etc. Will determine how well we maintain our shelf, the books and how much we can learn from these books and attain new books.

With these books, we must make a choice, due to the limited shelf space and time we have to spend reading/living.

Maintain the library of your life well, do housekeeping, remove books that may not be useful, but don’t throw them away, perhaps just placing them in a box and picking it up once in a while does no harm. Don’t let it get cluttered with so many different things, and when the time comes when you need or want a book, you can’t find a good book among that junk, because you don’t know the books on your shelf very well, and many would be poorly maintained.

It boils down to another overused quote of, “Quantity over Quality” This is a choice you must make. I am not saying you should only have a few books on your shelf, in fact you can have many, but you’ve got to make sure they are well maintained and enough time has been spent on them, in order for them not to be useless or poorly maintained books.

By having good knowledge and understanding of your shelf and the books within them, you are better equipped in handling the world before you and achieving your goals and of course the pursuit of using your full potential. With our clock counting down, would you fill your shelf to the brim? Or fill it with something that makes a bigger difference? “Quantity or Quality?”

Like a summer of a thousand lonely smiles,
Without an end in sight,
When the moment seems so bleak,
Across this room of broken glass,
Turn away and don’t look back.

Take my hand.

I’ll show you a light that engulfs the darkness,
Where we become dreamers,
Among the sands of dream,
Shaded by these trees,
Where there is no need to try,
Because we just want to live.

For in life we can’t ask for more,
But the gift of life’s journey.
-Never giving up