And They Lived Happily Ever After

It's a myth, it's a lie that we've been brainwashed with since we were children.  

All the fairy tales that were read to us, all the fairy tales we read.  They tell of Prince Charming and Snow White getting married and living happily ever after.  No marriage is ever further from that truth.

Good and lasting marriages involve a lot of hard work, a lot of give and take, a lot of sacrifices.

Marriage is a union.  It means putting your own interests, your own preferences, your own whims & fancies aside.

It means taking into consideration, serious consideration, the needs, the wants, the desires of your spouse.

We spend way too much time preparing for the wedding day and way too little time (if at all), preparing for the years ahead.

We Remember

A young man died in Ferguson, Missouri, USA, this week.  A young man on the verge of conquering the world as he prepared for the university.  A young man died, unnecessarily this week.

One young man in USA.  And thousands more like him - men and women, boys and girls - across this troubled world. 

The moon watches over our troubled earth.  The stars watch over our troubled world.  And somewhere among the galaxies, a life form may come down and teach us how we should live.

Until then, we need to look inwards and make a decision on what we really should do. 

Before we destroy ourselves.

Rest in Peace, Mike Brown.

Gone

My hard disk crashed.  Along with the thousands of photos, captured over the years.  The memories of childhoods, the memories of growing up, the memories of growing old.

I have learned, the hard way, that nothing in life is permanent.

I have learned that we need to be more prepared.

I have learned not to take things for granted.

And to the memories of the days past, the memories etched not in the hard disks and virtual disks of the new technological wilderness, but in the recesses of our minds and our hearts, I dedicate this photo.

Taken in some faraway land, in a forgotten time.  A time and a place where the children and grandchildren will probably puzzle over in the years ahead.  A time and a place special to only to the ones who were there.

谢谢 and спасибо

My blog stats shows that my most avid visitors come from Singapore and Russia.  So somewhere out there across the physical miles and the micro-dots in the Internet world, I hope I am making small changes to people's lives.

I haven't heard a single whisper from the people who visit but I grateful that people do take the trouble to visit.

In time to come, I will learn what type of pictures will be more appealing and what encourages all of you to come back to visit.

And for the rest of the world, thank you for visiting and your continued visits will encourage me to keep the posts coming.

Three Words

Three words we don't use often enough.

It's always good to spend time with the family - doing things together. It may not be the best use of time, it may be just being together doing things that could have been done better or faster by myself.

But it's time with loved ones.  We take such moments for granted, until someday those moments are no longer available to us.  Whether because the loved one has moved on in life, or life has moved out our loved ones.

Either way, remember that the moments are here and brief as they are, these individual moments come back together someday and make up our memories.

Say it before it is too late.

Goodbye and Sleep Well

And in a morning's light fleeting moment - like that moment when the sun first shines over the horizon - a life is gone.

A mother's short life is taken.  She returns to the Lord.  And the family grieves.

No matter how much time we had to prepare for the day, since the news of the cancer, we hold back - believing that the battle will be won, believing that Lord will not be so harsh to take away our loved ones.

So another life is lost to the dreaded one.  We mourn.  We grieve.  And life will never be the same again.

And the pain will never go away, even after all the years.

For Agnes, for Anthony, for Jacqueline, for Philip, for Josephine, for Celine, for every single family and friend I have lost over the years, the pain has not gone away.  The memory has not faded.

So today, we said goodbye to another.  And pray and hope that someday, we will find the cure - to the illness, to the pain.


Picture courtesy of 
http://homeofflowers.blogspot.sg/2013/01/the-flower-daffodils_19.html