Dial Down Velcro Cling

So it's now Sunday night and I'm a little bit depressed. Not that I don't have good reason to be: I've just three days left to do all my packing and say all my farewells and settle a few administrative niggles, though with a little planning and careful use of time I certainly should be able to do all of that. But it remains that I'm essentially saying goodbye to everything that has been familiar to me for the past four years (plus three months) and going somewhere that I've never actually lived in.

Because you shouldn't get the wrong idea. For all that I talk about going back to So Hour, my experience of the place is extremely limited; I go there often, but I only know my extended family there, and of them I know maybe a handful well. I know nobody outside the family and I don't even know the geography of the place--I know the public transport but only as far as it concerns getting to/from the ancestral home (as I've started calling it)--so as far as I'm concerned the job may as well be in a completely foreign country that just happens to not need a visa or permit. Even the language will pose problems: I know no dialect, I speak very broken Mandarin and Malay, and the locals don't quite speak English. At least not the English I speak. So it's going to be a time of massive adjustment.

And the whole thing of course is that I'm giving up my comfortable familiarity for something completely unfamiliar; if I had to describe what my situation looks like, I'd say that I'd been walking down a long road knocking at a series of locked doors, and then one that I simply knocked on out of sheer let's-give-it-a-try opened up and I stepped through only to find that it was a springboard with a lot of empty space underneath, and the door has shut behind me and I have to jump whether I like it or not. And I don't yet know what the landing is going to be like.

I've never liked unfamiliarity; it's ironic therefore that nothing in my life is ever stable. But then nothing in the world is ever stable, which doesn't stop me from envying people who've lived in one place their whole life and grew up surrounded by the same people from kindergarten to university and have childhood friends (a completely unfamiliar concept for me!); while whenever people ask me about where I came from, the closest thing to an answer I can give is "oh, I've been all over". I've complained about this before; perhaps it's a good thing my childhood has been so spread-out, since it does result in me being pretty good at acclimatising to pretty much anywhere. And the changes that happen to me do tend to be sudden ones, too; the move from KL to Patience took a mere two weeks from random idea to fait accompli, the decision to go from Patience to KL (for A-Levels) was less than a week in the deciding, and the decision to go to NTU was just sprung on me barely two weeks before I had to go. And now? Last Thursday I was informed that the company's decided to hire me, and come this Thursday I shall be moving all my things from this place to the ancestral home.

I suspect the lives of all my siblings look quite similar. After all, we've been separated and are all in far-flung places now, and all on what looks rather like impulsive whimsy. I suspect my parents would call it "taking opportunities as they come", but to me...

Well, there's no point whining. I've been told I tend to be clingy, and I've never liked it when other people go away; much less when it's me going away. I've gone away several times now, always to "somewhere near", always with promises to return and visit lots; but time goes on and things and people change. I change; the people and place I've left behind (so to speak) change too. And sometimes I think my life would be easier if I didn't form so many attachments to people--to be the human equivalent of Teflon rather than Velcro (which is what I think I'm rather like sometimes).

But then I look at the old woman who owns the house I rent a room in, who seems to have no friendly human contact other than her two children, and I shudder at the thought of ever becoming like that.

Essentially? I'm going away. It's got massive amounts of pros and cons; the job looks promising, the company's got good prospects for growth (or at least stability), the boss is friendly, the people seem nice, it's relatively near family, it's in Malaysia; but I'm leaving behind the people I've been with for nearly two years now. Somehow that one con dwarfs all the pros, though I suppose it'll dull with time. Or it might not; I still retain keepsakes from people who went away: my wooden paper fan, the purple wristband on my left wrist, my yellow plastic wallet, my wire-rope keychain, a little wax green apple, a snowman paperweight, a handmade bamboo ring.

...but I'm getting maudlin, and this bout of self-pity is no help to me whatsoever; the past is past, the future is rushing madly towards me at the insane rate of one second per second, and the present is rushing madly away at the same dizzying rate.

A thought came to me this morning during the singing in church, spurred on particularly by the lyrics of one song--"for You are my Sun and Shield"--and it struck me as a rather strange juxtaposition. What does a sun have to do with a shield, after all? And being a rather literal-minded person, the image that popped up in my head was of a person walking in an infinite featureless plane carrying a large Roman shield and holding a sun on a string, like a balloon. Which, of course, doesn't at all sound like the picture of comfort. Being constantly in the glare of a sun would be pretty blinding, and toting a great chunk of metal around would be tiring (and doesn't metal conduct heat?), and even if you used the shield to block the sun your arms would get sore and cramped after awhile. And then the thought came to me--it's not a terribly groundbreaking thought, I admit--that that might be exactly the position we're in on this earth whether we like it or not. We're definitely in hostile Everything Trying To Kill You territory, but God protects us; we're in a world of darkness and coldness and God is our giant body of Nuclear Fusion that provides light and heat in abundance. It might only show how warped my viewpoint sometimes gets, but over the past weeks I've been looking at my situation and moaning about how uncomfortable it is. And this image reminded me basically that God makes us warrior-priests, not coddled fatlings, and that means we're going to be put through trying times for our own good; that every believer is called to be a Royal Who Actually Does Something, and that Authority Equals Asskicking. Yes. my theology tends to be expressed in tropes, and yes, my mind does tend to wander off into strange territory during worship-time.

Now I just have to plan out the next three days of hustling. I shudder.