Coming out of the closest

I was catching up with a friend the other night when the conversation turned to close friends and how we might define who we are 'closest' to.

As a rule, I generally don't give much thought towards quantifying my varying degrees of closeness to my friends, but for discussion's sake, it did make for an interesting topic: what does make a close friend close?

Is it the person with whom you spend the most time with? The person to whom you share the most with? The person you talk to the most? The person you have the most in common with? The person with whom you have been friends for the longest?

There are endless reasons to be close to someone, and indeed all the above reasons are reasons to be grateful for. For me, there are two reasons that I am close to the people I am close to.

The first is honesty. Among those I count as my closest friends are those who are willing to open up to me. They have shared things with me I know that one does not immediately readily share with the world, and their trust and vulnerability induces reciprocality in me. I have great difficulty in sharing and opening up to people, and as I have grown older I have only made more mistakes in whom I elect to share my vulnerabilities with. This negative feedback means that I tend only to open up to people I feel have opened up to me.

However, more than just sharing their personal lives, such friends are treasured for the fact that they are unafraid to share their personal opinions, even when said opinions may be less than savory. When someone is willing to insult or rebuke you in the interest of being completely honest, it is for me one of the signs of a true friend. Caveat: insults alone do not imply friendship though - quite often they imply rather the opposite.

The second is gratitude. As my dear blogstalkers are well aware of by now, I love a good cliche, especially when it is true. And my dears, a friend in need really is a friend indeed. This works both ways. Both those who have helped me when I am weak and those who have allowed me to see and aid them in their darkest moments, are friends who I treasure deeply.

It's the heart that matters most

[Warning: as you may have discerned from the title, this will be a cliched and gushy, probably preachy post.]

Looking around at the doctors and doctors-to-be around me, I see people of all walks of life. There are the foul-mouthed swearing types, there are the jokers, there are the cold and distant types, there are the overtly caring ones, there are the ones who claim they don't give a damn.

But they do. We all do. The thing that binds us isn't that we're high academic achievers, or that we're competent, or that we've an all-consuming interest in what we do.

It's that we've got heart. Underneath our exteriors, whether hard and clam-like, or soft and welcoming, we feel for others. When we see another human being suffering, some part of us is fundamentally driven to do something, unselfish enough to care about it, and to want to make a difference.

If you're in the profession for anything else - whether it's the so-called glory or prestige, or the financial stability, or even for the intellectual gratification, you're bound to be disappointed. There's little real glory to be had - every other course from Politics to Culinary Skills, has its fair share of high-fliers. As for financial stability, there are easier ways to get that. You will spend a long time awaiting intellectual gratification, if that's what you're hoping for. Frustration is more likely, with all the loose ends and incomplete science.

The only thing that I can think of that makes us want to go on in this race is that we care. We care about our patients. We care about being good doctors. We care about each other.

Biblical 32"-24"-32"

Today during bible study we were sharing about our recent quiet time experiences, and I started rambling on about one of the verses that I hold dear to me, the Proverbs 31:10-31. It's one of my impossible ambitions - to become a Proverbs 31 woman. (That, and to be ravishingly beautiful. Yes, I know it's a cliche.)

Anyway, while trying to share why it means so much to me, I realised I couldn't say much. I began to get self-conscious and embarrassed and think about how time was running short and ended up not saying anything at all, really. But coming back, I decided to find out more about what other, more authoritative voices had to say about the verses.

This resource divides the biblical ideal of a woman into the different roles she fulfills for ease of study - her position as a mother, a wife, a neighbour and so on. This one does a line-by-line analysis, as well as an overall situation of its context.

As for the ravishing beauty, well, there's a history to that. I don't mean the earthly Liv Tyler kind of beauty, although I truly wouldn't mind a bit of that, as I really can't say much of my god-given assets. I mean the heavenly Sarah Smith kind of beauty you read about in The Great Divorce (C.S. Lewis). Suffice to say that it is and always will be, a distant, misty-eyed dream for the life to come.

Music: The Chinese

If men were to be judged by music alone, give me a Chinese man anytime (Heh. So much for the hot Aussies I hope to meet next year...). Chinese music seems possess a sense of innocence, a childlike lack of inhibition, that is generally absent in other genres of music. At least part of it is due to the fact that Chinese pop stars seem blissfully unaware of the concept of a cliché.

But really, besides the fact that Chinese musicians are either fine with being clichéd, or else unaware of it, their concepts of romance are generally sweeter, less sensual, and more pure than their Western counterparts. Whether you hear about love unrequited, or the simple love of a first romance, Chinese music just has that sense of being earnestly, sweetly, sentimental. It's a bit like being eternally youthful, in an emotional sense. Free of worldliness and cynicism.

Why doesn't time listen when I say stop?

This year has passed so quickly - it's already the last six weeks before the next year begins. Already I feel the year looming ahead, rising like mist after the rain. It's full of potential, like all unused things - a fresh sheet of paper, a new pair of shoes, the beginning part of a relationship - it has that special magic. A promise, perhaps, of something good on the horizon.

It's naive and cliched perhaps, especially when all nice, clean new things eventually get stained and dirty with use. Mistakes are made, and cannot be erased.

Perhaps it's tempting fate to say this, but I don't think I made too many mistakes (edit: I mean major mistakes, the kind that make you go 'What was I thinking?' when you think back on them. Not the making-funny-faces-in-lift-mirrors-when-the-door-opens sort) this year. I think I was spending to much time dwelling on the mistakes of the past, trying to recoup my losses, I suppose.

In the last leg of this transitory phase, before I leave on my jet plane, I want to experience something I've never experienced before. Too bad it's too late to plan something like climbing a mountain or something.

Maybe next year.

Small^time = big

Don't you find it funny how true cliches are, despite their bad reputation? For instance, today I realised the truth of the cliche that the little things are the ones which count. Sometimes you wake up one day and you suddenly realise how far you've come from a few years back, and you kind of wonder how the change came about. I think it is the little things that make this change. The little decisions to just indulge that little bit here, or to make that extra effort to be nice there, that ever so gradually and imperceptibly build up.

Dance also helped me realise this. In dance, particularly in ballet, every move you make is important, and significant. Slack a little bit at barre, and you will feel it at centre work. In no movement can you say, what the heck, I shall slacken just a little bit here. Once you do so, the whole movement is ruined. Perhaps it is imperceptibly so, but the weakness will be revealed in other steps that you perform.

You have one life, take that little bit of extra time to think over the choices you make. You will live it all the better for thinking.

It's the heart that matters most

For a long time I have been searching for the Truth; irrefutable proof that the Christian God exists. I've always known, deep down in my heart, that the Christian God is the truest God of all, but I wanted to prove it was true through foolproof argument and irrefutable logic.

For this entire semester I have been almost bogged down by this. I spent most of my quality time with myself in the shower mulling over the issue.

Then, someone asked me how I would want God/Jesus to prove that He was who He claimed to be. My answer was that God/Jesus would tell me something so wise and true that I would know immediately that he was who he claimed to be. But this raised the question, how would I know that what was said was a Great Truth of Life? Perhaps it could be because it was so obvious, yet so unreachable by leaps of mortal logic. Perhaps I would know because I would feel it with my heart.

Then, I realised what a grave error I had made. I should have trusted my heart, in the same way I woud trust my heart to recognise a Truth when I heard it. There is plenty of evidence that the Christian God is true, but no human evidence or understanding can be complete. In the end, I have to use my heart to tell me what's right and good and true.

[Edit (28/11/2011): Now I've realised that God indeed did talk to us through His Word.  Jesus himself spoke many home truths that revealed His deep understanding of the world, and how we are to live in it.]