Watching Him Work

One new year eve, maybe when I was ten, I stood in silence behind my grandfather. He brought my story book, along with cans of paint and brushes. He opened the book and stopped on a page with picture of a boy and a girl wearing uniform. They walked to school, while waving their hands to their parents.

He took a pencil and started making rough lines on a white wall in front of him. He glanced back and forth between the book and the wall. It took me a while to realize that he was copying the boy and the girl on the book to the wall. I kept on watching him in silence, until I was too sleepy to stay awake and decided to go to bed.  

On the following morning, I looked at the wall and chuckled at it. There’re supposed to be little kids going to kindergarten, but my grandfather messed their faces up. He made them look way older than any five year olds.

They wore uniform with my grandfather’s favorite color: green. They smiled weirdly to their invisible parents. Their tangled fingers were holding colorful balloons.

The balloons say TK NU AL-ANSHAR.

The name of a school he built next door, over thirty years ago.  

On any other nights, I would find him doing another artsy projects for the school. Sometimes he repainted the chairs, sometimes he created hand-written sign boards, and sometimes he re-arranged the classrooms’ layout. When I wasn’t too sleepy, I would join him by watching silently and he would let me. At the following mornings, he would be sleeping and I would be awake, enjoying the master pieces he’s done during the night.

Until now, I still do love watching him work.  

It’s like he never stopped working. 

Grandfather

Three days ago, on the day of the death of my grandfather, I sat still with my cousins in the living room, waiting for our turn to give our last kisses to his flowery-scented body.

My grandmother couldn’t move her feet due to her illness, she remain seated next to his coffin and cried out to him desperately. My youngest aunt burst into tears after her last kiss, my mother hugged her and said it was our turn: the grandchildren.

I moved closer to the shrouded body, kneeled by his side and touched his forehead with the tip of my nose. It was jasmine, rose, reminisce and all lively scents, as it is him who’s breathing out the flowers. I couldn’t think of a prayer for him. I couldn’t think of anything at all.

I was busy feeling his wrinkled skin to mine, inhaling his pheromone with all my strength, while trying so hard to hold back my tears from falling to him. I was being an egoic-head who’s craving for his body. The body that made my existence possible, the body where my blood and vein were rooted.

I went back to my spot, covered my red-face with my hand and let the sorrow take over me. My sisters cried in a hug. My mother was there too, calming them down.

“He’s now in a better place. He’s free of the pain,” she said while stroking their backs.

I joined the hug after a moment of solo-heavy-cry and made the most heartbreaking grief in the world.

I’ve Been Dead for Too Long

After finish reading The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, I become more conscious of my thought. I’m not surprised when I found myself couldn’t stop thinking, because that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing for my whole life. That’s also how I identified myself as a human. Noticing that it is just how everyone else’s been doing.

In fact, that way of life has made me a dead meat. I might still look like a real person: be nice to other; set some life goals; and have a hobby, but I haven’t been actually alive. The thing is, my thought has been running my life this whole time. Thanks to the book, recently, whenever I caught my mind wandering, I would shout internally, “come back!” I do come back, but that wouldn’t be for long. Seconds later, I’ll be somewhere else.

I desperately want to arrive at some point in the near-future, where I project myself as a better person with better life. I delete my unrealistic monthly goals and wait for the next month to come, just to set other seemingly-realistic goals. I rewrite my unchecked to-do-lists and convince myself that I’ll do them tomorrow. I wake up every morning and tell myself that it’s going to be a good day.

These doings lie on the same false believe: the now is a stepping stone for the better future. The now becomes a wait for an arbitrary thing called the future.

The clock time surely is a helpful tool for organization. It does give me lessons from the past and hopes for the future, but my life happen now. Once I’m done using the clock time for practical reasons, I should return to the present moment immediately and be truly alive by being in the now.

There is never a time when my life is not now. It has always been that way and it will always be.

I’ve been dead for too long.

Now is the only time to wake up.

Maybe, you are too.