Oxymoron In The Tropics

It seems to me that I am meeting more and more young people from broken lives or families.  I'm wondering if all this while, there have always been broken families and lives everywhere or has the world gotten worse? Yet these young people still fight on to find meaning and stability in their lives.  They still laugh and smile with their friends and classmates, never showing how much they are bleeding inside. I suppose there is no point in railing against a cruel or unjust world... because they cannot change the outside elements or factors. They can only change how they respond to their experiences. So far, the majority I meet have shown admirable resilience... although a few have the tendency to snarl and snap when people accidentally touch on sensitive topics. What I do notice is how all of them find their anchor in God.

I was on FB checking on some stuff (yes, my FB account is still dead but I have a shell account for school groups) when I came across my ex-student's fb.  Let's call him Max. Way back when, Max was a brooding young man with too much pain for someone so young.  There was so much loss, rejection and anger filling up his heart and mind.  When my eyes rested upon him, my heart hurt for I saw wounds I couldn't put a bandage over.  Sometimes I wished I could just take him home and get him to smile.  But of course, I couldn't do that.  My house would be overflowing if I gave in to every urge to take a kid home.  But that was a long time ago.  Max was fortunate because an angel smiled on him and he was given an opportunity to join a training program which took him away from painful home and prepared him for a well-paying job with an MNC.  There was a time when his FB account showed statuses that spoke of wanting to give up and go home.  I prayed that he wouldn't. Fast forwa...

An old friend commented that I 'know my stuff' and that puzzled me for a bit. By the time anyone reaches my age, he ir she better know their stuff. Or risk winning the 'Slow Learner' award. But then I do tend to know things intensively and exhaustively. That is because I develop a near-obsession about new things. I like new things because well... they are new. So I always want to figure out what they are, where they come from, why they are like that and all things related. If I were to create a mind map about what I want to learn about new stuff, the resulting paper required would be knee deep. Metaphorically speaking. Perhaps I have a psychological condition but I need to know enough about something until I am able to reach a sort of critical mass and I am able to say,"Yes, X is _______ !" And that adjective or noun should be able to describe X to a T. It took me 15 years to reach critical mass about debate. And what a great 15 years they were.... And...

It's been 23 years since I first stepped into a school as a teacher and I haven't lost the fascinated feeling I get when I'm at work. The feeling of sometimes being awestruck in silence when I watch my students... To me, each of them are raw works of art... potential masterpieces. They themselves are the artists and they hold their own palettes and brushes. Yes, there are times I feel like screaming in frustration ... or like grabbing one by the shoulders and shaking him or her awake from a dreamfog.  A lot of such times... but isn't a masterpiece usually born of frenzied energy and angst? And now I teach pre university students... it seems like ALL of them are brimming with angst.  I used to feel like I was the one holding the brush and that I HAD to do this or do that... but I have come to realise that these masterpieces-in-the-making need to make their own decisions of where the brushstrokes need to go and how much paint to use and when to apply the colours... ...