Confronting our ghosts and demons

One is supposed to be scary as a ghost for a Halloween party on All Soul's Day. It is an American tradition that has been adopted by many countries. I don't know the origin of ghosts being so frightening because they could also be beautiful in an apparition they choose to be seen. The tradition has become commercialised, like all others that the scarier and uglier the masks for Halloween, the better they sell.

I want to take ghosts and demons away from the Halloween gaiety and bring them into the real lives of people who have difficulties confronting them. How often do we hear someone say: "I have my own demons plaguing me and I don't know how to deal with them." Or perhaps it is like this: " The ghosts of my past keep trespassing into my present and I am held hostage." These are terrible burdens to carry on and they affect one's capacity for enjoying life and love, for giving and for sharing them.

I have a friend who met and fell in love with her perfect man. He was everything she wanted for a lifelong partner. But somewhere in the relationship, something broke irreparably. So she married someone else who was a good person, but she had no closure with her love of her life, and she failed to give herself to the man she married. They separated. Up to now, that closure hangs in limbo.

Then there's the story between a mother and her daughter. She was young when she had her. And when she left for Europe to find a new life, she left her daughter to the care of the grandmother. When she was ready to take on her duties of mothering and reclaimed her daughter, she could never make her love her as a mother. They became enemies.

Another example. A close friend came home early from her shopping tour in the city and stumbled upon her diplomat husband with another woman in their marital bed. She was devastated. She wanted instant divorce. But they were both middle-aged and if separated, they would be losers. She claimed that she could never trust him again which is understandable. But on the other hand, she failed to accept that she probably forgot he was a man instead of just being the husband who brought home the bacon. And he, a middle-aged man succumbed to the flattery of a younger woman's seduction.

Still another example and it is about a boy of eleven whose mother died so suddenly. He was perplexed, numbed by the thought that someone so young and vital as her mother could die so suddenly. And he said: " I had many things to ask her but now I will never be able to do so." This is almost as traumatic as another case where the son said upon hearing of his father's death: " I will never be able to tell him that I really loved him." Or a wife who said: " I never told him how much I really loved him and he died without knowing my true feelings for him."

These are traumatic experiences that many are forced to live with because they cannot confront, or exorcise the ghosts and demons of the past. They maybe defeated for a while in an environment of trust and affection, but they can resurrect all at once in any unguarded moments. "The answer is out there," quoting a popular TV series. But how does one find those answers. Should one seek, or should one wait for time to bring the answers. Would it be too difficult to forgive oneself for one's own sins of omission, and for other's wrong that left a broken heart? Unless there is grace and humility to accept and make amends for wrongs done to oneself and to others the ghosts and demons will lord over the present and future of one's lifetime.#

Redefining human boundaries

The coming of winter is now evident as the temperature slides down to zero and darkness engulfs the horizon. Living in wintertime becomes a philosophy. We curse the weather for being unfriendly and rainy and cold, but we don't really answer the fundamental question of why we have chosen to be in a place where there are four seasons demanding changes in lifestyles. We come face to face with boundaries which we make ourselves, and those imposed upon us by the social and natural order of things.

I live with boundaries in my world because the opposite would be utter chaos and disorder. I live alone, like more than a thousand others, but it is not a nomadic life. I am bound by social rules and traditions that help create balance and order. My sense of balance with the outside world and what I feel is right for myself, is mine alone to determine. I choose the boundaries I can live with, allowing certain limitations to be flexible enough for change and growth. For instance, I can say that being born an Asian has equipped me with values entirely different from westerners, but after having lived in Sweden for 20 years, I outgrew some of my Asian beliefs and allowed great western values of egalitarianism and equality to enrich my outlook in life.

What are the boundaries we live in? Obviously it is in the realm of human relations where different kinds of boundaries exist. It is in this sphere that we can make our choices, most of them anyway.We decide how much is ours as individual persons, and how much is given to family, friends and the rest of the world. Blood ties are sometimes restrictive when they result in a border between "Us and them", and a boundary excludes others from the outside world. It is not a porous border that enables one to move in and out the "Us and them" paradigm, without fear of losing one's sense of belonging. Think about having a relationship with someone of this cultural background and being considered an outsider.

There are certain societies that strictly adhere to the "Us and them" rule. If you do not belong to the blood kinship, then you will always be an outsider. This is not the case in the western world where there is greater openness and where family relations are extended beyond blood ties. There are no boundaries for human relations to extend and multiply. Most Asian societies are clannish when it comes to considering who's family and who's not. But it is well-known for being the most extended in scope.

My family is extended beyond geographical and cultural boundaries. Having been married to a Swede gave me the opportunity to embrace his own family relations. Now I have children being married to, and having relations with persons coming from countries like Japan, Australia and Lebanon. The extension has created an expansive cultural experience for everybody, an affinity that defies distance and cultures. If that is not enough, I have also added my sons' friends in gymnasium as extended family. Hence, a Portuguese son who is more British and two Brazilian sons who are as affectionate as my own.

The trickiest boundaries to deal with are those in the field of human emotion - the man-woman relationship where social roles influence decisions on the limits of boundaries. Take a single parent, who maybe a man or a woman and who is also a parent to children. The first boundary that comes up is, what percentage of time is yours and what percentage belongs to the children. Then comes the career boundary, where one's professional life consumes almost 100 percent of one's time. There's nothing left for the other but excuses and loads of SMS that do not justify waitings and failed dinners. These are movable boundaries that one has the ability - given the determination to do right - to redefine and to re-adjust in order to achieve a balance between heart and mind, between duty to others and to one's self , and least of all between the spiritual and the material.#

Remembering the dead

Life is a precious gift one cannot afford to ignore or squander away because once it passes though the gate of eternity, there is no recovering what had been missed in one's lifetime. What makes All Soul's Day a heavy moment of reflection is the magnitude of recollection that comes with remembering the dead. As we honour our departed loved ones, we contemplate on the richness our lives have once been when they were part of the living and mourn the joys lost with their departure.

One experiences many kinds of death in one's lifetime. The unexpected ones are the hardest to accept because they catch us off-guarded, like when a close family member is murdered, or dies in a car collision or plane crash, or was hit by a suicide bomber, or simply fell down unconscious. We die a hundred times more than the death we mourn because we are caught unprepared for the loss.

Some deaths are expected, especially when an illness has taken an irreversible path of no return. We count the days, the hours, the minutes left for us to hold on to the bare thread of life that ties us to the person we don't want to let go. And when the inevitable happens, we hold the hands of our loved one for as long as it takes until they become cold and lifeless. Even an expected passing away is difficult to accept, and we somehow die ourselves.

Each time we honour the dead on All Soul's Day, we rationalise on their dying and on their departure from the sphere of life they once shared with us. Some deaths take a longer time to accept because they leave behind a deeper hole of emptiness. Maybe the heart has been shattered into tiny pieces that mending it is near impossible. Maybe the emotional destruction caused by death is the same magnitude as the ruins left behind by a world war where the possibility of becoming a whole person again is almost impossible.

As we light candles for our dead, we also seek the same light for our darkness, so that we might find ourselves safely out of the tunnel of sadness. The empty heart is difficult to fill again because it seeks the same purity of emotion that had once inhabited it. That is why happiness is elusive for those that have lost a great love.#

Lonely hearts and the magic world of cruises

How do you break away from a social isolation not of your own making but that fate played a cruel trick on you. A separation from a long-time companion, a divorce that ended a cycle of love and hate, an untimely death that claimed the love of your life, or just plain indifference to the noble functions of the heart have destined many to a life of murderous loneliness.

Sometimes it is none of the above that exile people to the barren life of common trivialities, to a deafening monotony that is punctuated only by the changing of television channels, as one desperately searches for programs that abbreviate the gap between something and nothing. Many couples married for a long time find themselves saddled in a routine of television watching where conversations are no longer relevant and silences become excusable.

At this particular time when the world is gripped by unstable finances and shaky employments, the feeling of anguished uncertainty over life and the attainment of happiness becomes so untenable and desperate. How does one get away from these crippling emotions of desolation? How does one break away from an externally-imposed social isolation when money is scarce and hard to earn? How does a lonely heart find a cure for its constant ache?

For people living in the Nordic countries, there is the gift of the sea. An abundance of archipelagic waters have given life to cruises. One can choose from a number of cruise programs: whole-day cruise to Mariehamn, or 36-hours to Åbo, Finland or the two-nights on board, one day city sight-seeing cruises to Helsinki, Finland, Tallin, Estonia or Riga, Latvia. Name it and the cruising ships of Viking Line and Tallink/Silja Lines are there everyday to make dreams ( some, anyway) come true, even for a borrowed time.

A long time ago, cruises were a luxury and affordable only to those in the upper social class. Think of the classic Agatha Christie Nile cruises where beautiful people cavort with one another and pretend to be someone else other than their real selves. To go on a cruise was to leave behind a wretched life and enter the magic world of make believe where there is music, dancing, dining, flirting and partner-seeking. Life becomes fatalistic. Live today or tonight because tomorrow you could be dead. Carpe diem!

The Nordics are truly egalitarian in the sense that the myth of Agatha Christie's elite crowd of dress-to-kill people on a cruise ( with an agenda to murder ), has been subverted by proletarianism. Cruises are for all, the different kinds of humanity that inhabit this wonderful region of equality between men and women in the pursuit of elusive happiness. In these ships that silently weave through the endless waters of the archipelago and the Baltic sea, men and women pursue with fierce equality the dream of dancing away the night with a Prince Charming or a Cinderella, and not run away at midnight and lose a golden shoe.#