When things don’t go well, I too will not be happy.

When things go well, I will take joy.

I too have emotions, I too have feelings.

I seem strong and in many ways it is fair to say that I am strong, but there are times when the cracks will form.

After all, I too am human – seeking to be anti-fragile, but not quite there yet.

I am blessed to be lifted up by the grace of the universe.

For each person, I feel that there is a sort of fate – a range of things that happen in the course of the writing of their destiny, each page unique and tailored to the person’s nature, experiences, encounters.

And to each person, I suppose that there is a set of things that they are put to do, whether by their own nature or by the universe.

In doing what I do at the moment, it feels that there is a sort of animating force that lies within, pushing every single exertion, clip deletion, spoken word, idea that comes out from the internal engine that is my mind.

I imagine that in some alternate person’s history, it would not be so – they would feel a different animating force, and it might be on a different topic; rather than politics, they might be interested in a specific niche or aspect of business; rather than any of those things, they might be consumed by the high art of painting, music-making, or some other fancy that I might call a flight but that they might call an all-consuming raison d’etre.

Once upon a time in life, I used to be a little more judgmental, I feel, of possible raison d’etres – ways that people could live their lives, manifested in the daily choices and the everyday actions that they take; I don’t feel like that anymore – in many ways, it’s more of like… “Do what you have to do”?

If I think about it further, I guess that immediately sweeps out the people who just choose to do nothing or choose to break the law with no compelling or justice-driven reasoning and sit there crying, unchanging, doing nothing except complain day in day out as they live out authentic lifestyles that whether privately or publicly I say that I neither like nor respect – so I guess I change my mind; I am judgmental after all, but I just wanted to think that I wasn’t judgmental, and a part of me was trying to corner myself into a somewhat superior moral corner.

I am sure that a master philosopher would be able to take everything that I’ve said here and then write a dialogue out of it – but I think my basic observation is this:

As long as you don’t break the law as commonly accepted by both legal scholars and the ‘reasonable man’ and as long as you don’t do nothing, you should feel empowered to do what you have to do – you should be able to be who you wish to be, exist as you wish; you don’t have a right to talk to everyone because it’s everyone’s right to determine who they want to talk to, but certainly you have the right to try – to act, to react, to initiate, to respond, in order to get what you want out of life.

I guess this naturally invites a specific question.

What is it that you do, Victor? Why do you do it? How are you getting what you want out of life?

Well, I educate people and train them for exams, but I also do it more broadly by teaching them about politics and society; I educate myself by learning from the historical figures of our time directly – all in the service of my own self-enlightenment, through which I yearn to see the enlightenment of those around me, whether they may like that enlightenment or they may not.

The last question?

I don’t have a clean answer to that, because I’d have to answer at least partly in the negative.

I think that I am responding to this world mostly by instinct rather than through full orchestration – I think that there are many things that I’ve done and am doing and will continue to do that respond to different parts of the hunger inside me – but in terms of directing process, energy, intelligence, and articulating a full vision of what it can or should be, I think that we are still short.

But I don’t think that it is unmeaningful.

I guess some of you may already be aware of some of the things that have been happening, and you may also know that blog posts like these are a dreadfully low resolution medium to understand what these things are.

I leave it to you to understand the wider context – it should be a fun exercise 😀

I often consider myself a very lucky person in different ways, to the point that it feels as if fate sometimes looks down at me at opportune moments and says:”This one will be lucky!”

It’s hard to explain why, but the universe has given me opportunities to have things happen in greater numbers than I might expect given what I know, have, or have been able to get given my disposition and nature.

Some people don’t really believe in luck – they think that the universe and how it shows up is always a result of skill, preparedness, or some combination of the two; to these people, relying on fate is almost irresponsible.

I see this as the nature of my cello teacher, Timmy – someone who recommends that we practice until we ‘cannot get it wrong’ – where the natural consequence would be to get it right rather than to err in the moment; I see this as the characteristic professed by those who are both good and have the prospect of becoming better in an ever-continuing loop, whatever profession they may have.

But realistically, I think that’s at best an approximation to what reality is going to hand out as part of her card game – in a cello performance, you could break a string; a baseball could fly in from a broken window and destroy your cello even though baseball isn’t played in this country; you could do every single math problem right but then maybe the exam papers are torn apart by zombie sheep in the middle of the night hiding in the school compound – who knows???

None of that is to deny skill, to deny practice – but neither is this an attempt to say that we should scream to ourselves that luck isn’t real.

Was it by skill or by luck that I’ve managed to appear on former Ministers’ podcasts at this point, invite people to speak with me of strange yet legendary ilk, get the police to subscribe to me on YouTube, have multiple Ministers aid me in complaints directly, criticize multiple people with no apparent issues, push freedom of speech to what seems to be the absolute hilt in this place we call Malaysia, and to just go forward in life with no apparent cognitive dissonance or fear from the unknown unknowns of this world or reason to feel any of that?

I would imagine that part of it was by skill, but spiritually, it feels to me to be more like luck – like all of the things that have happened recently, I want to say didn’t happen because I deserved it even though maybe a little part of me (maybe a big part of me) deserved it by the intelligent choices that I made over the course of time – choices that I suppose make me a bit of an odd duck.

It is nice to think sometimes that you are not responsible – and the ambiguities of luck and chance in this complex universe sometimes allow us to paper over what had really happened in ways that we may believe but cannot prove.

I want to believe that all of it happened in a dream – that somehow I had coasted and it was the inevitable result of living, breathing, existing; but can a person really say that when a little part of them is moving forward as quickly as they can, ignoring most if not all external feedback?