Breaking the Habit

The very first night in Putrajaya, Malaysia with my new Malaysian and Indonesian friends (this little Malaysian lad gave me a brief crash course in BKM--Malaysian Sign Language--and proudly showed me foreign signs he had learned from other travelers. A future traveler is indeed in the making!)

I have been genuinely enjoying my solo adventures thus far. 

Malaysia and Singapore brought people--the Malay, the Chinese, the Indian and even the French--into my life, the people who helped shifting my perspective on my own culture, on others' cultures, and on life in general. I left these countries with a sense of gaining something akin to humility and wisdom. 

Hmm.

Let's forget that I'm traveling for a few moments.

Life stops for nobody, not even a globe-trekker. So, please allow me to get on the soapbox . . . 

While I was in India, someone told me that anger is a habit.

At first, I was stumped by the concept of an emotion being a habit, rather than a sense triggered by an event.

A habit is something you have control over. You can make or break a habit. Some habits have been formed over time and it is getting harder and harder to break them because you are so accustomed to using them to define you. Other habits are not the central pieces of you, and when you give them up, you just chuckle to yourself and think, "Well, good riddance!"

Now, let's consider the possibility that an emotion could be a habit. 

You react once to a certain event and believe this reaction is a proper one, so you begin to develop a need to feel this emotion every time an event happens. 

You feel validated or vindicated when this emotion obtains a kind of response you want to see from others. You feel violated or offended when this emotion fails to push a right button in someone else. 

When you do feel violated or offended, you begin to blame others for not giving you what you want. You want compassion to your anger. You want love to your sadness. You want kindness to your meanness. Others are to make up for what you could not give to yourself in the impassioned moment of a particular emotion. 

You become accustomed to appreciate and like someone who reacts beautifully to your emotions. It becomes a habit to scrutinize someone and deem whether h/she deserves to be in your life based on how well they respond to you. They happen because you are taught to listen to or even ignore specific emotions to help you navigating life. 

It becomes a habit, maybe even a reflex, to feel the same emotion every time a similiar event occurs. After all, it feels familiar and you like to know what to do rather than have to come up with an utterly new way to respond. So you falls upon your habit of feeling a similiar emotion.

Now let's imagine you breaking this habit of feeling the same emotion every time the similiar event happens.

What would happen?

Maybe you would discover a power within yourself to direct your reactions in a way that you can walk away from an event feeling free instead of feeling guilty. 

Maybe you would recognize the deep well of peace inside you that swells up and washes over you as you allow your habit coming up purely for the sake of recognizing and acknowledging an experience.

Or maybe it would make your life even more miserable because thinking that your emotions are not you and that they are nothing more than a scratch of an experience gives you an absolute freedom of consciously choosing a reaction. This absolute freedom overwhelms you because, hey, you've opened a can of worms and let out infinite possibilities to choose from.

Okay, now consider this: 

I am angry because I am frustrated with my struggle to choose a path in my life. I am angry because I am despairing over my own cluelessness. I am angry because I do not know how to make life easy for myself.

Anger is a habit, as a friend in India told me.

If it is true, then I am going to break this habit. 

I am fighting for inner peace. I am insisting for self-acceptance. I am demanding love for myself. 

And I am going to direct this habit, turning it into a perspective that offers me a means rather than an emotion blindly governing my reactions. 

I will transform this anger into an action. An action that will change the way I live my life.

What action?

I do not know.

However, in order to break a habit, I have to try. I have to experiment with different ways of breaking a habit. I am going to keep on trying to break, break, and break this habit until it is broken.

I am going to make decisions that will surprise even me. Some of these decisions might be mistakes. 

Big mistakes, probably. Or a long, agonizing series of tiny mistakes that add up. 

These decisions or mistakes probably will help me to eliminate all the distractions and all the ideas I thought I should have. They might lead me to find the core purpose of being myself, the principal objective of my life. 

I am angry. I am filled with passion to take the bull by the horns. 

I might be one big disaster of bad decisions and foolish mistakes. 

But I will shed all the habits, to unfold the origami of myself. I will find what it means to surprise myself. 

Watch me. 

I am going to raise my red flag. 

Bull, bring it on. 

Lining up to get my first taste of Singapore's own special ice cream sandwich. An yummy treat, tru biz!

Posing next to the most famous landmark of Singapore: Merlion. 

Raising the Noah's Ark (Manila Bay Sands).

Bumping onto two Singaporean-born Gallaudet alumni at the Singapore Association for the Deaf!