This display was a part of a showcase during Singapore Garden Festival. This was the first time I attended the event and it has already became one of my most favorite events in Singapore. Can’t wait to check out this year’s showcase. The creativity and energy that goes into the designs and displays of the show were utterly amazing. There were tons of capture I took at the exhibition but I have chosen this photo for the post mainly because I like how the concept of nature is being intertwined with the modern-day furniture. It also reminded me of how I used to be an extremist. At one point I felt that my character is somewhat of a person who wants either the best or rather not have anything at all, I didn’t believe in half-baked stuff. It’s either all or nothing. That basically just shows how attached I am to my mind and I find it hard to accept anything that is less than perfect.

It also made me think of the times when I would really love to live in a place where there are fewer people and more of nature, maybe somewhere in Australia, Iceland or New Zealand of sorts. I got tired of the coldness of city life where the more people there is, the more people seemed to be lonelier. People connect on the surface but deep down, not many can open up to connect as fellow human beings. The more I love nature, the more I hated city life, and I realized later that this is also a reflection of the extreme nature of my mind. Sometimes all we need to do is to accept where we are and embrace both extremes because they are one and the same. Now I can be comfortable with modern-day living and all its challenges, I can also be comfortable in nature because it frees the spirit. The body and soul are one and they need both sides for nourishment. I felt that this work of art has successfully capture the essence of this interdependence and I hope it can inspire you to find the balance within.

Let’s start this year rolling with what I refer to as “the middle path”. One of the greatest discovery for me last year is that in life, everything has to keep a certain effort in regaining balance, even enlightenment itself. What this means is that even for an enlightened individual, he or she has to consistently work to maintain the state of enlightenment or it can be lost. Now, enlightenment might be a little too extreme for most people because not many understand what that state is and it is difficult to explain especially with words. Maybe a much simpler way to understand is to think in terms of inner peace, and if one attains it but is not careful, he or she might lose that sense of peace anytime. I used to think that when you achieve something, you will have it forever but that is not the way life works. Life is like a river, ever-flowing and ever-changing and nothing lasts in the same state forever and that applies to all things, even your state of being. One day you can be happy and peaceful, the next day you are back to wondering what is happening with all the mess you have to deal with. To stay in the state of inner peace, it has to be a constant act of balancing and this act of balancing is what I refer to as the middle path.

First you have to understand the nature of the mind. The mind function in extremes. It has the tendency to move from one extreme to the next and like a pendulum, it swings from one end to the other and back again. It is a never-ending cycle and that explains why we always have desires. Desires are the product of the mind and desires always happen on the extreme end of emotions. If you are able to stay in the center of the two extremes, desires disappears. It is like standing in the eye of the cyclone where there is calmness but on the circumference there is the stark contrast of a storm with the strongest winds; no matter which direction you run from the eye of the cyclone, you will end up with extreme weather on all ends. To further understand the benefits of the middle path is to understand the complementary nature of emotions. The mind likes to think that love and hate are opposites to one another, in fact they are the same. Remember that the mind like to think in extremes but love is not opposite from hate, it is actually on the same plane as hate. Without one on either end, the other cannot exist. There will not be a need for peace if there is no war, there can be no good if there is no evil, beauty cannot exist if there is nothing ugly for you to compare it with. One depends on the other and realized that if you accept one, the other will not be far behind. Life gives you the choice to decide whether you would like to take part in any of these emotional dramas; the struggles we have usually stems from rolling off from one extreme to the other, based on the expectations we have of our desires. The only way we can transcend it is to be in the middle, staying in the center of the cyclone, so to speak. The catch is, if you are to live and function in the world, it is impossible to be always centered in the middle path.

The point is not to try to be in the middle or to be neutral in all situations, it is guaranteed to fail. It is not about being permanently in the center but constantly finding the center. Finding the center is like finding the stillness of your very being, it allows you to be in a place of power and be fully in the present moment. All actions that stem from being centered in the moment comes from a place of surrender which gives great intuition, it offers a clarity that is not clouded by the illusions of the mind nor tainted by time. Why then is it not possible to stay in the center indefinitely? Imagine a tightrope walker, if he just walks in the center, he is bound to fall. In order to walk continuously in the center and maintain the line, he would have to shift his weight sometimes to the left and sometimes to the right. This shifting or the act of balancing is the key to walking in the center, it is never a straight path. If you haven’t yet realized, nothing in life is ever a straight path, there is bound to be something that will always throw you off course. During my sailing days, we used what is called a gyroscope to steer the ship. There are all these numbers on the gyro to show your headings so that you are able to follow it like a compass. During rough seas, it is almost impossible to keep the ship heading in a fixed direction. You can have a fixed destination and it would be so easy if the ship just went in a straight line to the destination, but there is always adjustments to be made to counter the wind and tides as they throw you off course, so in reality, you are always going to go off course so that you are able to get back on course again and reach your destination.

As you go about your day, the turbulence on the outside will always be in a constant change and there is nothing you can do about it. The only thing you can do is to be aware of what is going on in the inside. There is an interesting saying that the world does not exists on the outside but it is always in you. In some ways it is true, when you close your eyes and you go to sleep, the world ceases to exist. Whatever meaning you give to the world exists within you, on the surface there is no meaning, occurrences just happen the way it is. When you shift from one extreme end of the emotions to the other based on the stimulus from the outside, what you need to be aware of is that there is a middle point. From compassionate to hatred, from sadness to anger, all extremes will pass by a middle or neutral point where that emotion is balanced and neutralized. There will be times when you miss the middle point and lose control of your behavior at the extreme end, that is alright, just know that you have passed the middle point then make an effort to find where it was. That will allow you to continuously seek to center yourself, and in the long run, you will learn to love the person you have become.

There is always a perfect balance. The more you think, the lesser you live. The more knowledge you think you have, the lesser you understand. The middle path is a place of balance, it is neither there nor here and yet it embraces all. If you are not going either left or right, you will eventually find that the only place left to go is deep within. Imagine a scale of 1 to 10, instead of going horizontal like from 1 to 2, you go vertical such as 1a and 1b and so on and so forth in every moment, that will allow you to deepen your self-awareness and guide you on the path that is meant to be.