Eyed wide open

Early this morning, I attached Pak Latiff Mohidin's Kalau Kau Mahu poem to a passionate email (as below) to a friend of mine, Mr. Beary Bear, a self-professed lit-slacker. I thought it was an appropriate poem to send seeing how caught up he is with work that he hardly has time to play with his two daughters.

With numerous readings, the poem will reveal its many layers to him eventually...and I really hope he loves it as much as I do!

Dear Beary Bear,

Sometimes we get too caught up in work that we forget that we have a life to live. I think this is what happened to Ms. Funky – she’s been working too hard that she simply “disappeared” from the social circle. That’s why I only got to see her after 10 over years at the reunion the other night. Before, when I try to find her, I googled her on the internet. She wasn’t even in cyberscpace! It’s like she didn’t exist.

But thank goodness for artists, writers and poets from long before and who are still alive now, from all over the world. Because they are the ones who observe life and write about the everyday, mundane things in life for us, the 9-to-5 slaves, to read and appreciate when we finally wake up from our paper-chasing, bureaucratic nightmare.

They have documented for us what a sunset looks like, the feelings evoked by putting on a pair of socks (yes, there is an actual poem out there by the celebrated Pablo Neruda on this topic – I will send it to you when I find it), what it was like to really experience eating an ice cream, about the beauty of a snail making its way up a tree, etc.

Thank goodness for books – where writers permit us to delve into their minds and read the fascinating stories they weave or conjure up. Some of these writers have fantastic minds that they can create such vastly different worlds from our very own. How imaginative, how clever of them!

If we continue our lives clocking in and clocking out at the office like this, going on clockwork, we would be like robots, you know…and God made all these beautiful things in this world for us to see, smell, appreciate…If we are cooped up in the shopping mall, house or office all the time, what a waste it would have been for God to have created all these things for us – the rivers, the mountains, the jungles. It’s in the Quran you know that this earth was made as a carpet for us, with the clouds to shield us, for us to harvest the fruits of this world for our own pleasure…I forget the verse name, but I’ll find it if you want. *

Oh well, after this “sermon”, I too am guilty of being ignorant of the world. But this is a reminder for you, for me…that there is a whole world out there, outside of this office, this home, that is just waiting for us. Life is more than this existence man has created.

Amen…and yours sincerely,

Ena


* Here it is:

From Al-Baqarah, 2:22

"The One who made the earth habitable for you, and the sky a structure. He sends down from the sky water, to produce all kinds of fruits for your sustenance. You shall not set up idols to rival God, now that you know. "

"Dialah yang menjadikan bumi sebagai hamparan bagimu dan langit sebagai atap, dan Dia menurunkan air (hujan) dari langit, lalu Dia menghasilkan dengan hujan itu segala buah-buahan sebagai rezki untukmu; karena itu janganlah kamu mengadakan sekutu-sekutu bagi Allah, padahal kamu mengetahui."