A Moment to Cherish

Somebody once said that life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.
As I was driving to work today, I experienced one such moment. A moment of simple, yet breathtaking beauty that made me just glad to be alive.
I was in my car, making my way along the inner roads of Bangsar to the NST office. It was simply pouring down and visibility was simply terrible.
And then, as I rumbled up a little hillock, the rains began to abate and the skies started to clear. What happened next was surreal, beautiful and strangely hypnotic, all at once. The skies around me were all still a dull grey, but up ahead the evening sun was poking out through the angry clouds.
Shafts of radiant light began pouring out, each one clearly defined and illuminating the city below it an a soft, heavenly glow.
All around me, drops of rain were still pattering down. But, what was just moments ago furious drops of stinging water had wound down to steady drizzle. Water splashed off my windscreen, every drop splattering into smaller and smaller droplets.
It throbbed on my roof, a calming, hypnotic drumbeat, the rhythm much like that of a heart. All around me, the world seemed clean and fresh and magical. The rainwater seemed to have had an almost divine cleansing effect on creation.
The world too seemed to be in a slumber, the roads mostly empty, what cars there were crawling by at half pace and hardly a person to be seen anywhere.
It was in a word, beautiful. And coming as it did on the back of a pretty lousy week, where the ugliness of humanity once more made itself painfully apparent, it was a welcome and appreciated reminder that things are more than just about humans and human relationships.
Sometimes, man can be an isle. Sometimes, it is better to seek solace in the inanimate, or in nature, than it is in your fellow man.
Sometimes, it is better to be alone and cherish the solitude.

Welcome to the Jungle

When I joined the NST, a friend warned me that the politics here is akin to nothing I've ever seen before. Whatever I've experienced in the past, she said, would pale in comparison to the sheer nastiness of the bitching which goes on here.
It's a been a year and some since I stepped through these doors and to be frank, it's been the most fulfilling year of my life, career wise. I've improved myself, proved my worth to the team, made some great friends and generally learnt a good deal since I joined.
And yet, recently those words of my friend are starting to prove ominously prescient. And all because of damn promotions.
Always a bone of contention, promotions are bound to please some and piss others off. But, that's the way the dice rolls, isn't it? Sometimes you get what you want, sometimes you get what you deserve, sometimes you get shafted.
But, here it seems that the frustrations felt by some at being passed over are translated into bile-filled online blog entries bemoaning the fact that some people are being promoted because they're the bosses' "machais" and favoured ones.
They don't seem to realise or take into account the fact that these people who are promoted come in to the office earlier, stay later and come in on their off days in order to do their stories. They don't take into account the fact that these people work their ass off to bring in their own stories. They see only what they want to see. They see these people's ability to get along with their bosses as ass licking. They see these people's hard work as currying favour.
What they seem to want is for everybody to drop to their level, to be as sad, as dead and as demotivated as they are.
Instead of doing their own work and looking to be assessed on their own merits, they'd rather spend their time worrying, moaning and bitching about how others are being given a better deal than they are. They'd rather spend their time tearing others down instead of getting on with their lives. It's just sad. Sad, pathetic and funny in a perverse sort of way.
But, whatever la. If those of us who actually want to work and enjoy their work waste our time reflecting on the meaningless venom of these bitter people, we'll just end up like them.
I'd rather just go on doing what I do, chin up and heart light, secure in the knowledge that whatever I get, I get on my own merits and through my own hard work. And for those who think otherwise, God bless you anyway.