McLife.

How do people hold on to their principles and beliefs in life? Do they flaunt it in the open? Or pretend to be someone else and be eaten by their own principles? They say that knowing one’s self is a lifelong process. Some people discover themselves - what they are, what they want to believe and how they want to be - early on in their lives. Some do when they reach adulthood and had plenty of ‘experiences’ that teach them lessons. Others, well, they only realize it shortly before they die.

The thing is, before you reach the stage where you really know the direction you want for yourself, when the principles you set for yourself is perfectly clear, there are people - close or not - who’ve known you in the ‘past’ who thought of you differently - most especially if you’re the type who don’t speak your thoughts out loud and lazy to correct the people around you. What you do instead is to offer them books to read.

Would you rather go tell everyone in your life that you’re not what they think you are, or would you just keep the same quiet, not-so-caring attitude and then write a blog entry about it? Would you rant about correcting them the difference between a person who like the nature and the environmentalists, or between a health-freak and the vegetarians? But then it will lead to a lengthy discussion with you telling your arguments, and then it will end up getting you frustrated for not airing them the way you want them to be understood.

Would you inform them you are an emotionless creature who’d rather be left alone with books to read and stories to write than converse with human beings? That would be hurtful, but then you try not to feel. How would you explain to them you don’t believe in the existence of love and you want to be single all your life, without them thinking it is out of bitterness or some ‘holy’ calling? How would you tell them it is a very objective decision, plainly drawn out from your sheer ’sense of living’?

Would you let them know you have discarded all religions and hasn’t been inside the church for months now? Or would you also avoid a lengthy argument regarding that? Would they understand that the church is only a vehicle for more poverty to continue? That what the church does is only a small portion of what the world is doing now.

How would you say that we live in a very stupid world that teaches selflessness, when it is the very thing we should teach against? Would you tell your own child to forget his or her self in pursuit of others’ happiness? When you go to ‘relief’ or ‘charity’ works, would you also teach the people you help - young and old - to be selfless? Think how would that help them to progress.

Things change. It is impossible for any person to know another person completely. We can only get portions of who they are. If you’re the quiet, not-so-caring, emotionless creature, might as well not to send wrong messages, such as ‘portions’ of exactly the opposite of your own principles.