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National Day Gifts
By peace | August 8, 2008
This book was being put in ‘cold storage’ until recently, when I began to look into the History of Singapore. It was being put into ‘Yahoo Auction’ by some people.
I wanted to throw away this water bottle some time ago, but I put in one side later on….
Today, the children went to school for National Day Celebration. In normal years, they would bring home National Day Gifts. But today they came back empty-handed. Clara came home with a bottle of new water.
I began to think of the previous years’ gifts. I had never treasure the gifts at all. I even threw away the National Day Bag. I regretted it so much. It is such a rare gift, and I did not know the importance of it… Whenever I saw the bag on the road (some people carried it), I would be reminded of the National Day Bag which I had thrown away…
I am going to treasure these gifts now, these two ’souvenirs’ I had left — the water bottle and the book, Today in History Singapore. I would not throw this book away nor sell it away. I would treasure it. It says “On this day in 1963, National Theatre, the largest at that time, was opened. It was built to commemorate Singapore’s attainment of self-government in 1959.” On this day is 8 August in the book and there are lines for the student to write notes. It contains all the works of students on every page of it. For example, on this page of the day, Wu Junde, age 11 of Zhenghua Primary School wrote: I was born on 8 August 1993. On this day in 1967, Singapore joined Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand to form the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). It was formed to promote peace, prosperity and stability in the region through the cooperation of all its members. I feel that it is also good for neighbouring countries to help one another in times of need. I am very glad that Singapore is a member of ASEAN.
This is one of the page from today’s My Paper. I did not read the fine words but only the headlines. Reading chinese is so hard, unlike English, which is easy to pronounce. There is no way to read the chinese character if you cannot recognize the chinese words at all. The headlines said “leaving home then know home is good” in Chinese. This is also called ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’. We learned to appreciate things only after we had lost them. This is especially so for arts, be it singers, the works of actors/actresses and so on. When the person is around, their work is always not appreciated, and have ‘no value’. This is a sad thing, because people never learn how to treasure what they have. Having said that, I am no different. It is something that need to be learned and cultivated. It takes time…
I took how long of my life to understand what is life, and not all yet. I took how long of my life to understand what I had been doing, and I took how long of my life to really know the truth and understand what is the meaning of all! At least 28 years. For these 30 years since I was able to have memory, I had never know the meaning of life!
But after my awakening, I knew that Life is a gift. To be able to breathe everyday is a gift already…..
Topics: All Posts, Arts, Entertainment, Personal, Singapore, children |
