Listen To Your Heart

Have you ever had a day that went all wrong, but at the end of it all, somehow you know that maybe it turned out alright after all?

Today is one of those days for me. Did it drop on me from out of the blue? Actually no, it was more like an accident that was just waiting, waiting, biding it's time, waiting for the right time to happen. And the right time was today.

I'm a music lover. I have been a music lover ever since the day my parents brought me home from the hospital as a little baby, and the first thing my Dad did to welcome his newest member of the family back then was to turn on his hi-fi set and to fill the air at home with the sounds of sweet sweet music.

I grew up with music. I don't think there has ever been a single day in my life when I have had no music playing around me at all. Music is my life. Music is the soundtrack to my life. Music keeps me alive. Music is my best friend. Music is my playmate. Music keeps me entertained. Music keeps me focused. Music instructs me. Music speaks to me. Music is feeling. Music flows in me and around me. Music is the river of my life. Music lifts me up when I'm down. Music gives me strength when I am weak. Music gives me motivation and encouragement whenever I need it. Music has never failed me. Until now...... or so I thought.

Today has been a total nightmare for me (ie. the 24 hours that had just gone by). I've had some pretty stressful days throughout my life, but I think so far, today has been the absolute worst day that I have ever had in my life to date. I like being on top of things, I'd like to think that I'm in a position of at least having some control over my own life.

Being a Christian, I know that God holds my life in His hands, but because of His love for me, a human being created in His own image, He has given me the free will to choose between His life-giving ways, or a life of destruction and certain death... the possibility of spending eternity enveloped in His warm, comforting Love, basking in His Light and Strength... or the possibility of an eternity spent apart from Him and His love, in eternal darkness and damnation, feeling the tug of eternal desperation, and never being able to find a way out from an endless pit of cold dark isolation.

I'd like to think that no matter what, I will always choose LIFE.

But lately, I've been so damned busy at work... busy doing what, I'm not sure exactly... and for some reason, it feels like time is playing tricks on me... time is getting shorter and shorter and shorter... I feel like I'm running a race every single day of my life these days, and the race distance is getting longer and longer, while the time I'm being allowed in which to complete this race is getting increasingly shorter.

So I work harder and harder each day, just to keep things at status quo... it doesn't take a genius or a rocket scientist to tell you that this is probably not going to be a sustainable state of affairs.

And today, it all came to a head.

The more I tried to get things done, the more nothing got done, and the more panic-stricken I got, knowing that the time I've been given seems to be getting increasingly shorter. Wanting to give myself a major boost forward, I only ended up going around in increasingly tinier circles, and not getting anywhere at all.

When I first heard the new F4 album, entitled "Zai Zhe Li Deng Ni" (when translated into English word for word, the title is "Right Here Waiting For You"), I have to admit that I didn't really have much to say about it. I knew that this album was F4's seemingly obligatory 3rd album with Sony BMG as a group, after which it may be uncertain as to whether F4 might ever have another album together as a group.

F4 albums have become somewhat predictable and formulaic. There are songs sung by all 4 members as a group, and there are songs sung individually by each member of the group, and sometimes, perhaps just to add some interest to what might otherwise be an utterly dull formula, sometimes there are songs sung by 2 members of the group. So for me, this 3rd F4 album was comforting in that it assured me that my favourite boyband was still together, and that they had released yet another album in a comforting, predictable, formulaic way that I was already familiar with... so everything was as it should be...... erm, right?!??

Boyband music... bubble-gum pop... what is it's role?... why does it exist?... does it even have a reason and a purpose???... or is it just mindless stuff, meant to cater to the whims, fancies and urgings of our hormones-raging youths??... creating a comfortable, predictable world of endless cotton candy flowers and fairy tale endings for them, to cushion them from the raw ugliness of REAL LIFE that will still await them out there in the big bad world, regardless of and no matter how long they choose to remain in the comfort of this land of seemingly eternal sweetness; rainbow-coloured sights seen through rose-tinted glasses.

I thought I was going to go mad today, I thought that finally the day had come when Jeanette Chin would at last throw up her arms at life, and meet eternity head on instead. The pressures of work had been piling up on me, I was getting more and more worried about not being able to keep up with the workload, losing more and more sleep, and eventually hardly sleeping at all, fearing that I might be viewed as a "slow worker" or as a "highly unproductive part of the team"... in short, "the weakest link"... disposable junk... replaceable at a moment's notice... an utter failure... and the ultimate loser in this game of life.

It's not that I didn't see this moment coming, but rather that I didn't have a way to effectively stop it from coming into my life and happening at all.

It was in my most desperate hour that the music I had thought had abandoned me for good came back to rescue me.

It was about 2.30am in the wee hours of Saturday morning. I had been in the office since 8.30am the day before. I ought not to still be in the office at this time. Something is very wrong here. I'm too exhausted to think straight. I'm sleep-deprived. There are times when I know I'm fully awake, and there are times when I feel myself floating out of my body looking back at myself, and there are times when my legs suddenly go weak from under me and I find myself momentarily falling, until my legs quickly kick back into action and very quickly firm up from under me again, resulting in a nasty but timely jolt which wakes me up from whichever "black out land" I had temporarily allowed myself to go to.

So here I am, hoping to God that I hadn't somehow unknowingly screwed up during any of the 2 client meetings I had had today, or that I might have been spouting rubbish over the phone to several other clients whose calls I had received and answered during the course of our usual mad and crazy Friday.

I have to get a grip here, before I really lose it all.

It is at this very moment that I find myself heading back to my PC at work, and this song comes on over the Windows Media Player... it is a song sung by my most favourite F4 member, Van Ness Wu... it's entitled "Listen To Your Heart".

Now it's no secret that I didn't think much of this particular song... in fact, I always thought it was a waste of Van's time and talent to be singing a song like this at this point in his musical career... it was too simple a ballad for him... in fact, I thought that for him to sing a song like this on F4's 3rd album was actually taking a step backwards and in the opposite direction! Yipes!

So it's ironic that it is this particular song that has saved me tonight.

I believe that there are times in our lives ~ moments ~ when we are at our worst, and it is the worst possible time... but it is at these lowest points in our lives that God sends us someone to help lift us up ~ out of the darkness ~ and back into the light......

For lack of better terminology, let's call these beings "earth angels"......

In these past 24 hours, God sent me one of these "earth angels"......

And this "earth angel" spoke to me through this song with a melody so simple that even I had looked down on it and totally taken it for granted... but this same simple song was the very one that was able to reach out to me... it was able to reach me, despite the immensely thick cloud of black that had descended upon my life, through the pitch black thickness that was covering my life at that point...

A point when my life and all it stood for had been reduced to the most basic physical level, the sound of a single human heart that was somehow still beating...

The song "Listen To Your Heart" opens with the sound of a single heart beating...

Then a simple melody begins...

Then Van Ness says,

" You're goin' round in circles...

but you know I still love you, right...

so please ~ just listen......

C'MON! "

And this simple melody reaches out to me... and his gentle voice speaks to me... it carries a message of love, a love so sweet and so pure, a love so beautiful that it's beyond words, beyond all possible human descrīption... someone is calling out to me, someone is pleading with me... telling me not to give up!

I maybe going around in circles in my life, I may not be making much progress at all, and it may feel like I'm stuck in one place with no way out, weaving myself deeper and deeper into a web that only gets more and more complex, thicker and thicker, more and more knotted up... trapping me till I can no longer move, and I can barely keep on breathing... but hang on, hang in there, because it's not over yet!

" So please ~ just listen...... C'MON! "

As the rest of the song plays on... as the soothing sounds of the music and the comforting words of the lyrics wash over me and penetrate through my very being... I feel myself gradually ~ slowly but surely ~ I know that I'm being healed......

Healed in body ~ mind ~ spirit ~~~ and soul.......

So never overlook the simplicity of a song, even if it seems like a throwback to the days of boyband-brand bubble-gum pop ~~~ 'cos you never know, that very same song could be THE ONE SONG that comes into your life at your very lowest moment ~~~ and it could be THE ONE SONG that has the power to simply save you!

Thank you, Earth Angel... for being there for me... for having played a part in restoring my precious sanity......

Wo xiang tong le...

... and from now on, I'm listening to my heart.