I have ended my four years of being a Ph.D. student. I successfully defended my dissertation last Tuesday. The feeling that I have passed was surreal. Looking back, I have had many experiences, of doing research, of living in a new place, of having a son, of knowing new people, but yet nothing salient comes to mind.
My past four years were by no means dry and barren. I have a son, now 15 months old; published 6 papers with 3 more in writing; I had spent a whole year visiting Disneyland every week; I have played World of Warcraft, Starcraft I & II, Counterstrike, Sims 2 & 3, Dragon Age: Origin, Crysis; we have friends we spent countless weekends. Yet, when the four years were marked with a period, few memory stood out.
Someone wise once said: The moment you are dying, only images of personal relationships come to mind.
This word of wisdom suggests that things such as money and career matter little at the time our life journey ends. However, many lying on the death bed will regret they had not treated other people better.
We tend to remember our acts which flow right from our heart. We as humans are social animals. We naturally care about other human beings. Yet, our society constructed artificial institutions and legalities that organized us into a more productive social group. In the process, we lost touch with many things we would have chosen to do, e.g., caring about other people, watching as time goes by, and not worrying about what is going to happen next.
Life is perhaps like a game. You start the game application, play according to the rules, complete the game, and end your role as a player. Next moment, you are already playing a new role: as a worker, a father, or a friend. Whether you relive the game depends on whether the experience touches you. I remember Dragon Age best, because the storyline is rich. I remember little of World of Warcraft, because I played it out of my research needs.
Yesterday, I spent one whole day with home improvement and watching television at my new home. These activities brought me joy because I was doing them right out of my heart. After that, I took pictures and told people whom I met of what I had done.
I do enjoy research, and I remember many moments of eureka. These are moments when I found something that surprises me. Yet research is not all joyful. Research ends after these moments of discovery. The next stage, of publication and writing, is painstaking and done purely to inform others of your new found fact.
When daily activities became overwhelmingly laden with instituted activities, life also becomes detached with the way we were designed to live. In a way, I had not lived in the best way I could. I do not intend to push my responsibilities away, for they are important to those whom the institutions serve. Yet, there are many snippets of moment between time that we could savor in a better way. Such times include when we walk through a park, talk to a stranger, or spend time with a love one. Each of these moments may seen short, but you can be surprised how many of them are there in a day. We can turn these snippets into a continuous stream of joy - by learning to constantly act right from the heart.
