44th!

9th August marks the nation's birthday. Every year on this day, I feel patriotic. I would watch the parade every year and wish that I was involved in them. And every year without fail I would ballot and hope to get the NDP tickets.

The parade this year was centred on the national pledge. I think most of us have stopped saying the pledge ever since we were 16, when we left secondary school. Back then, we would recite the pledge immediately after singing the national anthem. It was an everyday thing that the words held no meaning, no weight, no diction but last night, the pledge gave me a rejuvenated sense of belonging to the country. I reflected on the words and felt that the words used in the pledge had this strong pull of unity in it. What does being Singaporean mean to you?

44 years ago, independence was forced onto Singapore. No doubt the idea of being a sovereign state was in the minds of our founding fathers, but in 1965, it came earlier than expected. I must say, we did well going solo. MM Lee's vision of turning this island into a metropolis within 10 years back then was realised. Singapore as we see it have grown from strength to strength ever since and never looked back.

It made me reflect about how we as humans react to such situations. Many a times we humans are just plain lazy to get our ass moving in achieving something that we tend to slip into this comfort zone where we feel that everything will be alright. It is when things happen and we are forced to react would we actually start moving into attaining that goal. We procastinate until we have no more room to move before we finally take action.

I have friends who complain about their jobs every other day and when being told to look for opportunity elsewhere, they would go "Slowly, I'm looking around." How do you look around slowly? It's either you choose to move elsewhere and take action or not at all. But when retrenchment occurs, and you are being pushed to a corner, then suddenly we move at double the speeds in our efforts to attain something better, something which we have always wanted to achieve.

So friends, get down to achieving your goals now. Stop procastinating. If not now, then when? Time is something we do not own. What happens tomorrow is up to us to change. What happened yesterday can never be retrieved. The skies' the limit as long as we dare to dream. ;-)

Happy 44th Birthday Singapore!!