Yesterday, while clearing files off my old computer, I came across a poem I wrote. It is a love poem and I feel like I am destroying my reputation. But alas, got to keep it real. Enjoy and tell me what you think about it.

To me

To me
You are a little bird singing in the morning
That awakens the heart with purpose
And enjoins with my soul in praising its maker

To me
You are the desert flower in heat of day
That calls the passing traveler
To pause and say a prayer for his beloved

Aye, that you might see your own beauty
Reflected in the oasis pond
Dressed in the finest of garments

-Kwasi
2007

This week has been awesome. I am smoothly settling into my new place. I am getting along well with my roomies though I barely see them at home. For instance, I see Cory more often elsewhere than at home. I had coffee with Soji again but this time my car didn't get stolen. Instead, we discussed his Phd research with is very similar to a project I am working on. Praise God for dropping him into my lap. In the midst of our technical talks, he told me about a sermon he heard at MPPC about Ash wednesday, which is today by the way. Ash wednesday is especially celebrated in the catholic church as a day of atonement. It also coincides with the first day Jesus went into the desert for 40 days to be tempted by the Devil. When the priest uses the ashes to make a cross on your head, he intones "From dust you were made, from dust you will return". As I was telling Leah T. the other day, in a 100 years from now, or for sure a 1000 years, everything we do or accomplish will have turned to dust. Very little we do on earth is really more than ashes in the long run. Even our righteousness (if its self-righteousness) will be worth nothing. Ash wednesday reminds me not to take my life too seriously because all turns to dust at the end. But it does remind me to take God very seriously. This is why the day is set aside for atonement. As I get older, I see more and more how messed up I really am. Even worse, I realise that due to the selfishness in this world, Its hard to be truly loving without being prepared to lose everything. He is showing me that without Him, I really don't have any hope. I thought I was a good person because I didn't chase money, women or drugs. I thought I was good because I didnt cheat (except in games ;), steal or intentionally harm others. I thought my good church boy behavior will get me into heaven. But now I realise just how bad I am. The things I used to look up to; education, church community (I thought the world of church people), people's approval, my sense of righteousness, were all idols and are now ashes in my mouth. All of them have brought me so much pain and trouble because they blocked me from the true source of all happiness which is God. My trust in Education lead me to become prideful and a workaholic and made me feel like a failure when i burnt out. My belief in the lie that church people were or should be perfect prevented me from truly connecting with people at point of their need. My need to make others happy lead me to me neglecting to take care of myself. And my pursuit of righteousness led to self righteousness which made it difficult for me to authentic and to forgive others.
In short, I aspired to good things and those good things became bad. All I really have left is my relationship with God. Everything else I have is suspect. I have no idea whether it will turn to good or bad. But this i know for sure, it will turn into ashes. Oh Lord, I give you my everything, please ransform it for eternal purposes. Happy Ash wednesday everyone!

This week was crazy hectic, fun and challenging. I do not remember a more seesaw week in my life. The trip to Tahoe last week was off the hook. It was incredible getting to know YAF people better. It was awesome getting to spend time with loving people. I also went downhill skiing for the first time in my life. It was a blast. I definitely plan on skiing on the regular. If only Tahoe wasn't so far away. Sigh. After averaging 5 hours of sleep a night, I was very tired during the week. I barely did any work on the color filter project. However, I found out that Soji did is thesis on EM waves and has the expertise I need to pull of the project. Praise God, I am so glad I met him. I moved in with Cory and co. on wednesday. As much I liked living in sunnyvale, it feels good to move. I feel much freer now. We also had incredible developments at work. While not everything is official, I believe we are much closer to our goal of fully developing our technology. I then spent this past weekend in Monterey with Cory, Kristen, Hung-Tzu, Alex, Annie and Kim. We had a great time celebrating Kristen's birthday. We ate great food and had a great dance party and explored tide pools.

So one might wonder, why was this such a seesaw week? I think its probably due to the lingering effects of Asemia's death. It has made me extra sensitive to people. I feel my emotions much more strongly. My empathetic ability has also shot through the roof. I almost literally feel the emotion others are feeling when I am talking to them. This leads to being either super elated or downright negative depending on the person I am talking to. For instance, the ski trip was intense because everyone was excited and that excitment almost wiped me out. Cory and Kristen were very happy and I couldnt help but share in their joy. Chuck and Keith were quite relieved by the good news and again it calmed me down. However I also felt a negative aspect of human behavior - competition. Competion is the desire to beat someone else in one aspect or the other. This can be great in games and things that dont matter. On the hand, it can pretty destructive when applied in daily life. People tend two have these two views in life. One view holds that we are here on earth to succeed together in life. Our goal is to all defeat the challenges that the world presents. People who hold this view love to help others achieve their goals and defeat life's obstacles. The second view measures success by how much better one is, compared to their peers. Everyone sort of falls between these two schools of thought. When Asemia died, I lost my desire to compare myself to others. I asked myself; when I die, how will it matter whether I was better or worse than anyone? When I leave, I will leave alone. How much wealth or knowledge I gained wont matter. What others thought of me wont matter. The only thing that will matter is what God thinks of me. This leads me to truly focus on enjoying life. And the way I do this is by overcoming my challenges and helping others overcome theirs. Its by encouraging others when they falter and letting God's love to humanity flow through me, knowing that I will be refreshed by that love as it makes its way through and out of me. To bring home the point, God open my eyes to see how competitive or cooperative others were. The insecurity I saw in competitive people was sad. The joy I saw in cooperative folks was awesome.

I am competitive. I definitely want to succeed in life. But my opponents are not my fellow humans. My fight is against systems of sin and oppression in our world. My fight is against injustice, disease and hatred. These are much worthier opponents and together we can take them down. But if we compete with each other, we will all lose to these forces. As it is said, united we stand, divided we fall.

Visions of Mortality

I am grieving. Two days ago, my Dad sent me a text. My cousin Asemia had just died, in his sleep. He was only 24 years old. My heart broke. How could he die so young? My mind started wandering; no more playdates with Asemia; no more will I hear his laughter and see his ridiculous antics; no more will I be able to guide, love and cherish him. Arghh!
I am so sad. My heart is so sorrowful. I spent the last few days in denial but I anger is setting in. I dont believe in fairness in life so I doubt I will remain angry for long.

However, there is beauty in grieving. I find myself cherishing people more. Moving ahead in life is no longer as important as cherishing the people that I have. I called all my siblings the morning i heard the news. I believe I have treated everyone I met with more attention and love than usual.

When you come face to face with mortality, you can't help but put more value on the important things in life; God, family and friends. Without them, life is empty.
Grief also leads me to reexamine my life and evaluate it according to what is truly important to me as opposed to what society expects. As I was crying out to God this morning, He showed me a number of things.

First, He showed me that by holding on to society's standards of love and righteousness, I was blocking His ability to pour out His Love and Righteousness to the world through me. Its not that I have to stop being loving and righteous. What He was saying was that I had to let go of my own standards of love and righteousness and trust that He will take over that area of responsibility and that He will do a better job than me.

He also showed me how due to my childhood upbringing, I had become a perfectionist. You see, my mum had an interesting technique of raising us. She never believed we, the children, had done enough unless we were the best. If I went to her and said "hey mom, check this out, I was second in my class", her response will be "why were you not first, you should study more". Tiger mom for sure. While this always made me strive for more, it had a very dark side to it. What my mom was projecting unto me, was the idea that if you weren't the best, then you wouldn't make it in life. She herself is trapped in that same mentality. A mentality that developed because she was raised by a mean stepmother who always tried to put her down and make her believe she was never good enough. So even though my mom loved us kids, she still made us believe we weren't good enough because she never believed she was good enough. My father did a much healthier job of encouraging us to do better but my mum always found it hard to consider our results as excellent. Looking back, our academic results where excellent. Our extra-curricular activities where stellar. Our behavior was exemplary but we never heard these words from our mother. Her response was, this isn't perfect. Hence I am now a perfectionist and God is trying to help me see that I can't be perfect. He is perfect. I can be below average, average, above average or excellent and He will still love me.
With an awareness of his love, I can dial down my personal expections from perfect to excellent. Then to good. Dial it down further to average. Continue to do this until it reaches zero, the perfect spot. Because, when I am nothing, then God is everything. Its going to be a long journey I definitely need His grace. By dying to myself everyday and taking up my cross, I can achieve this. Zero is perfection because in Zero, all that is left is God. Amen