Had lunch at Sukiya with Wanjun today, and just went out for sheesha with Danny, Tiffany, Daniel (from Canada) and Daniel's friend, who's a Canadian of Pakastini origin and is teaching English in Japan now.

Maybe the beauty of life is in these little things, little experiences that make up our everyday life, and we should be thankful for every little one of them rather than always hoping for something more. The thing is that life can always be much worse, and we don't realise that.

Perhaps life is such that we need the pain and sadness to make the good good. I was musing about the possibility of a happy drug, that acts directly on the brain to make you happy all the time. But then you'd just get used to it, and happy won't be happy anymore. You'd just want more and more of that drug, till it's of no more effect. That's what happens to drug addicts, you take that drug till it no longer manages to produce a "high" in you. Your mind just becomes numb.

And life is like that, perhaps. You need the sadness of a breakup to treasure and appreciate your next relationship so much more. You need a life-threatening sickness for you to appreciate the gift of health more. You need a near-death experience to appreciate the gift of life, of existence, that God has given you.

But then that is the tragedy, is it not? Because you live life forwards, not backwards. You have the health of youth, which you don't appreciate, then you have the pain of sickness when you get old. You wish you were healthy again, you would appreciate it so much more. But it's impossible. If only we lived life backwards, we'd appreciate the vigor of youth infinitely more, rather than waste it away.

Same with death. People take life for granted, wasting it on useless pursuits, and when they die, they regret. You never appreciated life till it's gone.

That's why I'm interested in Buddhism. It seems that through the process of meditation we are taught to appreciate the beauty of essence, of existence, of the world around us. We slow down, learn to savour our own bodies, learn to appreciate our senses: our senses and minds become so much more active, so much richer. We learn to appreciate the here and the now.

Our minds focus on the only reality that exists at that point of time: the here and the now. Everything doesn't exist and doesn't matter except the here and the now. Focus on the present. Enjoy its beauty.

Because the here and the now is all we have. At the end of the day, what is life but a collection of millions of "here and nows". If you don't learn to enjoy the now and the here, always wishing for something more, you'd never get much out of life.

If life is not beautiful today, it will never be beautiful... never ever. Not when you become rich, or have a girlfriend, or have kids. Because the onus is on the individual to appreciate life's beauty, in whatever circumstance he is in.

I don't want to be on my deathbed before I appreciate the gift of existence that God has bestowed me with.