Shanghai Tan

Every new year break is a moment of reflection and self evaluation, as well as a moment of day dreaming of wishes for the coming year. After a tragic year 2008, I suppose everyone’s wish is to recover from the deep hole, be it physical or financial. The same applies to me who dropped into a rather deep financial hole last year, at the same time my mother has just recovered from a light cancer. I guess my deepest wish is to have a stable year 2009, no big financial loss, remain healthy and employed.

I do have dream of course, but it’s always the same one year over year. It’s the universal dream of improving my life situation, which includes career, finance, life style, knowledge and family, without any particular order. For 2009 I think career and finance are priority, not that the rest are not important but one must have a relatively narrow goal in order to focus effort on it.

My choice of relocating to Shanghai at 2007 remains a good one despite all the events of the past years, and as far as I can see, will remain a good choice for my personal and career growth. I just hope that my family at Canada have a peaceful time so that I won’t have to worry about them, which is — thanks God — so far so good. Without any doubt, I want to settle down at Shanghai as my permanent location from now on, if everything goes as expected.

As I grow older, I realize that every gain in life comes from persistence, perseverance and determination. To earn love and care from someone, you have to consistently, day after day, offer love and take care of that person. To earn trust and intimacy with friends, you have to consistently keep up the promises and spend quality time with them, day after day. To make career advancement, you have to consistently keep up the good work, go beyond your responsibilities,  continuously learn and share your knowledge, be patient, open and tolerant, day after day. To earn good health, you have to consistently keep a good regime of diet, balance work and life, day after day. There’s no easy gain in life, only some people do it painfully while others just do it naturally not feeling any pain at all.

The ox year is such a natural symbol of perseverance, giving without complaning. There couldn’t be a better zodiac sign for this recovering year. Be persistent in your daily life doing good things, persevere when facing challenges, and be firm and determine toward your long term goal. I’m talking to myself of course!

These photos were taking at my residence building and Jing’an Temple. Click to see the album Capturing 2009 Spring Festival at F/1.4.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 2nd, 2009 at 5:56 pm and is filed under Photo, Scrapbook. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.