Let me write this down.

Don’t know where to put this yet. But it will definitely be put somewhere.

“Some people needs a streak of insanity to make their lives worth living” – Lee Ai Ling.

Insane moments in soccer: the scorer runs wildly shouting nonsensical words, adrenaline rush.

When I looked back, the moment I joined soccer as my CCA seemed to be one those most insane moments.

I knew the stakes of doing so. I have thought for long about how I wanted to focus mostly on my academic matters for the last 2 years in Singapore. I wanted to go to a big university. To me, for a long while, to get into a good university is the most important goal for next few years of my life. My parent’s goal. My peers’ goal.

And the moment I joined the soccer team, it’s like I threw away those dreams. I knew that I would have to endure the strenuous trainings. I remembered the nights when I returned to my room at 9pm, shoveled my cold, packed dinners, took a shower, took the attendance in my boarding school before falling on the bed and slept like a dead log. I knew with all the training loads alone, I would probably doze off during a few periods in school. And yet I enjoyed being in the soccer team. I enjoyed soccer enough to stay on and to put in extra training time.

But when I think more closely, I realize it’s not one of those insane moments that I have had. To many people, what I have done might probably anything close to insanity. I have never been to some isolated corner on Earth. Singapore was my first overseas trip, indeed, a first trip to a distant place without my parents. Indeed, my life can be nowhere qualified to be the closest to “insanity”. Soccer team stood out because it was a long process, long enough to make me think about being insane.

Many things I did that I now consider as “insanity” were sometimes just unintentional fumbles or veering off the track. With the soccer team, being insane means I, normally considered as quite a geeky boy, to joined a bunch of much more care-free …. boys. Sometimes, I would choose to read a book while my friends are all geared up for exams, not because I don’t know the importance of the exam, but because something in the book kept my attention, just a sudden, vague feeling that what I read is important to me. War stories, war movies, animorphs …

My friends tell me that I sometimes think too much, too far for my age. When I tell my mom that I may want to work as an entrepreneur with a start-up companies, I thought she would say something like “you are still a kid, no need to think of such stuffs”, but instead she said “yah, it’s about time you should think about working”. I’m nearly 20 years old, by this time, Bill Gates …. Steve Jobs … would have … For me, I would probably have been shielded off from the insanity of the world for too long, so coddled and protected that I thought simple things that I have done as “insanity”. “Some people need a streak of insanity to make their lives worth living” – insanity may be just be the very things that I normally sway from. But they make lives worth living because they sometimes give me a chance to see beyond that sane life that I have had. I only just made a full sense of that lately. It is definitely not early for me to realize that. People tell me that when I get older, I won’t think about crazy ambitions anymore. Probably because by then I will have a lot more burden and responsibilities that I cannot recklessly do insane things. May be I will be like that, maybe I won’t. I don’t know. But realized that as I am who I am now, at my age now, I have too much energy that such insane dreams are the only way to help me get loose of my energy. But I’m also not too childish anymore to just blindly do crazy things, I realized that I could actually make sense from my insanity.

(Not I need to answer the question about Why Reed? Well, the first thing I found on google when I searched Reed college is about pot smoking in the school. May be probably that happens everywhere, but somehow the thing that the school is open enough to let the people know about such thing is quite something. I read that it’s because Reed is full of young people who carry too much energy and enthusiasm in them and such insane behaviours are just an elongated part from their search for an identity in this word. Well, I guess I want to see more insanity in this world to figure it out.

Sometimes by taking those insane paths, we got a chance to look back at the very world that we have been living. To think of the why we have been there? Sometimes by trying to figure that out, we got a chance to realize how wonderful that world has been, to appreciate its value more. Or to decide to leave the familiar land behind and take a new path. Sometimes being a bit insane, knowingly or willingly, we unintentionally put ourselves in a whole new perspective.