Adrian Loh will always be Adrian Loh. Damn! I wish i had a fraction of the brilliance!
QUESTION: What stands in the way of you reaching your goals?
As cliché as it sounds, I believe we are our own best friend or worst enemy, our own angels or demons. Growing up, we tend to “discover ourselves” by systematically probing our desires and facing our fears. We're compulsive, and impulsive, we make decisions, voluntarily or involuntarily without regard to consequence. And when you're young, that's not always a bad thing. Because your evolution depends on it. On making mistakes. Of course, when you've “found yourself”, you realize that that is only half the challenge, because the real question that remains – the thing that matters most – is whether you can stay true to it. The problem is, as we grow older, we tend to lose our ability to face those fears. Maybe its because we have more to lose. So instead, most people choose willing or unwillingly, to run and hide and ignore. They go about their lives, having swept the demons under the rug, praying that they never come back. And of course, they always do. The challenge therefore, is to grow old and somehow not lose our capacity for wonder, to dare, to attempt. Because the answer has to be in the attempt.
QUESTION: What do you see yourself as 10 years from now?
It's perhaps a privilege of youth, a gift awarded to the young, priceless to the older: the ability to see life as boundless, limited only by the limits of your own vision. There is a saying, that we are not measured by our experience, so much as we are measured by our capacity for experience. Thus, the most honest answer I can think of would be to simply say, that I don't know. And I say that as a good thing. Life is simply too big, too awesome, for me to restrain it and cage it in a bottle on a shelf and call it my future. I am too much in love with life to do that. It would be untrue to myself. And while I may plan, I plan also with an abandon, because the essence of living comes from not knowing, sometimes it comes by accident, by chance and by surprise. And to close our eyes to it, to narrow our vision so explicitly until we are blind to everything else, is to dismiss all the other exciting things that make life worth living. And if there is one thing I've learned from cooking and running a restaurant, it is that we are not homogenous in our tastes, or singular in our appetites, not when it comes to food, or clothing, and especially not when it comes to choosing how we want to live our lives.
0 comments:
Post a Comment