I just feel reflective today. Had a long gruelling week, which saw me drop dead in bed at 7pm on Friday evening. I've never done anything like that before, so it must have been really draining. Woke up at near the strike of midnight to get some greasy grub at Geylang, before crawling back into the fold a couple of hours later.

Refreshed at 9, and started rushing through what was to have been completed last night.

Been here until 2pm except for a brief breakfast from Mac. Feeling alil tired, but not fatigued, and been thinking about stuff generally, thinking about what I've done, what I need to do and what I need to work on.

Making plans for the future, looking for ways to improve my life. Improve everything around me, and find a worthwhile cause to devote my years towards.

Also thinking about people. I think what makes people unpredictable is the need to be a decent human being. We are constantly struggling to make a choice between being a 'good' person (in our own definition, of course) and being selfish. This need, for us to feel, or at least be seen, as a nice person, is the reason why we are, as a species, so unpredictable. When we weigh choices, we think about being nice. Then we think about the benefits of being nice will bring us, and weigh that in too. Then we think about being selfish and the incentives of doing so.

So ultimately, it is a mish mash of rewards, favours, moods and benefits that guide our choices. On a different day we would have made a different choice for no reason other than a different mood and a different word said. So whoever said that everything is destined is hardly correct. So many things fall to chance and randomness. People speak of destiny and of fate, where things are meant to be. Others speak of chance and luck, where things happen due to fortuitous circumstances. On hindsight we can attribute every effect to a cause, but the myriad of possibilities mean that things could happen so differently for a minuscule reason.

As we learn more and more, we distance ourselves away from God. In the past, when knowledge is limited, it was easier to be awed by things. Sunrises and sunsets looked amazing, we wonder where the rain and the stars came from and the world looked so vast and so overpowering. The more we learn, the less amazing they appear. And while we uncover more, we do not find anything divine about them (well, most of the time, anyway). Just a couple of weeks ago I read about this Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Suffice it to say that the number of galaxies alone overloaded my brain capacity, as I cannot even begin to fathom the enormity of what this revealed.

I'll leave it to the astronomers to figure that out.

Anyhow, there is less than a month to the final quarter of the year. It's time for me to look forward and make the best of it, enjoy the holidays that come with it and look to 2010 with optimism, with changing my life and improving it.

Hopefully I'll make even greater strides.