i'd wanted to write this yesterday, but it was 1am by the time i was done with my shower.. so here i am today, with much less of the zest I had yesterday, but nonetheless I thought this was a good chance for me to record it down...
well yesterday night I went for the youth camp preparation meeting. I was late, reached there around 8.10pm cos of the traffic jam. Well I really should have left the house earlier since I was so free anyway.. When I reached the kaikan, the sound of the chanting was so powerful and resonant I thought the entire hall must be filled. sharks, no space to sit...
And since I was already late, I decided to make payment for the camp first, while I continued to hear dynamic chanting resonating from the room. When I was finally done with queueing for the payment, I made my way into the hall, and to my surprise, it was only 3/4 filled! Honestly the kind of
daimoku I heard felt like the entire hall was bursting with people. I thought, wow, these ppl are good..
The meeting began with spirit boosting by some super onz leaders, with quite some onz responses too. At the beginning I felt a bit odd, haven't seen such on people since orientation camp... but after awhile, it was actually quite nice to see that our youths are still filled with vibrancy :)
At the end of the meeting, I felt quite recharged. Someone mentioned that this camp must be the turning point in our lives. And that we had to take action to make this happen. It suddenly dawned on me that it doesn't mean that taking up faith will automatically turn me into a better person, or that just by chanting I will mystically become 'good'.
Why do some people say big events help to change their lives? Those NDP participants always have some exciting stories about their lives to share. They go through all sorts of struggles to keep up with the practices and thus grow in their lives. And why is it that I can go through one big event after another but only feel that 'this performance was fun', or 'i have improved in some skills'; and never,
that was the turning point in my life.I realised that for a person's life to
change, we really need to be determined to do something about it, to
take action. Just as they were saying, what do we hope to achieve from this camp? Whatever that I hope to achieve, I'll have to put in some effort to make it happen. I can't just, oh I hope to achieve xxx, go for the camp, and expect miracles to form.
Yeah.
And so with that I hope I'll start becoming a more enthusiastic person create ever so much more value in my life.
We have also managed to invite Dean Lawrence Carter of the Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel to speak to us. This guy's the 'founder' of the Gandhi, King, Ikeda exhibition. I hope to be able to learn something about peace from him.
Yeah!
