I’m sitting in my dorm in Hong Kong thinking of posting and staring out the window at the hazy sky that reminds me very much of Vancouver.  You know, the gray-about-to-rain looking kind of skies.  I can’t decide what to write about.  Challenges of healthy living at dorms?  School stuff? The exchange student partying habits?  Extracurricular activities?  Budgeting? Homesickness? I can’t decide.

I made a friend here who is from HEC in Quebec.  He says it must be a Vancouverite thing, the indecision. You know those times when you hang out with a bunch of people but no one wants to make a decision on what to do?  I have a friend from home who is taking a semester off in HK and when we all hung out, he said it’s not indecision, it’s being considerate.  I think it’s just personal indecision on my part.  Is indifference the same as indecision or just an excuse for it?

People who return from exchange often say they learned so much about themselves and the world.  For me, even though it’s only been a month, it’s the meeting people all the time factor that is affecting me most.  You can’t call up your best friends to go out when you’re lonely or rely on someone to be on MSN to fill your social gap (time differences boo.)  The business student teachings also kick in and tell me to go out there and “network.”  Get bored, meet people more often than I would at home, and then I’m plunged into the awesome cosmo of knowledge and insight that is the bigger world.

I met up with an “acquaintance-friend” (those people who you would say are your friends but you don’t know them all that well) who quit school to move back to Hong Kong and work in his family’s business. I learned he is very ambitious. When I hear about what he has been doing and what he wants to do it makes me wonder if I should be ambitious too and build great dreams risking failure or just be calm and content and stable?  At times I wonder if there is even a decision there.  I guess it’s more like I don’t have a picture for my future. Like its an empty frame hanging in white space.  Maybe I’m uninspired.  I love ambitious people, I always learn so much from them.

Go be ambitious, you’re young, just do it.
(September 12, 2011: Mid-Autumn Festival, Victoria Park)  

Whilst talking to my friend I noticed two feelings that young ambitious people tend to tell me about:

1. We want to do something great and we know that we can, we just don’t know what it is yet.

2. We either hold fears that someday we will be [age] and we won’t be where we want to be or we are already feeling like we are not the person who we thought we would be by now.

Do you think this is universal? It is striking how extremely similar my friend’s feelings were to other young ambitious people I know.

“If only I had a dream, then I’d chase it like mad” I would tell myself.  People my age with dreams tell me “if only I knew for sure this is what I want.”  I’d like to hear what someone who knows for sure has to say.

Windy days here are wonderful =)