Zombified

You know, I have never really thought much about zombies previously. Well yeah, I grew up listening to 'Zombie' by The Cranberries thanks to my uncle who played it rather frequently back in our old house and I loved how they repeatedly sang "zombie-eh-eh-eh", but I never really wondered what the heck zombies are. Not that they truly or predominantly exist (but then again, I can never be sure). But I was introduced to a game of zombies sometime last year and I learnt that they are these people who are ironically alive while being dead, walking around, soulless. Pretty terrifying creatures with stains of cold, hardened blood on their decaying clothes who walk weird and make weird noises. With this, I suppose all the more you feel motivated to shoot them in L4D2. Anyway, sometime ago I caught the movie 'World War Z' and learnt that the dead cannot be any dead-er so it is pretty hard to kill 'em and pretty recently, I finally succumbed to watching 'Warm Bodies'. I thought the latter was really good from which lessons can be drawn. I like how fictional films and books carry much underlying truths about life in general.

So 'Warm Bodies' is about the de-zombifying experience of this particular zombie character, who upon chancing into this girl (ah, typical ey?), began to understand and feel love in itself and gradually, started showing signs of being human - to be able to make out words, to experience what cold feels like while walking in the rain, to regain strength, speed and vitality, to feel love, to feel pain, to bleed, to connect with others, to be able to sleep and dream, to be motivated, to think, to share his thoughts and to inspire others to strive and aspire for the betterment. In essence, the zombie was becoming human; his heart started beating, he was radiating warmth and he has something to fight for - he had a purpose.

Now, after watching this reverse process makes me realize truly the true blessings of being alive. I was watching this in the comforts of being away from home while on vacation and within close proximity to nature and could not help but to reflect the experience of being zombified upon my own life and to further make sense of some general observations I make at work and experiences shared by people. I think that sometimes we have fallen into this risk of being zombified, or heck, I think perhaps sometimes we are zombified. Not that we are dead, but our spirit is dead. Our heart is beating, but we are not skipping to its beat. The beating becomes mere rhythms of just mere existence without meaning. Don't we feel that way sometimes? So caught up with pursuits after pursuits, so busy, so exhausted and we feel like we run on auto-pilot that we lose our senses and feelings. All of a sudden we are clueless with what excites us anymore. Sometimes we lose the joy with what we once thought was the source of joy and inspiration for us. And then we scramble in search of meaning. In the process, we might encounter a dead-end, and we start falling into helplessness and despair. And then we started asking ourselves, what the heck am I doing with my life?

So if there is a debate if zombies truly exist, I would say I think they do. We humans, if we don't inculcate this habit of meaning-making, can potentially be zombies. But let's try not to be zombies.

The process of meaning-making is not an easy one; it requires concerted efforts. We need to try. With whatever ways we can. To awaken our souls. To detach, to let go and feel free. To de-stress. To shop around for what excites us. To be passionate about something. To feel deeply about something. To nurture existing friendships. To do acts of kindness. To be creative and do things differently. To take risks. To sing. to dance. Whatever.

Anything, anything to make ourselves feel alive.