What's The Problem? — PadangBolaSepak

During my time away, dial down, I had and still have time to myself to spiritually to reflect as well as react on a lot of things. Some positive, some negative, some strong, some weak. Correlated to the past as well as looking forward to the future. There was a period of anger and frustration that clouded my compassion and love of many things in life including football. I reignited some old fun habits to get away from majority of things to my gratefulness opened up my old idealist self additionally added light into my clouded thoughts. One fine night of cycling around this safe consistent route while listen to a podcast, stumbled up on this gem.

"There's two paths that I always felt. You got your creation & you got your destruction. And the destruction path is packed, you can't move because that is the easiest lane to take. Everybody can knock something, go 'Yeah that's stupid', take it down or lobby against it. Once you are on the path of creation. You don't sit around. In the destruction path, you look around & hate all these people in turn everything. But when you are on the move, you love everything. World looks wholly different." - Writer Kevin Smith on Startalk radio with Neil deGrasse Tyson

I sincerely love football and genuine people in it. Hence why the evolution from football micro-blogger to football activist makes sense ultimately. Like to football programs that I and the team have been conducting. Encouraging people who don't have the chance to play football, a chance to play football with other people who wants to play for fun. Meet new people, develop friendships, play together, play for each other, and overall, play with joy and love.

Into that same fine night, tuned into a podcast episode of Fatman on Batman with Marc Bernardin and Kevin Smith was talking about a lot of things that's relatable. I encourage you to have a listen to it. That particular part is when they talked about, "Fitting in", the "Us vs Them", and more in the fandom-pop-culture community. Marc Bernardin noted that, it is okay to have disagreements about what people want, but don't get to the point that it creates an inwards vindictive division like how fans who watched Star Wars: The Last Jedi and the fans themselves splits their own community. Growing distant away from the happiness that got them there in the first place.

Then Kevin Smith referred to what the creator of Star Wars, George Lucas said during an Academy of Achievement Address. That struck a chord with me went I saw it.

Happiness is pleasure, and happiness is joy. Pleasure, is short lived, and it peaks very high, but the next time you want to get that same peak you have to do it twice as much. On the other hand is Joy, and joy is a thing that doesn’t go as high as joy, but it stays with you, joy is something you can recall, pleasure you can’t. The secret is, that even though it’s not as intense as pleasure, joy will last a lot longer.

Pleasure's fun. It's great, but you can't keep it going forever; just accept the fact that it's here and it's gone, and maybe then again, it will come back, and you'll get to do it again. Joy lasts forever. Pleasure is purely self-centered. It's all about your pleasure: it's about you. It's a selfish, self-centered emotion, that is created by a self-centered motive of greed. Joy is compassion. Joy is giving yourself to somebody else, or something else. And it's a kind of thing that is, in its subtlety and lowness, much more powerful than pleasure. You get hung up on pleasure; you're doomed. If you pursue joy; you will find everlasting happiness. - George Lucas

I will keep on going into football with my team to create, be it write ups about all levels of Malaysian football, developing content, producing programs and so on. Ultimately, it is not about giving pleasure to ourselves through football. It's about creating joy through football with genuine people so that things can progress in the long run. Don't agree with this refresh approach because of how naive it sounds. Well, look, the door is always there for you to decide to enter as well as exit. For me and the team, as long as your intentions of entering are sincere with the objectives, vision, and values that we want to create and develop, let's create the joy together!

P.S. I humbly advise to those of you who aren't feeling themselves, and have physical symptoms that adds onto to your current situation to go on a break from the things that's not making you happy. Accordingly dial down your responsibilities and dial up your relaxation. Before coming back to it, plan how to manage responsibilities, stress, and joy better. I must say that I am glad that my right face twitching has reduced that started quite sometime ago.