Azure Wings Café

If you listen to the music of today's generation, you'd generally find voices that are really awesome. Kidding aside, we find these songs really great. Whether it has a classical feel, or one that makes your feet dance to the rhythm, we like it. One possible reaction we might have is, "Wow look at him/her/both, his/her/its voice is very high and it's something I can only dream of having." True, it is difficult to sing high notes. But it's just as hard to sing low notes, if not harder. And this is where the argument begins.

Aim high, they say. Always strive for the best. Bring home the bacon. Be the best that you can ever be. We often hear these things as motivations for one who is generally underachieving. But when we read or hear these, the usual conclusion would be that the best for any person would be what is high. And what is high is difficult. Guess what, being low is harder. It's hard for a low person to stay low, and even harder for a high person to become low. But who would want to be low?

In music for example, we always get amazed at the power of a soprano sing and breaking a crystal glass with just her voice. But I've never heard of a bass who was applauded because his voice served as the foundation of the whole choral music in which he is a part of. Or even in a band, we often applaud the lead guitarist with his master fingers, but without the bass (who also does some nifty finger work) the music of the band would sound dry. Wouldn't you want to be a bass or a bass guitar, being the foundation upon all of those high buildings were built, and your disappearance would mean the collapse of everything? It's the same way in life. Without the lowly, there would be no high people.

By the way, how do we count? Do we count beginning from infinity and downwards until there is nothing left? No. We begin with nothing and we end with everything. It just goes to prove what the Bible teaches, that the lowly will have the Kingdom of Heaven. But then again, in a society who glorifies altitude and scrutinizes depth, who would understand all these things? Time would just pass and everyone would want to be on top of one another, always wanting to escape that state of being low. How difficult it would be if we were to let go of our high aspirations for a lower aspiration. But that's exactly what the world needs.

If everyone aimed high and leaves what is low the moment they can leave it, then who would be in charge of guiding the future of the land? If every child from rural villages study medicine in some prestigious place and never returns to that rural village, what would happen to the children in that village? If every teacher leaves the country to work as a domestic helper with higher salary, then where's the dignity of the profession heading? Ironically, downward. And it is only when everything is down that we strive to move up some more, eventually causing us to fall down.

There will be some who might ask, "But isn't moving downward a cause of under achievement?" Not really. Underachieving is when you are given the opportunity to act, and do not act as you should. Underachieving is not gaining anything. Being low gives the opportunity to see the world from a perspective no one else has seen before. How do we fix a problem that seems impossible to fix? We go back to the beginning, and work our way up again right? We can now say that to reach the top, we must first go to the bottom. If we forget our foundations, everything would collapse.