Winning Performance --- Spirit Lifter

Travelling is part of my job requirement few years ago; I don’t really mind the high frequency of travel. In-fact, I treat it as a free runaway trip from reality. During the freight, I will have a glass of wine and a good story book accompany by friendly smile from air hostess. Hey! What more would I demand as an employee during office hour.
Oh Yah! Almost have forgotten; I can also switch off my cell phone officially and becomes UNTOUCHABLE ---- Oh man! isn’t that great ?

But, this time is different despite the usual last minute notice. Tomorrow is my eight years old daughter’s birthday party. This is her first birthday party which I have promised since her memory begins. She has not stop talking about it since the day I have decided. For me, I just can’t wait to see her delightful happiness radiating like a little fairy during the party. Looking at her, I know that whatever words come out from my mouth right now will be simply excuses to her. I am totally speechless that night before I leave home for airport. I apologize for not able to describe her at that particular moment because this is one thing which I would not like it to surface in my mind during my lifetime.

In the airport, I desperately look for some interestingly fresh event in order to overwrite the recent unwanted memory. I have a good meal all by myself, a good drink in the transit area all by myself, looking at pretty girls passing by all by myself, cigarette one after another all by myself. The passionately stubborn feeling still surrounds me with the company of nicotine odour from my apparel. Habitually I put my hand into the hand carrier searching for my usual story book, Oh shit ! book! where is my book ? I have forgotten it.

No, I will go insane or turn into werewolf before next touch down which is almost twenty hours from now. Ten minutes before last call, I run quickly to the nearest bookshop and pick up a thin volume of my trusted author Jeffery Archer, A Prison Diary, Volume 1 HELL. Then I check in.

In the cabin, I aimlessly flipping the pages while my mind is fighting it’s own battle. Until the lines from the Invictus gradually becomes the officer in command for me, my mind and my passionately stubborn feeling. For nearly an hour, I continually reciting the Invictus in my mind until I regain control of the entire army of myself.

Thanks to the Invictus to give me such a lift when I am falling.


INVICTUS

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I think whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul

In the fell clutch of circumstance,
I have not winced or cried aloud,
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this places of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade.
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul

William Ernest Henley (1849 – 1903)