What I Enjoy Most when Swimming: Serenity.

I'm proudly announced that I just finished my 8 weeks swimming class! 
Beberapa orang mungkin akan berpikir kalo telat banget ya baru belajar renang di usia segini, but hey.. my 55 years old mother also just finished her swimming class!  So I guess age is just a number right.. 

Terus kenapa tiba-tiba belajar renang?  
Karena baru ada kesempatan dan tempat yang pas sih sebenernya.  Awalnya sih ngira bakal panik ya pas di air, tapi setelah belajar ternyata asik bangeet..  Yah, walaupun setelah 8 pertemuan tapi belum expert banget, tapi lumayan lah jadi ga terlalu panik kalo nyelup di air.. hehe..

And what I enjoy most from swimming is.. Serenity.
The relaxing silence you feel the moment your head and your body is inside the water, the movement of your body that feels more like dancing inside the water, and the peaceful feeling of nothing except your breathe..

For someone that has a super noisy mind like me, swimming is some kind of moving meditation that shut all the noise and give a time for my self to think about nothing.

Ya kira-kira merasa jadi seperti putri duyung. :)

*btw yang mau kursus renang di depok, ada tempat namanya Khodijah Muslimah Centre (KMC) yang khusus buat muslimah, bisa cek websitenya di http://khodijahmuslimahcentre.com/ ya.. recommended banget deh pokoknya!

About Language

Ngga terasa sebenernya cuma sisa -Insya Allah - 1 semester lagi dari 6 semester yang harus ditempuh. Dari awal dan makin kesini semakin banyak yang bertanya ngapain sih ambil jurusan bahasa..

Kalau diinget-inget sebenernya dari jaman TPA tertarik banget sama bahasa Asing.. Sayang dari dulu ngga pernah punya kesempatan les bahasa kayak temen-temen yang lain.. Biasa.. Ga Ada uangnya :D
Pas jaman SMA, sayangnya ga ada jurusan bahasa.. Jadi ambil yang nyerempet-nyerempet ngebahas bahasa dan kebudayaan..

Buat saya.. Bahasa itu menakjubkan.. Incredibly amazing!
Language is the first thing we learnt as a baby. We learnt how to communicate through our own language, and then we tried to mimicking our parents. Bahasa adalah pembentuk kebudayaan. Language formed society. People with the same language shared ideas, knowledge, ideals, and then passed the knowledge to the next generation.

My drama lecturer said that artist, writer, and other profession that used language as their power, are the one who always feared in revolution. She said machine gun can kill them, but their words will travel through time and place. I personally amazed at her words knowing that the statement is right.
Dan di semester ini kami belajar tentang English Literature, and I remember her words again. Of how words and works of art can travel through time.

Memang sih keliatan ga ada gunanya belajar jaman Renaissance, Romantic Age, and so on. But learning language is also learning about wisdom. How we see things in how others saw it hundreds of years ago. About people at that time also questioned about life, about their existence, about the personal feelings and everything in their mind.  And in some of them, I found wisdom.
I do hope I can be wiser and wiser each day.

"Of that there was and end; so there may be of this"
Taken from Deor's Lament, from the Old English Period.

#JeSuisMuslim #JeSuisCharlie #JeSuisHumaine

There’s still vividly in mind about the shooting in Charlie Hebdo Headquarters in France that happened last month.  When two strangers shouted “Allahu Akbar” before shot 12 peoples, include the chief director of the newspaper, and suddenly, being a muslim-which is some people think you’re half terrorist when you’re muslim in some muslim minority country- became an issue again.  Despite of the satire caricature about Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) that Charlie Hebdo published, which me, as a muslim also hate it, but I don’t think killing people is the answer.  I found an article that told me about how hard it was to build trust from non-muslim people to the muslim in muslim minority country, and it will be harder-once again-after the shooting in Charlie Hebdo.  Especially when all the international media blew this case up and it became international issue about “Terrorism”.

#JeSuisCharlie

And few days ago, I read heartbreaking news about the shooting, again, but this time the victims were my brother and sisters.  Three young muslim founded death in their apartment in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, with bullet in their head, without any sign of resistance from them.  The shooter said it was because they had argue about the parking lot, but the family and friends of the victims said that the victims once told them that the shooter came and talk to them with gun in his belt, he showed them the gun to insult them.  But the family and friends think the problem was already over because they never mentioned him again.  Only Allah knows the truth.  But killing people is not the answer.  They just students, they even younger than me, and the husband and wife just got married for few weeks, for god’s sake! 

This shooting triggered emotional reaction to the community, and also from muslims around the world.  Anger, sadness, and question: why the international media didn’t blow this up like the one in Charlie?  Why there’s no “terrorist” label for the shooter? Is “terrorist” label only for muslim?

There’s rumor that the shooter will be examined for his mental and psychological.  Do you know what that means?  There is no way to punish people with mental illness.  I wonder if he was a moslem, maybe the police will shoot him directly when he was captured.

#JeSuisMuslim

I, we as muslim in Indonesia, the largest muslim country in the world, sometimes forget how easy our life is.  How it is so easy to wear hijab or any religion attribute, any religion, not only Islam.  How it is so safe to walk alone with hijab or any religion attribute.  Maybe we will never feel –and I hope we do never feel it- as minority.  And I didn’t write this as a show off, I write it as a reminder, for myself, for my brothers and sisters, about the humanity, about how it is so evil to take someone’s life because of what they worship, or even for whatsoever reason.  It’s not in our hand to take someone’s life.  And how, we are blessed to be in this country, and how we should always pray for things like this will never happen here, and how we should care more and more aware to what happen around us.  And also how, our country should stands up as a good example for tolerance and harmony, and how our country should speaks against humanity and religion issues like this.  I can only pray.

#JeSuisHumaine

the stories:

http://www.islamicgeo.com/2015/01/tragedi-paris-mengkhianati-nabi-tanpa.html

http://www.newsobserver.com/2015/02/11/4548704_our-full-coverage-of-the-chapel.html?rh=1