What a strange little title to end the year, isn’t it? Initially, I had the idea back in my head to write a piece on flowers. I even did background research on it and everything. Alas, I felt this was more fitting to end the year with. First off, I would like to wish you Happy New Year and may all your resolutions come true. 🙂

I have been getting a lot more viewers on this blog lately! That’s really due to my shameless promotion. Aha. I tell my friends about it and some of them visited it and stayed behind. Good on you, person who is reading this and thank you for that. Thank you for having faith in me. The posts I feel particularly connected to were ‘Fight or Flight’, ‘Hello.Love.Heartbreak’ and ‘There and Back Again’. I wrote stories again! In fact, the grand total is… two which are ‘Angel’ and ‘Second Glance’ . A friend mentioned that ‘Second Glance’ reflected me as a person now and I really don’t know what that means but I definitely know I don’t have a wife and a kid. If I could say which post set the tone for this year, it was really ‘Fight or Flight’ because it impacted me on an emotional level and recent events brought back the lividness of the memory.

I’m two paragraphs in and I have made no single mention of the title. So, when I was young, I remembered sitting in one. This was when I was cute. Aha! Stop snickering. So I was six years old and I rode in my first cable car trip with my family. I highly doubted my family would have let me sit the cable car alone. I should also mention to you now that my first flight was when I was five to the land down under. Yes, Sydney. So back to the cable car, I remembered sitting in it and I was excited like a kid who swallowed ten packets of lollies. My sister however wasn’t. She feared roller coasters for a reason and this was just scary for her. Imagine this. You are sitting in a cable car across several metres, travelling from one point to the other hanging on nothing but you guessed it, a cable. If anything happened and the cable snaps, you fall into the land of nothingness.

I sat in it and I feared nothing. I guess being six years old helped and I was excited about every single thing and it showed. I asked my sister, “Why are you scared?”. Backtracking to my first flight, I didn’t sleep at all mind you. The flight was 8 hours and my word I was giddy. I sat up all night playing video games on screen and I asked my mum and sister a question 7 hours in. “Why aren’t we landing yet? Can we land now?” They laughed with shock on their faces and told me not to say stuff like that. Just with the cable car, I feared nothing on my first flight.

15 odd years later, I realised why I never feared. I had faith in a cable and in an airplane. It’s a bit odd isn’t it to have faith in a metallic wire that has current running though it. As a child, I trusted every thing but more importantly, when I put my faith in a cable and in an airplane, I put my faith in the people that build and operated it. My faith and trust in them was what carried me to my destination. With my family by my side, I had no reason to fear or whatsoever.

15 odd years later, it’s a trying time for the aviation industry with three aircraft incidents related to my country or at least my country’s neighbour happened this year. 15 odd years later, a man whom people still don’t know much about held a group of people in the city I study in hostage which resulted in three deaths.

Upon a day after hearing the news of the Sydney Siege, I took a train into the city at night. For once in my entire life, I had fear when I took the train and looked everywhere as I walked. A week after the incident, I sat in my flight home hanging tight to my seatbelt when it was under serious turbulence with horrifying images flashing by my head. Have I lost faith in humanity and humans themselves?

I know what it feels like for people to not have faith in you. Humanity throughout history teaches us that we really suck. I really do mean we suck. It’s that simple. Let that sink in. Since the beginning of time, humanity has failed time and time and never learning its lessons but the failed nature of humanity has never stopped humans from trying time and time again. If we lose our faith in humanity and in humans themselves, will we ever try time and time again?

I remembered someone telling me she wasn’t sitting in Malaysia Airlines because she feared it and didn’t trust it. It was reasonable and unreasonable. In fact, I was actually very annoyed to the close point of being outraged by what she said. I have always said this, we still don’t know what happened to Mh370. We know Mh17 got shot down. How is it then we doubt the national airlines of our country? If people doubted it, shouldn’t that exactly be the time we had faith when it’s trying times and in dying light?

In the aftermath of the Sydney Siege and report after report and theory after theory being churned out, I visited Martin Place with a couple of friends. If you weren’t there, you wouldn’t believe it or maybe you will. The scent of flowers filled throughout the air and there was a massive line of people just waiting to put flowers for two people whom they have never met before in their lives. There were hundreds waiting to write condolence letters and messages for the victims. People were mourning but the air wasn’t just filled with scent of flowers but it was scented with humanity once again. My mum asked why I visited the place, I replied in response, “Why not?”.

I know my nature is more of in hope and in faith. Am I building castles in the sky and just grasping at straws? Shouldn’t I be more practical and put more stock in strategic solutions and methods? As a future aerospace engineer, shouldn’t I think of ways to increase the safety of aircraft and perhaps pilot error can be reduced significantly? As an international student, shouldn’t I think of campaigns to advocate for the safety of the public amidst the idea of terrorism finally successfully creeping into members of the society? Yes, I should but they should not be done with a view that all is lost with humanity and that humans can’t be trusted to protect the security of the nation or pilot an aircraft. They should be done with the view that yes, we still have faith regardless of what happened.

We all have been through periods where no one and I do mean no one have faith in us. It was heartbreaking to see the pictures coming out of the AirAsia crash. I really wanted to cry when I saw the response of the family members. It wasn’t the picture of the wreckage that made me cry but the picture of a person in tears because that is what humanity is. It is essentially every single one of us with a regard that we could be them and they could be us. In trying times and dying light, I could easily lose faith and asked why and how and all the relevant questions or I could hope and have faith we will bounce back from this in the midst of that.

While reports are not determined and investigated fully, I will always have faith that engineers and the pilot did everything they could and to the best of their ability. When madman and gunman choose to threaten a whole nation, I will always have faith that humanity will thrive at its lowest. That’s how I choose to live my life because sometimes, a little faith goes a long way.

As a child, I trusted a cable and a aircraft. 15 odd years later, I trusted an operator and a pilot.