Essay｜My Core Value

The world is too beautiful, yet life is too short. There are all sorts of feelings and experiences I want to keep close and remember, but time is so cruel that happiness and sorrow passes too fast for us to even notice, leaving everything behind. That is essentially why I am constantly in pursuit of eternity.

I started to feel the sense of time around seven years old. During a summer vacation, I went to Disneyland with my family, where my favorite ride was “it’s a small world”. I loved it so much that I forced my mother to take me on the ride for three times. While I was mesmerized by the experience, I was also frustrated that it lasted only a few minutes and that I couldn’t go back in time to relive the moment.

When I was eight, my parents transferred me to another school closer to my home. I had to leave my old friends and adapt to a whole new environment. It was not easy at such a young age, and I missed my old friends so much that I again feel frustrated being unable to go back in time. Soon, I found myself always trying to keep track of life and hold on to time. I wrote diaries; I kept every toy, note, and even broken pens; I collected signatures or name labels of friends. Although I barely had any technology, I still found a way to pursue eternity by collecting everything that represent a moment.

Growing up, I have written several journals, and I especially put effort on travel journals. As every moment during travel is full of surprises, I tried to keep track of everything throughout a trip. I have travel journals of Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Macau, United States, Cambodia, and Spain. Ever since the technology of social media and smartphones, I became even more obsessed with keeping moments, as images and words can be preserved more easily. I especially enjoy looking back at words I wrote in the past and immersing myself in the experiences and emotions I had at the time. This year I went on a graduation trip with my best friends, and I filmed vlogs in order to hold on to the memories. I know I cannot relive history, but keeping the moments as genuinely as possible is by far the closest I can get to eternity.

One of my life goals is to create something that preserves myself. I cannot live forever, but I can create works, perhaps a book, an album or a movie, that can represent me long after I disappear. Before I’m ready to create that “autobiography”, I would like to create all kinds of works that can preserve a certain moment, story or emotion. In the era of emerging technologies, the media itself is not the point. Whichever media I decide to work on as my career, whether it’s video, literature, music, product, or curation, I am eager to pursue a sense of eternity by creating something.

Ai-Heng Lee creation

2019.10.16