The ideal world is boring. Everything is in black and white. Everything fits into different categories perfectly. The bad guy is always evil and the good guy is always kind. You will always reap rewards proportional to the effort you put in and there will always be good karma and bad karma. Blah Blah Blah... Life gets pretty stale when it comes in only 2 flavours for everything that we do, chocolate and vanilla.

Luckily, the world comes in different shades of grey, and in colours too.

I never do any statistical studies but I'll guess that for an average human, we may be performing more than 100 tasks a day. And every activity or task we work on comes in 3 stages that you can see in the title. Fortunately (or is it unfortunately) for all the idealists out there, most things that we do are simple ideal tasks.

For example, you may have the intention to take a shower, so your action would be to grab a set of washed clothes and get into the bathroom to shower. The end product is that you will feel refreshed and clean at the end of the shower.

Simple tasks like the example above is simple due to 3 factors. One is that the actions and consequence of your action fulfills your intention. Second is that it does not involve a second person. Thirdly, the whole process is an isolated event. In our ideal world, it's so simple. In the real world, your sister might be using the bathroom or there could be a cockroach there. Nonetheless, these 'perturbations' is not what makes life interesting...

Life is interesting because of interactions with other people. When your intentions involves people, when your action involves people and you consequences involve people, especially when that people is someone you care for. And because it involves people, intentions, actions and consequences is dependent on the subjective views of individuals.

There's quite a few forum letters to the newspaper recently debating about the issue of same-sex parents. These parents, who are lesbians, adopted some under privileged orphans and took cared of them. Many people are arguing over if that is a right thing to do, is it beneficial to the child and if society should accept it as a norm.

The couple started off with noble intentions, to adopt and take care of under privileged orphans. But they do it as a pair of same-sex parents. The choice of their actions led to many controversies in the forums with many conservative Singaporeans writing in to say why it is wrong to do so because of such and such consequences. Their argument includes stuff like children with parents of different gender are better off and that the kids will grow up confused about their gender, that they should raise kids in 'normal' families etc. In some instances, religious books were quoted too. On the other hand, the open-minded Singaporeans were glad that these kids were well taken care off by capable adults, that the kids found warmth and love.

Our actions may be interpreted differently by people. They say great minds think alike, but I guess it's that the person who thinks like you seems to be smarter to you. Intentions seldom matter when we interact with people because we could never measure intentions accurately but we could observe the actions and consequences easily even though the actions that we take are reflections of our intention. And people would take different actions even when they have the same intentions. This is what makes the world interesting. That's why there's such a buzz about these lesbian couples.

As for the consequences, there are long term consequences and short term ones. There are individual consequences and societal ones. There are many different consequences related to an action. Some consequences fulfills your intention while some do not. There are some that may be opposite to your intentions and there could be other consequences that is totally unrelated to your intentions. Just like the lesbian couple who adopted the children. Getting into the limelight of forum discussion is a relatively unrelated consequence to their intention of caring for their children. Providing care and love when nobody else is doing it now is a good short term consequence and if the naysayers are right, in the long term it may not be so good. What about the children's point of view? If you are posted the question if the lesbian couple were right in doing what they did, how could you answer in a black and white manner?

Life is not black and white. It is colourful. I'm so tired... Year 5 PTM coming up... it's been a long long week. I hope I'm coherent. Finally I can rest, for less than 7 hours.