A fifteen year stretch

It has been 15 years since the first post on this blog, and I can now look back and close the loop on some things.

In 2012, I was poised to leave home to study overseas and was feeling apprehensive: home was comfortable, and I wrote a post to that effect. But once I ventured out, I remained away for 5 years to the point that what had once been uncomfortable became the norm, and I didn’t want to return. With some reluctance I eventually did return and settled back to the formerly ‘comfortable’ home, but it took me some time to come to terms with it. In hindsight, I guess it’s not the place where one is that matters, but how one makes the best of things every day.

The year 2012 also marked the end of my full-time military service. For the two years in which I served, military service was the entirety of my world. Even in my free time, my conversations with friends and family would end up as a discourse on military life. For most enlistees, it was a love-hate relationship (the consensus was that it was a waste of time), and I wrote a poem expressing my thoughts: when our time in service is over, do we dispose of our uniforms and say good riddance to the experience? Last month, I returned to camp for a two-week stint, which made me recall how much I had enjoyed those two full-time years. I also chatted with a service-mate who shared that he had considered signing on to the military back then as a career (I had wanted to, as well). It shows that I’m not alone in thinking that, notwithstanding all our complaining (I had named the poem “Army Fatigue”), there can be meaning in a role that seems purposeless – again, it’s about making the best of things. It’s easy for one to see how enjoyable something was once it’s over, the challenge is in enjoying a tough time while you’re in the midst of it. I’ve taken that thought to my current workplace, which is also challenging though in a different way. After my two years of military service, I did indeed shred the mud-stained uniforms (as I wrote about in the poem) but there are many other mementos of army life that I still hold dear.

In 2013, army life was over and I had a foot in the door of the legal profession. I wrote about my vision and qualms about law practice – why did it have to be conducted in such a rigid way? It felt that law firms maintained the ostentatious front of being as exclusive as possible, as though the posher the place, the more one could expect that they knew what they were doing. Surely in a profession that has at its heart the need to be in the shoes of the client to advocate for them, empathy and understanding are key – and the wall should be broken with the profession taking the first step to meet the client on terms comfortable to them. I’ve now been able to answer my own question: yes, law practice can be different. We can meet the client in the middle. As to the exact details, I’m working out exactly how every day.

And with a few life lessons done and dusted, perhaps it’s time for new adventures.

Hare today, gone tomorrow

The time between the last post and this one has passed in the blink of an eye, and I have a description in verse for it:

Headlong Slide

The rush of water flows unabated
To its unseen, inevitable end
And I flow with it, the course decided
Though hidden by the river's myriad bends

Buoyant, I do not clutch at anything
Lest I am torn away by force and hurt
For the wild currents are unforgiving
Can I hold out, as a creature of dirt?

But discomfort hardly lingers with me
Slights fast forgotten and lost in this pace
I see the quickness of my odyssey
Mirrored in shortness of breath from the haste

Is the ride of life all the more thrilling
For its breakneck speed into the unknown?
It is only deemed truly fulfilling
In joining others who journey alone

At travel’s end, the sights and sounds will fade
For the story to be grandly retold
All memories woven taut and displayed:
Good and bad forming a glorious whole

November 2022

But may it never be too much to pause to savour beautiful moments.

Clear skies and sunshine

When I was in Morocco, a young man who could speak fluent Arabic, French, English and Berber claimed to have the secret to learning many languages: "Be unemployed,” he told me. “Without a job you have a lot of time to learn."

I must have missed something because the stretch I had without a job brought me no nearer to linguistic brilliance.

But I dare say, if I had time on my hands, I might instead be enjoying some peace and quiet. My most vivid memory of Geneva is sitting by the lake and enjoying the scenery. It was the social norm – on fine sunny days, everyone was there. An ex-schoolmate recently sent me an email concerning sharing of poetry, and in response, I decided to write something to remember that communal spirit of taking a moment to appreciate life:

The Sunshine Collective

The brevity of flowers in the summer
Deters not the arrival of pots upon pots
As the planter of life, the gardener
Lays out the rows of fresh plots
The varieties growing by the hour

They sway in unison with the breeze
Delicate petaled heads held high
Such cordiality solely to please
As visitors mill idly and sit by
For the season's declaration of colour

November 2019

 A record of that scene - sometime in 2016. 

With a string of exams I took just over, I hope for my outlook ahead to be similarly idyllic.

Happy December!

On zeal

I have a terrible commute to work. There are four or five possible routes to choose from; none are good.

But though I dislike the commute, it struck me one day that I never disliked the journey because of the destination. I always wanted to reach the office at the end of the ride. It’s been exactly a year at my current job so far, and there’s never been a day that I didn’t want to go to work.

It’s life-changing to be doing, for the first time, something that I truly want to do.

My current job is at a charity, and I think I love it because I feel that what I do has meaning. It’s nice to see the smiles on our beneficiaries’ faces, and to realise that people who need help are receiving it. It’s a joy to make a difference in other people’s lives.

I’m not the only one who feels this way – many of my colleagues have similar views, and it’s very telling of how strongly they feel about their work when you see them spend out of their own pockets to give back to the organisation. I think it’s a pleasure to be amongst such passionate people.

I’ve met two people recently who inspired me in a similar manner. One’s a middle-aged lady who embarked on three careers in the span of one working life, as a businessperson, a teacher and a lawyer. Those were not easy career switches because you need (many long years of) training to go into teaching and law. The other’s a pastor, whose work is difficult and family life even more so. Yet both set their hands to what they do with zeal.

Now that I know what it means to be doing work not because I have to, but because I want to, I really hope I’ll take this attitude of doing things from the bottom of my heart to the next job.

For now, I’m cherishing everyday and figuring out how to have even a fraction of that lady’s energy.

People & languages in an inter-connected world

Stumbled across a website with an amazing idea. It’s a language exchange: but instead of finding a penpal and exchanging emails and the like (I’ve tried something like that before but the site didn’t seem to work very well), in this one you treat the site like a blog and post up entries in any language you’d like. Other people correct your posts, and you in turn correct posts for other people who wrote entries for themselves in your native language. As a bonus, because it feels like blog-browsing, I’ve been able to learn a lot about people living in other parts of the world. I think it’s an amazing system, and I’m looking forward to seeing how well it turns out. (Lang-8, if anyone is interested)

It also has been really nice to be able to write posts and share them, something I’ve been reluctant to do with this blog lately – probably because it’s entirely open to the public. The older I get, the more I think to myself ‘oh, I shouldn’t write my views about this or that, because it might get seen by my future boss - - - oh, what if I become a politician’ … There were good points to being young and naïve!

One thing I’d like to write about, though, is that recently I met old man that I got along well with, who invited me for tea and cakes. We must have had very different backgrounds, and were obviously in rather different stages of life – so it was nice to chat. When I mentioned my ‘I wanted to get out and see the world’ sentiment (per a post below) he threw in his thought that “it feels like everywhere you go, no matter how different the place is, people are the same: and you’ll find some that are just like you and some and are not”. No matter how easy it is to connect with people across the world now, people are the same – perhaps.

Possibilities

[edited]

I was watching a young boy on the train today, who was peering at a map of the Singapore transportation network. His excited expression sort of reminded me of myself studying the London tube map, thinking how amazing the extent of the network was, and how I had never seen anything like it before. Who knows, maybe in some ten years that same boy will be able to look at the Singapore map with even more fascination than today as this metropolis grows and heads in the direction of other mega cities.

I came back this summer in time for nation-wide celebrations marking Singapore’s 50th independence anniversary. It was a good time to look back at the last 50, last 100 years to see where this place has arrived from, and I guess, trying to put it simply, Singapore has always been a place for immigrant people to find a livelihood, work for themselves, and somehow get tied up with the land along the way. To an extent, it still is like that today, even if the face of the nation is now very different from the past. What has been constant here is that the land and its people seem to change very quickly, continually adapting to the circumstances; and since independence that attitude has been mostly beneficial. So if adapting and looking to the future is a good recipe for success, I sincerely hope that this nation continues to do so, and that it changes wisely as well, so that those little kids can continue to enjoy modern train rides, and so that bigger kids like me can be proud of my homeland.

Local drink in a non-local mug

A short story and an unasked question

He laughed, replacing the shirt back on to its hanger. It was the most absurd thought he had had the whole day, so far. When the lawyer found out he worked from home, the legal practitioner had suggested that they meet at the coffee shop near his house – “I don’t stay too far from you, after all”. They would meet in fifteen minutes’ time. Lim had instinctively reached for a crisp shirt he kept at the back of his wardrobe – he rarely dressed up – while wondering where he kept his belt. This was to be a serious legal discussion. You have to be dressed appropriately when you sign at the bottom of the page. He had then stopped himself. The last time he visited the office, the assistant, Jenny, had smiled and told him it was perfectly fine to dispense with the pleasantries and formality while dealing with their firm. He’d smiled back and told her he’d prefer it that way, too. He considered that this modus operandi should probably also apply to the lawyer that he was meeting for the first time. Should he dress up? This was a meeting at a coffee shop, for heaven’s sake. He was the client! He could do whatever he liked. Lim walked to the doorway, picking up a comfortable pair of loafers as he let himself out of the house.

While walking to the coffeeshop, a pang of self-consciousness struck him once again, and Lim wondered if his black and white “I love Krabi” T-shirt was not too sloppy for the occasion. It was nevertheless certainly what he was used to: he was a reclusive software designer, and this occasion of filing a patent and selling on his idea was one of the few times that required him to step out of the house. He was thus far more used to dressing comfortably than dressing to impress. Lim felt a mix of reactions when he located the lawyer sitting at one of the coffee shop tables, decked out in shorts, slippers and a plain T-shirt, a briefcase placed on the chair beside him. On the one hand he felt like laughing at this flippant lack of ceremony, and on the other, he was glad that the lawyer was as informally attired, if not more dressed down, than he was. The indecision did not last very long. Lim decided this state of affairs comfortably suited him.

He pulled out a chair and sat down. He wanted a “milo-bing”.