He Who has a why can endure any How

A forced pause on our busy default mode has compelled me, or many of us to take a hard long look within ourselves at how we’re ‘doing life’. Calmer waters (before CoVid) create conditions for mindlessly skimming along the surface of life, hastily racing from weekend to another, one accomplishment to another, often to fill some deep seated need to prove or please or impress or protect - from who or what, we’re not quite sure.

Yet when storm waves blow in (in this mother storm of a CoVid where not everybody is on the same boat), lives built on some of superficial values and held by untamed fears of inadequacy and insecurity can quickly fall to pieces. As they say, the problem with modern life is that accomplishments cannot produce deep satisfaction.

While we may not enjoy the auto-pilot of our lives being disrupted, this crisis holds a silent invitation for transformation at the deepest level – individually and collectively.

And while I mention courage of reflection and transformation, i am no immune to fear than anyone else. With nowhere to go, this enforced slow-down has highlighted my fear of inadequacy and found me forever striving, trying, yet never arriving- on my race to an imaginary finish line.

How do we reset our attention on the things that matter most?
How can this seemingly gift of crisis be a blessing for lucky people not in the frontlines to pause, and recalibrate our ideas of success?
Much like how the capitalist/consumerist model of this world stresses the earth's natural beauty, have we, as people, been too busy, doing too much? For what?

If this crisis has taught me anything, it's that humanity's temporal range is short, and life is both incredibly fragile and immensely precious. There is no other time but now to stop, and reflect for a more noble purpose. Yet amid a future filled with uncertainty lay unlimited possibilities for me, and us to change the way the world works in more impactful ways.

A Lonely City

Adrift and alone in the city that promises its inhabitants "the better life". I cycle through a series of temporary homes — sublets, friends’ apartments, and various borrowed quarters, only amplifying the sense of otherness and alienation as I am forced to make a life among someone else’s things, in a home that someone else has created and long since.

But therein lies an inescapable metaphor for life itself — we are, after all, subletting our very existence from a city and a society and a world that have been there for much longer than we have, already arranged in a way that might not be to our taste, that might not be how the building would be laid out and its interior designed were we to do it from scratch ourselves. And yet we are left to make ourselves at home in the way things are, imperfect and sometimes downright ugly. The measure of a life has to do with this subletting ability — with how well we are able to settle into this borrowed, imperfect abode and how much beauty we can bring into existence with however little control over its design we may have.

This, perhaps, is why I found my, if temporary, respite from loneliness in an activity propelled by the very act of leaving this borrowed home: walking.

In certain circumstances, being outside, not fitting in, can be a source of satisfaction, even pleasure. There are kinds of solitude that provide a respite from loneliness, a holiday if not a cure. Sometimes as I walked, roaming under the stanchions of Cavenagh bridge, or the aromatic Serangoon road.

I didn’t get this feeling when I was in my apartment; only when I was outside, either entirely alone or submerged in a crowd. In these situations I felt liberated from the persistent weight of loneliness, the sensation of wrongness, the agitation around stigma and judgement and visibility. But it didn’t take much to shatter the illusion of self-forgetfulness, to bring me back not only to myself but to the familiar, excruciating sense of lack.

Mercury

Sometimes you tell yourself to chill out and just live in the present. Other times you get so worked up on what's happening in the present that you daydream a lot about the past, and especially what could you do in the future.

At the present, I am dreaming of a slow life in the farm - a small cabin, tending to my farm crops, and having a sustainable lifestyle.

You can actually do it now - but why wait?

Because you have to save more for?