new land

Until my early thirties, and apart from eight years in England, I had lived only in the eastern parts of this island.  Then came a string of places - Upper Bukit Timah, Holland Village, Toa Payoh - all perfectly fine in their own ways. But I pined for the east and not recognising this, mistook my fickleness to new habitats for a chronic case of wanderlust.

I have moved back to the east now and I cannot even begin to say how this feels, how it feels to walk, drive, cycle through neighbourhoods that I have known since I was big enough to squat in a trishaw and accompany my grandmother and nanny to the Haig Road pasar.

Recent experience suggests though that I may have space in my heart for a new love.

Unexpectedly, over the last two weekends, I have come to know a new land - not new in the sense that I had not known it before, but new in that I am knowing it now in remarkable new ways. In this brief period of time, it has already become rather dear to me.

Tiong Bahru - meaning "the middle of the new"?  Were you named thus when the walk-up apartment blocks that are now your most recognisable architecture were first built in the sixties? They were very much part of the new back then, embodiment of our youthful and newly postcolonial nation, these striking white buildings in the middle of a new city.

Walking on the pathways between blocks or in the corridors at dusk or on a Saturday late morning, looking up at balconies and peering through windows or glancing up the stairway to rest the eye on old fashioned metal door grilles - there is sometimes the smell of cooking from a kitchen, sometimes there is the sound of a pop song from a radio programme or the hum of voices from a television set. The names of roads not yet familiar and the weaving of alleys not yet inscribed into my mind - can you hear it in my voice?  The pleasure, the delight, as I look, listen, and learn more about this new land - pure and intoxicating.

Perhaps because it is bestowed at this age -- when the spinning happiness and lightness of youthful infatuation have become as tired and revisitable as old tourist sites where nothing new can be added (except perhaps the softening of edges by the nostalgic misty eyes of a retrospective gaze) -- perhaps this is why my ardour for this new land gives me the feeling of having been returned to youth sans its heady, wild and reckless caprices and compulsions.

In his excellent book The Tao is Silent the witty and wise Raymond M. Smullyan writes: "freedom is doing what one likes; Zen is liking what one does." This leads me to see something which I shall commit myself to acknowledging by putting it here, in this public space, in words that shall outlast my flesh and bones and breath:

my approach towards novelty now (at two years shy of forty) compared to what it was from childhood up to age 35 seems to be guided by a Zen-like principle of liking what I do and not so much doing what I like.

This is a good place to be at. There is only so much time left; one really cannot afford to be squandering any more of it.