I had forgotten that I was a writer who wrote to change the world.
You and I know I can write well. In fact, I now teach people how to write, a lifelong aspiration that has come true.
But I have not written with my original verve for many years. For too long, I have been too cautious, too concise, too restrained, to the point that my words have become like boiled water sitting for days in a rusty kettle.
This is my annual year-end blog post and every year I do it differently. This year, I will give thanks for all things. Whether they are good and bad, it’s a matter of perspective, and when you follow Christ, you will see things in a different light.
The simple thing about of having working hands, fingers, eyes is always taken for granted until you lose it. I am reminded daily my eyesight is failing bit by bit as I age. I have four pairs of glasses – for watching TV (100% myopia power), using a computer monitor (90% myopia power), reading and writing up close (100% presbyopia power) and for going out of the house (progressive lenses).
A few weeks ago, I was squatting down and scrubbing the toilet floor when I got up and felt a funny twinge in my lower back. Then it was many days of avoiding sitting down for too long because I would be so stiff if I got up. When is my back going to give way? Only God knows, but I am being more careful now when I do housework.
When I jog three times a week, each time I give thanks for the breeze and that my legs, my heart, and my lungs can function properly.
Jesus holds the fabric of the universe together, he also ensures that my cells continue to function while I’m still on earth. Each second that we can do what we desire to do is a blessing that we don’t realize.
I could probably spend my life in solitude doing my hobbies but I am always grateful when my family and friends reach out to me. I am also reminded to reach out to them as well, especially those whom I have lost touch with over the years.
One year ago, my friend Clifton died, and among the many thoughts I had was that throughout the two years of the pandemic, I had not called on him. What a poor friend I was!
Every time a friend dies, I tell myself to meet up more, but after a while, I lapse in doing so, until the next friend kicks the bucket. More importantly every meet up is an opportunity to share the Good News about Jesus and to ponder if we represent Jesus well in our daily lives.
You know what I like about my friends at this point in our lives (ie. middle age)? They don’t tell me how to live my life, and I don’t tell them how to live theirs. We each have our own personal challenges and worldviews, and we’ve grown up learning how each other are uniquely wired, and we just listen and share ideas and learnings.
The people you know and cherish are more precious than many things in life.
Life has more or less returned to normal for many of us in the world, and China is going through its difficult transition time now. The pandemic forced everyone to rethink how work and life should be carried out, and made us appreciate what normality is.
For me, the pandemic allowed me to stay at home and not travel like I used to do for work. How else would I have gotten so much time with the family, and also work on my weak Chinese language?
While many people are going on revenge travel sprees and dining out sprees, my family and I have not done so. We live life as we have always done, and the pandemic allowed me to test if my way of simple living would suffice for any situation, and it did.
But some perspective is needed here. Most of us did not suffer major complications from COVID, and thanks to the efforts of our governments to vaccinate us, we mostly were just inconvenienced with bouts of discomfort. We don’t think about the people who lost relatives, we don’t think about the frontline medical troops who endured the worst of times. We need to appreciate what we were given to save our lives, who made the effort to help the sick and be sensitive to those who went through much worse than us.
We can observe how things unfolded, and we do not know why God did what he did. But we can be thankful for what help we have received, and before the next life-threatening plague or unexpected personal tragedy arrives, we need to consider life and death, and what is the afterlife about – is there heaven or hell? Will we become nothingness or continue to exist?
Quite a few unpleasant things have happened this year, but I only think of them in terms of what good they have done for me, and what can I do better for myself and for others.
I’m no saint, I still get angry when lousy drivers give me problems on the road, or when commuters are so inconsiderate on public transport. But these daily unhappy bits, I just minimize (eg. I drive less and take public transport during non-peak hours where possible) and don’t get hung up on them.
For bigger issues, I accept that sometimes… make that often… people cannot help themselves, and decide how I will deal with the situation. Every person we meet is a potential friend to make, and if not, a lesson to learn from. God’s gift to me is a bad memory, so I often forget why I was upset with someone in the past, but for now, we must first understand the other, and we will find it easier to forgive.
There is one line that I learned in the book of Micah when I was a young Christian in 1997, and here it is :
He has told you, O man, what is good;
and what does the Lord require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness,
and to walk humbly with your God?
Micah 6-8
My violin teacher had a discussion with me today that really opened up my mind, and it was a culmination of many thoughts I have been pondering on for weeks.
The current violin piece I am learning is “Allegro” by Joseph-Hector Fiocco, and it is from Suzuki Book 6. My teacher asked why I was not putting full force into the bowing to bring out the tone. I said I am always worried about going out of tune, so rather than focusing on the bowing (with my right hand), I am focusing on the fingering of the strings with my left hand.
He said : “That’s not the right way to think about it. You should play it as loudly as it should be played, then when you make a mistake with the intonation, the mistake gets even more obvious so you can work on it.”
My annual tradition is to write a blog post looking back at the past year. That has gotten boring so I decided a few days ago that I would write this letter that should be shared with my friends and family after my death.
A book I’m reading says that we should prepare for life and also prepare for death. Yes, indeed! I’m always ready to die and meet Jesus, so here goes.
I took an MRT train recently and looked around. Almost everyone had neck craned downwards and looking at their smartphone. I don’t really look at my smartphone often because of my middle-age long-sightedness, and I only take out my reading glasses if I really need to. Nowadays you can stare at someone in the train and he/she would never even know it.
I thought to myself : “We are truly in The Matrix. People prefer to look at the simulacrum rather than the reality. People spend their emotions on the Matrix, getting triggered by every single manipulative post or image designed to distract their attention. People are posting images of themselves to project their own simulacrum, whether perfect or self-pitying, to get attention of the other digitized beings. People are creating millions of short videos and doing all sorts of things in the hope of becoming a wealthy digital character.”
I have a few simple practices that keeps the Matrix from engulfing my life, and would like to share them:
It is 2006, and I am sitting in a school bus with my school mates. We weren’t going to school this time, we were being driven to the Lim Chu Kang cemetery where we would put our friend Derek into his grave.
I have been wondering about different things as the pandemic continues for the second year. Penning down some of these thoughts which I have when I go jogging or have some downtime:
Why are Christians often the people most against having the vaccine?
You know, I have never spent a minute thinking about any conspiracy theory regarding the virus. All I know is that if you get hit by it, your chances of suffering greatly and dying can be pretty significant. Perhaps I am personally affected by the death of a doctor friend who was infected by SARS in 2003 (wow, has it been nearly two decades?) and the way he died was rapid and horrific.
Everyone had many more things to say this year and I won’t go into all the reasons why. Every day, it is estimated that 2.5 quintillion bytes (that’s 2.5 x 30 zeros) of data is created and here I am adding to the ridiculous and largely unnecessary mountain of data.
I have been pondering over the past two weeks about what I should write for my annual year-end blog post, a tradition that I try to maintain despite a decreasing number of things to say publicly as I get older.
Our family went for lunch at Golden Mile Food Center today. The food center has a tiny car park that is perennially full, so I parked our car at the Golden Mile Tower building opposite as it always has ample parking lots (thanks to its rundown state and dying shops).
As we crossed the overhead bridge, I saw the long queue of cars waiting to go into the full carpark, and I raised my arms in exasperation at those drivers.
Why do people spend so much time waiting for car park lots when there are always other options that don’t demand more than a short walk? How much time do they waste in the process, and how much exasperation do they generate for themselves? What could they have done with that 10-20 minutes?
My schoolmates and other alumni from Anglo-Chinese School often joke about how poor our Mandarin is and some wear it like a badge of honor. I used to do so, until 2003 when I visited China for the first time as a journalist.
The minute I arrived at the Shanghai airport, I headed for the McDonald’s and was stunned to see the menus completely in Chinese. (You’d imagine it would be bilingual at the airport). My Mandarin* was rusty as I hadn’t touched the language since my last Mandarin school exam in 1994 but I saw the gap in my life.
Empty Vessel 
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