How do you measure a life? By the lovers had or the lovers lost? By the exhaustion of failures or by your ability to endure? By the assets earned or by the wealth spent?
But how about measuring it through each encounter instead? To be able do your best, but not only for yourself – because a life focused on your own existence is bound to be a very miserable one.
So I arrived after a long train ride and plunged into the warm sofa. The cat orbited, sniffing and curious, pleased to have me sprawled on its level. I thought I’d be exhausted and asleep by 8pm (2am à Singapore), but I laid for hours, digesting the solid, vital phrases I’ve just learnt while getting lost for about 5 times in Paris and the chords of a new song which the town has apparently fallen in love with, resounds comfortingly in my ear. Comfortingly, because it’s the only thing I’ve spontaneously heard in English so far.
In my next country, things are going to be different.
You affirm to yourself, each time, with that strong sanguine secret – that every new place is a potential creator of who you would like to be and what your life would become.
You love the weather there. You’ll definitely get healthier. Flowers bloom way brighter here and your new job will make you happy. It all feels new and full of hope. It feels, just like one of those supreme sky-bar-cocktail nights, that it’s going to last forever.
But it goes without saying that every new place is different. Cafes, gourmet groceries, new transport lines and mannerisms. You become different too, as an organism adapts to be accepted into its new environment and tribe.
But as soon as the new place becomes home, things suddenly aren’t so very different anymore.
Around the corner from mine is a quaint curation of salons, fragrant boulangeries, hidden gyms and it calmly ends with an idyllic fishing equipment store. Some worn and weathered, others nouveau and cosy. An outstanding cottage catches your attention, an intricately-bricked building with white trimmings on its turquoise wooden door, warm, with a surrounding hedge of cherry blossoms.
One day, in the middle of spring, not as warm and humid by Singaporean standards, but warm enough to unbutton my petticoat and loosen my scarf, I walked down the little rue with a tote over my shoulder, stuffed with my favourite foods – cheeses, salmon and vegetables, and long baguettes in my free arms. The light breeze felt like a promise, and on the spring tips of the cherry tree’s branches, I could foresee the juvenile green leaves and flower buds.
Everything changes, and yet everything stays as it ever was.
In that moment, I felt a strange elation. I don’t feel at home but rather, only a possibility that I might one day. The truth of being the same person in a new place takes precedence. The transport lines aren’t as neat and efficient as in Singapore, but if it could be I would love just the same. My native tongue has been altered numb. That exotic foreign language you’ve peacefully learnt on your weekend hammock sounds all alluring until you find yourself trapped in a serious, losing conversation on why your credit card doesn’t work there. Your lollipop of linguistic wonderland snaps into a dark forest of prickly thorns up your throat.
But the impending spring continues in its unfurled petite blossoms of hope. Juicy petals of white and the palest of pink, grow firmly on the otherwise barren dry branches – trifling, but tenacious.
And just so you know, Wi-Fi is pronounced “wee-fee” here.
Sometimes I wonder how and why
People like the sea and sky
Can be attached or even try.
Have you ever wondered if we are out of great ideas?
Name me an “ism” that still works.
Conservatism? Liberalism? Capitalism, whatever that’s left of it? Sure, maybe for billionaires. Syndicalism. Mercantilism?
We are living through some form of implosion. Not just of institutions – that much is clear – but a collapse of institutions detonated by an implosion.
Yesterday’s ideas on how to organize societies and economies simply don’t work anymore. We are out of great ideas about how societies, democracies, and economies should be organized and managed. The collapse of great ideas isn’t merely…an idea. It’s a reality.
Consider the twentieth century. The world created international law, international development, international trade, and international human rights. These were tremendous, astonishing human accomplishments. The kind that mankind might never have even dreamed of a few short centuries ago.
But what do we consider “big ideas” now?
Build the Billion Dollar Life of Your Dreams by Using the Skills You Need to Be Successful!!
People we want to be affluent, envied, famous and fabulous.
Build the Skills You Need to Be Successful at Everything You Ever Wanted to Do…Without Trying!!
Flawless, fortunate, polished. Effortlessly, easily, painlessly.
How I Used the Skills You Need to Be Successful at Everything Without Really Trying…to Sell My Amazing Doggy Dating App for a Billion Dollars!
We stalk and we hunt. We click and we double tap. We search and we memorise. Always looking. For the prey. The quarry. The prize. The secret.
To become tat perfect, triumphant person we worship, envy, revere, and adore. Because we know—we just know—they must have one, right, the secret?
We live in a medicated culture and the narcotic of this age isn’t television. It’s the mythology of the Big Idea.
The Shortcut. The Hack. The Formula. The Method. The Program. The ten point plan. The bullet pointed list. The five step ladder. The ABCs.
Please tell me. I need to know. What’s the secret? How else will I live the life of my dreams? You must know a secret I don’t.
The mythology of the Big Idea is just like every drug which, it’s not real. It stunts us to be mere pleading petitioners of fortune. It promises us satisfaction, relieving our pain. And this pain is real. It is the pain of anxiety; uncertainty; precarity; an alarm. The futures we once had are slipping through our fingers like smoke.
And like every drug, the mythology of a Big Idea is addictive. Once you start looking, you can never quite stop. We don’t just look for shortcuts in our careers. But in our love lives; in our personal lives; in our friendships; in our hobbies. Everything we do, everything we wish to be; we search obsessively for that quick fix.
We’re addicts to cult of shortcut. Like addicts, we don’t just enjoy the drug—we obey the addiction. We don’t enjoy the secrets, even when we do find them—for the time and energy we save is quickly consumed in…the ceaseless search for a bigger, faster shortcut.
What we think are Big Ideas aren’t Big Ideas. They are small ideas. Actually, they’re barely even ideas at all.
They are blueprints. They are procedures. They are prescriptions. For construction workers. For administrators. For junkies. That is why our lives so often feel reduced, shrunked, stunted; meaningless, hollow, aimless.
Those aren’t great ideas. They’re simply clever businesses, and for that we should applaud them. But we must recognise that you can’t Tinder your way to a better world. You can’t even Tinder your way to a life worth living.
All the great “isms” are winking out. Nations are fracturing. Social contracts are being torn apart. In most of the world’s richest nations, not one but two generations will be lost. The global economy is stagnating.
And already from that witches cauldron is rising the smoke. Of violence, animosity, extremism, hatred. Which will eventually, if the fire is left untended, kindle into a wildfire of war. However, this is not inevitable. Yet. But it is predictable. For a single, simple reason: We no longer have ideas powerful enough to organise the world. Yesterday’s “isms” are vanishing. In their place is left a vacuum.
But here’s the catch.
You.
You probably believe that something will fill a vacuum. You’ve been trained to be an obedient believer in progress; in advancement; in growth; in efficiency; in spontaneous order; in self-organization; in automaticity; in manifest destiny; and in all that is inevitability.
In other words, you’re ardent in the Big Idea: the idea of the progress of ideas.
Something always fills a vacuum, right? A bigger, better idea?
Wrong.
Sometimes, nothing does. For a very long time.
Sometimes, there is no progress of ideas.
Sometimes the darkness stays. And lasts. And deepens. Into an endless, frozen midnight. An abyss of collapsing ideas; from which mankind must escape.
We call those times Dark Ages; and we might just be stumbling headstrong into one.
I’m sorry you might have loved till it hurt. Within my little teeny life, I’ve discovered how relationships could almost re-fabricate majority of our perceived happiness. So I have for you this simple, unsolicited advice (but I also believe it applies to almost everything):
Stop trying to hold on to things.
Like sunrise and sunset, beautiful things will come around. They stay when they are meant to and leave when they aren’t anymore.
Your life will hold and contain what it can and whatever it should. Be as greedy and giving as you want. As loving, as angry, as funny, as hollow, as fulfilled, as broken, as optimistic and lost as makes you comfortable. As long as it feels like you’re in your own clothes and not something borrowed.
The people and things that you are drawn to might stay drawn to you until they don’t. That isn’t your problem or concern.
They’ll come and go. But while they are around for a visit, it will feel alright. It will be good, yet possibly terribly transient. It will be physics and love and everything in between. Enjoy every morsel of it, but never try to keep it. That’s just not how this universe works.
Then stop thinking about how you don’t get to hold on to people, and start thinking about how – because of this exigence – you don’t need to.
When oranges turn yellow,
and silk is red,
a woman’s gaze means ‘if’
Two trees make a forest.
Five tongues
make a language.
She’s the stars
in your night sky,
You realise,
as you pack your luggage.
ADELYN 陈慧清 