It’s 539pm, June 5th 2020. I just had a cold Subway sandwich from the fridge for lunch. I’m listening to In The Crossfire by Starsailor. I woke up pretty late, and was goofing off on Twitter for a bit, as I often do. And then it hit me that I only have about 6 hours left in my 20s. What’s the last thing I want to do with my 20s? I want to write.
It’s an interesting thought, and I think it comes from a relatively new-ish sensitivity to a sense of occasion. I’m borrowing the phrase from David Ogilvy, who described how, when he worked as a chef in Paris, the head chef would give everyone a great sense of occasion, and how it was great for morale. It strikes me as a skill that I’ve never cultivated much, and it’s one that I’d really like to cultivate mindfully in my 30s.
I was never really big on holidays as a kid. My family celebrated birthdays with small parties, we didn’t really do anything elaborate. We celebrated Deepavali once a year, where we would have visitors from our extended family, and we would go visiting as well, buy some new clothes and so on. But that was about it. I live in Singapore, where we don’t have seasons – I’ve never known what it’s like to experience the changes from winter to spring and summer and autumn. Singapore is basically hot all year around. My parents ran their own business – industrial waste disposal – and they never really “switched off”. There were “office phones” throughout the house – in the home office, the living room, their bedroom. Sometimes they would have work at night. They didn’t really take vacation days. We did take some trips here and there – a couple of cruise ship outings as a family, and we visited my grandparents in India a few times. Drove up to Malaysia once or twice. But all in all, looking back, I think life always seemed kind of relentless. When there were school holidays, I’d typically spend them reading books and playing video games. I’m not complaining, I think my life was pretty good. But on retrospect, there was very little sense of occasion.
But of course, life will present you with occasions even if you don’t specifically set out to make them. I’m trying to think now of some of my most memorable moments, off the top of my head. My first kiss with my girlfriend (now wife). Several of my band’s more memorable gigs. Every instance of travel, which I regret not making more of a priority in my life – it hits extra hard right now in June 2020, when it’s not clear when we’ll be able to get on a flight again. I was planning to take my wife to New York last month – we’d been vaguely planning a trip for years, and we finally got the dates down this year, and were looking forward to it for months. And then Covid happened. That’s life, I guess. Lots of people are going through much worse; we’re relatively lucky. I wouldn’t gripe and complain about it in public spaces, but this is my own site and I think it’s right that I face the fact that I’m pretty disappointed.
So… what now? What’s next? One major event that I was looking forward to, didn’t happen and probably won’t happen for some time. I can be sad about it for a while, but in the long run the right move is to figure out other ways to live into a meaningful narrative. I made a video in April titled “rerouting: finding another way when your original plan is ruined”. Some bits from my timestamp notes: you can’t play the cards you wish you were dealt, it’s important to be specific about the things that you’re looking forward to, and you can unlock new energy be reimagining your frames – even if you’re forced to use smaller frames, you can find ways to make those smaller frames more interesting.
I think it’s a compelling and promising idea – that even if my world is made smaller by something like a global pandemic, I can find interestingness within that smaller world. A photography project where you take photos of things in your house can be just as interesting, maybe even more interesting than photos from a trip to somewhere else. Of course, any substantial trip comes with an inherent sense of occasion, and creating a sense of occasion “by yourself” is something that requires more effort, more thoughtfulness.
Just before the lockdown in Singapore kicked in, I took my wife out for a nice dinner to celebrate the sales of my ebook. I’m really proud of myself for doing it – it didn’t come easy for me. It’s just… not something I have experience doing! My dad in particular I think was very averse to any sort of posh environment. He never liked dressing up, never liked going anywhere he couldn’t smoke, and would generally be grumpy and annoyed by most things that were outside his comfort zone. And I think that’s something that shapes and influences you in imperceptible ways. It’s not even something like “my dad didn’t like going out so I got that from him”. It’s more like, well we never went anywhere new or different, we lived this small and predictable life, and the idea of doing something different was not just uncomfortable but almost unthinkable. You can’t try something you can’t imagine, and it’s hard to imagine something that you’ve never done or seen.
I think my colleagues at work helped to change my perspective on this quite a bit. We would have “friday events”. In the early days, when the team was smaller, we’d often go to new and interesting places for lunch – places that were definitely posher than I was familiar or comfortable with. And I enjoyed myself, and found myself wanting to do more things, try more things. It still took a while for me to learn to adapt and integrate that into my every day life.
But I’m doing it now. I’m spending the last 6 hours of my 20s writing, because that’s how I’d like to commemorate my “dying” hours. I don’t entirely agree with the strong version of “how you do something is how you do everything” – but I think it’s true that attentiveness and/or sloppiness in one sphere can bleed into another. And I think living life with a sense of occasion is a great way to treat life as something precious, something meaningful, something sacred.