A Day at the Beach

“Life's a great big canvas, and you should throw all the paint you can on it.” - Danny Kaye.

This thought ran through my head as I watched the three little kids play with the sand. They were surrounded by beach toys. Spades, pails and old jam jars. It was a wonderful day.

I looked up and saw the people around me. Lots of families here today as it was the Easter Day holiday.

One group was flying a kite, or attempting to fly a kite. The darned thing just refused to take off. Another was preparing food. But most of them were just laying around, chit chatting, or doing nothing whatsoever.

My sister and brother in law had set up a huge tent in the middle of the grass patch. We were not planning to camp overnight here. No sir! We love our beds too much! It was just for the kids to run in and out, and pretend they were camping.

In front of the tent, we spread three big mats, and loaded it with lots of food. My mum cooked fried noodles, my hubby bought delicious chicken wings, satay and rojak from the nearby hawker centre, and I made salad.

My sister was the best. She found this instant bbq pit from Giants, an A3 size box filled with charcoal and a wire-mesh to put on top of the box. She then bought some hot dogs, shitake mushroom and fishballs, and we had a mini-bbq by the beach.

It was picnic Singapore-style!

The day was turning into night really fast. There was no big orange sun in front of us. But who cares? We were too busy devouring the food in front of us.

Sometimes, life really is perfect. We just have to pause and appreciate the little things in life.

Crossroads

We are at crossroads of our life all the time. We have the power to change our path. As such, any point in your life is a crossroad.

That said, sometimes the crossroads are prompted by life changes. Take for example, the birth of a child. It might prompt you to think. Do I want to be a full-time mum, a career woman or something in between? Death is another great bearer of change.

I have a colleague who is at her crossroads. She has chosen to apply for a one-year sabbatical leave. What is she going to do during the sabbatical? I am not so close to her that she will choose to divulge it to me. When I ask her this question, she just tells me that she will be going on long vacations to exotic countries, and will also spend time tinkering on some ideas that she has. It’s all very vague to me.

Nevertheless, I wish her the best of luck.

It is always exciting to witness people at the cusp of changing directions. First, there will be this great inertia. Then comes the voices in the head. Either you just get lost in this phase and gradually learn to shut those voices out, or you come out of the voices with a resolution to change. If you do come out of the fog with a conviction that change is needed, then I think we should give the person the courage to forge ahead.

Success can be defined any number of ways.  Why is there a need to define success the conventional way? Let success be whatever your “version” of it is. Have courage, take heart, seize the day.

When Death Comes - A Poem by Mary Oliver

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps his purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox;

when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,

I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering;
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?

And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,

and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,

and each name a comfortable music in the mouth
tending as all music does, toward silence,

and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.

When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was a bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

- Mary Oliver

Beautiful Mornings

I really have my kids to thank you for this.

I used to sleep at around 11 pm or 12 am every night. In the morning, I will wake up tired and grouchy. When I commute to work, I will be in half-sleep mode.

However, after I had kids, I started sleeping earlier and earlier. At the start of it, it was because my daughter could not seem to sleep without me. During the half an hour or more that it takes her to sleep, I would fight to stay awake in the dimly-lit room. My eye lids would droop, and the next thing I knew, it was 2 am in the morning. I had fallen asleep sitting up by her bedside.

As the saying goes, if you cannot fight them, join them.

Against all the parenting advice that you should sleep train your kids, I started sleeping in with them.

So I would sleep at 10.30 pm every night (yup, I also lost in the battle to get them to sleep earlier…). And I will try my best to wake up at 5.30 am every morning. A full 7 hours of sleep.

Now, I really love the mornings.

There is a sweetness in the mornings that cannot be described. The air feels cool. The house is quiet. You can hear the sound of water trickling down pipes.

I feel at peace and in a contemplative mood.

I can do all the things I love to do in the morning. Go jogging. Surf the net. Write some nonsense. Read the newspapers. A full hour to do the things I love.

And it means all the world to me.

Learning, Learning, Learning!

I am so proud of my parents. They just learnt how to use Whatsapp. 

My father is 78 years old now. My mother is 65. And they are still learning about the new digital technology.

In part, this is due to necessity, as my brother and his family is now based in the United States. To keep in touch with them, my parents started to learn Skype. Then, to see the photos that they posted online, they started using Google+. Now, my family has started a whatsapp group to keep in touch. So, they keep up with the online gossip, they started learning whatsapp too.

It feels a bit strange to chat with my parents over Whatsapp. Usually, this is a medium reserved for the younger (albeit not so young as well) generation.

I wonder what my world will look like when I am 70 years old. 70 years ago, there was no computers, no internet, and no social media. These are the things that we take for granted nowadays. However, for them, it is as alien as using bitcoin to buy things online. 

I will take a snapshot of their first whatsapp as remembrance of this moment, and to remind myself to keep learning and evolving, even when I am 80 or 90 years old!

Unsung Heroes

Really love this youtube video!

I have seen it before, and yet after watching it again, it still made me teary-eyed.

What hit home was the narration,

"What he does receive are emotions.

He witnesses happiness;

reaches a deeper understanding;

feels the love.

He receives what money can't buy,

a world made more beautiful."

Legoland

I had a wonderful time at Legoland recently. “Super fun!” would be how my little boy will say it.

It was the first trip with my husband’s family. For the first trip, we chose a very safe one. Just a simple drive out to the Legoland theme park less than an hour’s ride from Singapore.

We drove three cars out. There’s something great about just driving out to go somewhere. It is a mini road trip! We navigate the unfamiliar roads. There is a little (albeit small) degree of uncertainty and risk. And at the end of the drive, you arrive at your destination.

I have been to Legoland before. But somehow this time it was really fun.

Perhaps because most of us have been there before, so we knew which were the fun rides, and which were the duds. We zoomed in on the fun ones, and had a whale of a good time.

And it was not just the kiddos that had fun. The adults had a great time too at the game stalls.

Why don’t they have game stalls in Disneyland and the other theme parks? It is a fantastic money-maker. The stall master creates a game that looks simple but is deceptively difficult. You think it is a “sure win”. So you hand over a little money to the game master.

The first try you did not get a prize. The game master deliberately coaxes you to try a second time. You hand over just a little bit more.

At the end of it, you had actually parted a tidy sum of money.

Well, the saving grace is that we really did win a lot of super-huge, super-cute soft toys. The kids were happy. The adults were happy (because we won!). And we try not to think of the money we spent.