I felt a little alone today

I felt a little alone today. 

Maybe it's because I am dining alone, yet again! Unlike the dinner (all by myself) in Sheraton Melbourne on the 18th last month or my lunch (also all by myself) in Seoul Hilton 18 years ago, I felt out of sorts when waiting for my steak despite being in a homely, well attended steakhouse in Ho Chi Minh City.

On all three occasions, I was there for a public sector leadership matter. But today, it just felt like the cogs are not turning properly. 

Maybe it's this feature I read the other day that stated that recent survey showed that those in their 50s are at the most unhappy period in their lives :-(. I sure hope not! 

Maybe it's got to do with the anxieties of the role transitions where there remains much unfinished business.

Maybe it's got a bit to do with the country. It's just not quite there despite its efforts. This is a proud nation, with a people capable of extreme hardship. A legendary tale (relayed to me by Singapore's Perm Sec of Defence more than 20 years ago) about how the local troops defeated the French by dismantling and carrying parts of tanks up the Dien Bien Phu mountains where these were subsequently reassembled and thats how they overcame the last of the enemies holding up there. The world also know that they defeated the Americans who fled the country in dramatic style in 1975. 

The country then got stuck in time (no thanks to the 'sour grapes' US embargo imposed thereafter). Now, more than 40 years later, I wonder if these diehard attitudes are still present. We only need to walk around the city to be reassured that many of its old habits are still there. People (men and women, young and old) are still sitting on road pavements in low chairs in their pajamas with their legs crossed, eating, drinking, chatting, whiling away their time.

It's in their DNA, part of their culture. The perceptive LKY had held this view dearly to his dotage. I understand why. These habits took centuries, even millennia to form. They don't get changed easily. Which then suggests economic development and transformation of a nation, which necessarily rely on the human capital stock available, is proscribed by its culture from the start. 

The only way to accelerate this is immigration (but that comes with all sorts of national social cohesion costs).

Immigrants are by virtue more resilient. Not because they are smarter but because they knew no one else would provide for them and all they had were what their mind and hands could produce. I was sharing the story of the Hakkas to M in our usual weekend rides together. I likened the Hakkas of Asia to the Ashkenazi Jews of Europe, a perspective I had written about in an earlier entry in this blog. She absorbed it as she always does. I was trying to instill in her the spirit of her ancestors. 

Centuries of persection have caused these migrant people to develop a real steely core, able to withstand any hardship. With that in mind, I should not mind my lonely state. That said, I couldn't help it. It was in this city that D & I first lived together. Although the city has developed economically with it's gleaming new infrastructure and narrow streets choked full of cars and motorcycles, the people and their habits remain... Which reminded me of our time here more than 20 years ago. 

I too should live up to the strength and spirit of my ancestors. As I said in my thank you video to my staff, there is only one ingredient for success: ourselves; and when prepared in a recipe that constitutes vision, passion and courage, the result is inevitably the best version of ourselves.

With that thought in mind, I passed this night in Vietnam alone but not lonely: that I am on a journey of continuous learning, improvement and always comforted by the knowledge of the care of loved ones,

Lightness of being single, or not

When I first read him, I couldn't put the book down. He writes like no other. Milan Kundera wrote about the highs and lows of the single life in The Unbearable Lightness of Being. There was nothing light about it. The setting is a war torn Czechoslovakia (a country that no longer exists), for instance. When they made it into a movie, a very difficult adaptation given the weighty nature of the writing, Philip Kaufman had no less than Daniel Day-Lewis and Juliette Binoche to star. Only they had the courage to bring to life words like these: “Anyone whose goal is 'something higher' must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.” 

Photo credit: :fineartamerica.com

Fast forward 28 years (from the movie) or 32 years (from the book), I watched a random movie on board today. It's been a hectic week so I wanted to use the moment to unwind and picked a light movie. Even the title was simple: How To Be Single, a 'chick flick' starring Rebel Wilson and Dakota Johnson about four women and their differing attitudes to surviving the single life in New York complete with Central Park, indie music, lofts, fire escape balconies and of course sex and the city. 

The former is not a comedy. The second is supposed to be. In fact, for most part of the show, it succeeded. I laughed a few times. But it ends like all things built around casual relationships do: badly.

This year is my parents' 50th wedding anniversary. Though they disagree daily, theirs is a love that has stood the tests of time, and time did test them. And that's when it means the most. A fact substantiated by no less than father time. In 2014, we celebrated with both sets of parents the significance of all our respective relationships in a once-in-a-lifetime vacation for them. May their love truly last their lifetimes.

But back to the Single movie.  It started with "the thing about being single is you should cherish it", then tumbled into "you've never really cared about anyone enough to get hurt", descended into "I want to be alone. I know I've said that before but for the first time in my life, I truly mean it". It then rose with "I can totally handle all of this by myself ... But I don't want to"

It concluded with ..."the thing about being single is you get to be good at being alone but do we really want to be, so much so that you missed out at being with somebody great"

And that's the sum: being single is good. Double is better!

Like father, like son

There is a beautiful saying about Dad: a daughter's first love, a son's first hero.

Jackie Chan once said that his son decided not to go into martial arts because he didn't want to be like Brandon Lee who followed in his dad's Bruce's footsteps and was constantly told he was not as good.

The father-daughter relationship (from the father's perspective) is a simpler one. She loves you. You love her. You'd do anything to keep her safe. 

The hero complex between father and son is a tad more complicated. Because heroes do no wrong. Don't get hurt. Nor sick. Nor old. Real life heroes cannot live up to their own legends. National patriots, corporate captains, scientific geniuses and artistic talents all have moments they wish didn't happen. A philandering moment here, an abuse there. 

So how does a boy grow up with someone whom he regards as a hero and as the days pass, the hero becomes simply less so. Not because the heroic feats have ceased, but because the boy know sees more, the good bits and the blemishes. It's inevitable. I count myself lucky in this instance though. Mind you, not by choice but by circumstance. Because I have to travel most weekdays (averaging 180 flights a year), the number of days my boy and I have with each other are more limited. So less chance of him seeing my imperfections. On weekends we engage with each other without being burdened by each other's baggage (which of course due to the absence neither have observed of the other).

All that enabled me to guide, maybe even inspire him, in some ways. Scouting is an obvious one. I was a troop leader. He was too, and a President Scout to boot! I got offered a scholarship and he got a prestigious one, and we both got it from the same Public Service Commission of Singapore.

He's now a man. He's already living away from home, for 4 months now. In fact I am now more often home than he is. As a man, he is now building his own life. And he has already taken a first step into that and significantly away from the path I trod. I do think he's prepared to dream big and take one step back to go two steps forward in order to realize his dream. His dreams, though, are different from mine. I guess this analysis, courtesy of ScienceAlert, provides the empirical evidence of just how far a step he has chosen. I am in management. He has chosen the military life to start with. I wish him all the best.

Digital Native, or maybe not

She is 16,

She is more than a millennial. She's born literally at the start of a new millennium. The generation that are more comfortable with devices than with people. That interact through social media than with each other.

M shocked her mum and me last night when she says she's turned off Instagram in order to focus on her mid terms. We always knew she had this steely determination in her. That this would spill into her digital milieu was something we never imagined.

That's our daughter for you. She was christened DDPP. It used to stand for Darling Daughter Pretty Princess. She's still all that in my heart but now she's more. She's Determined Disciplined Passionate Pursuer of her goals. And far she would go.