Up To Speed

My previous post paints quite an unhappy picture of life in the past months, but there were definitely good things. I think those genuinely good things were as vital to whatever turnaround I experienced as anything else. Because time is short (I’m booking in soon), I will fall back on the expedient of lists.

Events (Momentous or Marginal):

• Theory Grade 8 Exam (last Saturday).
• All the outfield activities for my current batch.
• Finishing the last page in my awesome black notebook!
• Finally having a clear idea of the colleges I will be applying to this year.

Good Things:

• Toffee nut lattes. (‘Tis the season.)
• Nasi Lemak at Changi Village.
• Music! Lots of Wilco, Metric, Jamiroquai…
• Shrimp and avocado sandwich on freshly baked brown bread! The bread is chewy, the shrimp is fresh, the vegetables are crisp, and there’s avocado!
• YG5, a group of great people I’ve really come to appreciate.
• Finding solitude on duty. I listened to the other COS playing the bagpipes in camp when no one else was around, explored the area on bike, and listened to Radio Lab in the night. Quite wonderful stuff, really.

I think you’ll agree, life’s been going on even if I wasn’t really paying attention.

Before I leave the house, I really should mention something that’s coming up in the next few Sundays, because it’s something I’m excited about. Christianity Revisited is something two of the small groups in my church are organizing for our friends. The blog is really useful reading if you want to know what we have in mind, but what I’m psyched about is that it’s going to be an environment where we’re going to try and assume as little as possible, and be as open to questions and discussion as we can. We have you, our friends, in mind when we were thinking about this, so we didn’t want it to be something uncomfortably ‘churchy’ or sneakily evangelical either. We are Christians, but I guess what we’re hoping for is the opportunity to share about the things we think about the world and listen to what you believe, because beliefs are kind of difficult to bring up sometimes. I hope you’ll consider.

Now, I’ll be putting into effect my change-parade- and everything-in-everything-out-honed skills. I have a boat to catch. Until next week.

To Start

In the past couple of months, I’ve mostly been either immured in work and recovering from it, or distracting myself with the gratifications of life in the city. (The ubiquity of LCD panels, the expense of being an agent of consumerism, the ease of navigating public transport and well-lit roads.) Looking back at the time gone by, I know I’ve set aside too little for quiet, because too much of it seems blurry and inconsequential. I’ve also been fiddling around with project ideas and thinking up plans and programs, but they’ve been idle ones, for the most part; I think this restless scheduling is just a symptom of the fear of spending my time inconsequentially, or of being inconsequential.

Those words didn’t come easily, and I was tempted to dismiss it as neurotic self-abasement, but I asked myself again and found that I knew it was true.

I’ve been letting things slip, basically; having to give a definition of myself under pressure, and with the apprehension of becoming other than I am, makes it easy to lose sight of whatever was authentic to begin with. I haven’t been handling stress very well at all. Too often, I’ve been opting to go along with whatever’s moving, which is all too easy to do where I work because things are always moving, and most people are busy keeping up or running hard in the opposite direction; it’s easy to just follow them, too. Everything’s been worse recently because I haven’t kept up the habit of making time (neither me-time nor slack time nor quiet time, depending on whose language I use). The fear of letting things drop and the fear of being less than up to the task makes it even easier to allow myself to be driven and to get caught up in everything. These fears were a lot less overt and a lot more subversive to my mind, of course, but now I see what was there.

So I asked God to forgive me for being willful and sluggish and fearful. I am praying for faithfulness and focus and humility. I am praying that as I contend with authority as well as the use of it, I will look to my first authority.

I think it was on Friday afternoon that I realized I really didn’t want to feel tired and driven anymore. On Friday afternoon I experienced what it was like to set the tempo again, and I realized I missed the feeling. Experiencing it in the course of work was also decidedly refreshing, after feeling kind of out of tune for a long while.