Soul-searching in my past.

I’ve been doing some soul-searching and reflecting the past week or so.

Perhaps its due to being in this ‘liminal period’ that I’m in…of being neither in NUS doing classes or in Hong Kong on exchange yet. All the friends I’ve wanted to meet (or said we would ‘meet up’) have not met with me (and the only person I’ve met for lunch is…I think Daryl).

Leaving on the 25^th January, which is barely two weeks away. And yet, the departure date seems so distant. A distant image…

I recollect of a memory…on a January morning like this, four years ago, when a small group of friends and my Dad sent me off at the airport. My destination? The UK.

The Place? Sandhurst.

Time preparing for a year-long stint in a land I had never been to, for weather I had never experienced before, and for a culture so different from my own. I had been through tough training during OCS...doing marches and ‘chiong-suas’ on end, with scarcely any rest till ENDEX. But that was in sunny weather, or humid nights, where the only concern was to apply more mosquito repellant and to “drink up” and replenish lost fluids.

In Wales, where temperatures due to wind chill dropped the ambient temperature from a low of 4 Deg Celcius to a lower low of -2 or thereabouts, and frost-nip began to get the better of you, mosquitoes were never a bugger.

The culture there was so strongly different from my own. Obviously, the chief issue I had to rectify was the tendency to speak ‘imperfect English’, or “Singlish” as us folks in Singapore would call it. I had to deal with not only speaking in ‘proper’ as opposed to colloquial Singaporean English, but also the unique nuances and colloqualisms that the Brits had. “How’s tricks?” came to be understood as a greeting similar to “How are you?”, and “Bob’s your uncle” was not to be taken literally, but rather that everything that had been planned had been executed smoothly.

Even as I was alone in the car, returning from school after a fruitful prayer session in the morning, the programme on the radio about expatriates settling into their new environment in Singapore caught my attention. The expatriates being interviewed compared their experiences to having lived in other countries on job assignment, before arriving at their new postings in Singapore. The consensus seemed to be that Singapore is so much more ‘conducive to living’ compared to other places in Asia (that I may not dispute). What struck me as most uncanny was the testimony of one lady who commented that relative to Hong Kong, Singapore is so much more ‘relaxed’! And yes…we all know where Your’s Truly is headed soon!

I’ve truly been trying to renounce my sins and short-comings of the past year…and start afresh.

Perhaps, God is telling me something? Its not coming through clearly, I’m still trying to decipher it out of the garbled mish-mash this world brings to my senses.

Perhaps, God has been speaking to me through the radio.