wanderingintofocus

Stories (of Your Life and Others) As a person, your biggest problem is usually other people. You are vulnerable to people, and also dependent on them. But imagine instead that you were a freshwater sardine, or rainforest. Your biggest problem is still people. You are still vulnerable to people, and dependent on them. I think one of the biggest problems that we face as human beings is that we are stuck within ourselves. I will never know what it’s like to experience things in the way that they mean to you. I can only see you through the context of myself. Stories, in that way, can serve as paths to empathy. It is only through stories that I can piece together and imagine the richness of your life, in the same way that I hope you may be able to glimpse mine.  The school offers a graded module on storytelling. I’m mildly vexed at its credit-bearing structure, as it makes academic a personal pursuit that’s meant as a respite from that. But what it has also done is to make me more conce...

ORTO [2022] This is ORTO. I'd describe it as a kampungesque rejuvenation extrovert meditation wellness retreat spirit kind of place— plus prawning, tortoises, and bars that operate 5pm-3am. It so happens that I'm here today for none of those things, but a youth facilitators training event. In the URA Master Plan 2019, the Urban Redevelopment Authority has plans to redevelop this land to build HDB public housing flats next year. I'd wanted to visit this place at an indeterminate time before that as well, so today is a pleasant coincidence. Walking the ground, I can't really identify the target demographic of this place. Perhaps "grandparents generation brought kids here so now that those kids are middle aged they feel a community nostalgia", and those people who used to fish by the canals until our national water agency PUB barred the practice. ORTO seems to be predominantly shared between the privatised paid recreation part, and a new-age-through-yesterday...

The PSC Scholarship Scores of tourists throng the streets about this urban cafe in the heart of Tiong Bahru. Seated across from me is a colleague from one of the year-long projects that we have just completed. Two ice-cream waffles separate us on marble-esque plates. There was finally some time to sit down and catch up. As I recall it there wasn’t a missing beat in our conversation. She led mostly about our personal lives, dreams, intentions and plans. We chatted for a bit over the 90 minutes that we had between schedules. I had always known intellectually that we live very different lives, but I did not imagine the great extent to which this is true. She shares of adventurous climes in overseas travels (and missing our local food while abroad), studying a fourth language, exploring a part-time job, applying for internship, writing original songs, taking guitar lessons, chairing a student conference, and training for badminton up to four times a week at the community club. Some people ...

The 10-point Rating System In The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green, Green writes his thoughts on the format of the review: “Booklist reviews were limited to 175 words, which meant each sentence must work multiple jobs. Every review had to introduce a book while also analysing it. Your compliments needed to live right alongside your concerns”.  In many ways, this is what I attempt to do here– except that we get a slightly more generous 2200 characters on Instagram, which converts to about 400 words. Recently, in my capacity as a resource panel member, I’d had the opportunity to review and user-test some new toolkits on designing ground-up projects for public health. After about an hour of giving our opinions on the various aspects, we were asked to offer a rating out of 10. The 10-point rating scale doesn’t exist for humans; it exists for data aggregation systems. Everyone's experience is different and thus fundamentally incommensurable. But it is almost impossible to quantify ex...

Previously as part of year-end reflections 2022, I wrote that the biggest lesson that I've taken away from the past year is in understanding the importance of building the capacity to unapologetically lean into a sense of entitlement to be yourself , for you are the best at being you, but also that you can always be better .  Some readers have told me that this is a very convoluted sentence, but fielding alternatives I find leave out much nuance that I wish to convey, beyond "just be yourself"— which only represents one part of the realisation; This paragraph-long sentence seeks to communicate the recognition that it is essential to learn how to develop the confidence in your identity and appreciation for your idiosyncrasies, amid criticism by those who may seek to undermine your value— but to be mindful in withholding the arrogance that you must be right, for "best" is only so when measured against a criteria, thus to remain radically open-minded in consider...

In most common discourse on societal issues, the discussion of minorities typically refers to the ethnic, religious, or linguistic group that makes up less than half of the population of a country.  However, this piece is scoped beyond that context, and refers to any sub-group of people with preferences, traits, or characteristics that are different from that which is embodied by the majority of the people in the considered set. minority /mʌɪˈnɒrɪti,mɪˈnɒrɪti/ noun     1.     the smaller number or part, especially a number or part representing less than half of the whole.     "only a minority of properties are rented" The principle that underlies the mechanism of the majority (half) and supermajority (two-thirds) votes, is that utility is maximised by catering to the most number of people. However, I hesitate to concur that this represents the most desirable or optimal outcome for any society, group, or decision-making scenario, thus engendering the co...

The concept of the Adjacent Possible has changed my personal outlook. Today, I seek to share this mental model, and further expand the lexicon with some personal derivations. In book Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson describes: "Think of it as a house that magically expands with each door you open. You begin in a room with four doors, each leading to a new room that you haven’t visited yet. Those four rooms are the adjacent possible.[...]Keep opening new doors and eventually you’ll have built a palace." Although he applies this concept to the natural history of innovation, I think it's also useful for modeling our understanding of time and identity: Anything is possible. But not everything is possible at this point in time. The things that are immediately possible now, are your Adjacent Possibilities. This should be the focus of your immediate efforts. Time moves only forward. This means that the possibilities of the past are removed from you, akin to doors shutt...

"The thing that scared her most was not hiding in a cupboard, or under the bed, or floating in the corners of the room like a ghost. The thing that scared her most was inside her head, pressing its thumbs against the backs of her eyeballs and whispering from the insides of her ears:  "You have been chosen, not for one unhappiness, but hundreds, and I will make you yell at your mother, and hit your friends, and bite and scrape and burn your own skin,  I will make the days long and the nights even worse, and you will hide in your bed, under the blankets, and in the dark, away from the lights and the crowds and the noise, until the day you decide that things would be easier if you never woke up at all." - The Almighty Sometimes, by Kendall Feaver _ I remember a not-so-tactful exchange with a colleague before, something along the lines of the necessity to complete a course. They claim that to have the mental resilience to see through the programme, we cannot consider quittin...