The Natural Rhythm of Human Affairs

I took the MH723 flight which departed KLIA for Jakarta at around 4.30pm today. The flight takes 2 hours but I gain an hour, arriving at Jakarta 5.30pm local time.

While commencing descend to the Soekarno-Hatta Airport, I smiled when the pilot announced in Malay that we will be landing in Jakarta at "lima setengah". You will never hear an Indonesian referring to 5.30 as "lima setengah"--they would normally say "setengah enam" (half-an-hour to six). These are some of the subtle differences between Malay and Indonesian that makes the language such a fascination to me.

Once I was one hour late for an appointment with a friend because she specified "setengah tiga" and I said "OK, tiga setengah", thinking that they mean the same thing.

But like Malaysians, Indonesians are also not known for their punctuality. Perhaps they are worse. They call their flexible attitude towards time as jam karet or "rubber time". The strange thing is that when it comes to specifying time, Indonesians use the military-style 24-hour format--17.30 instead of 5.30pm. I found out that this is what they teach in schools--everyone from the maid to the CEO, would immediately know for instance 22.10 is actually ten minutes past ten at night.

Like Malaysians, Indonesians always blame the traffic whenever they are late for an appointment. I have learnt to treat appointments with customers as not 100% certainties, especially when dealing with government agencies. Sometimes you could end up waiting for half-a-day without the customer showing up.

Javanese are well-known for their habit of not expressing things directly and tends to avoid confrontations. They will never say no directly to you. Sometimes they'll just miss an appointment because they do not have any information to convey to you. They'll say, the decision has been postponed to next month. Or they have to wait for their superiors to come back from their overseas trip before deciding what to do.

Things move at a very slow pace as a result. Though I am a very disciplined person when it comes to punctuality and keeping things on schedule, I also believe that sometimes it is not wise to force things ahead. Things will happen in time. The Javanese say alon-alon asal kelakon (slowly but surely).

I believe we cannot determine things, especially time, to too fine a granularity. For instance, a 90 minute soccer match is made up of two 45 minute halves. The team can decide to play defensively for the first half and try to score through counter-attacks; but they can never say that they will defend for the first 10 minutes and then attack for the subsequent five minutes before retreating back to defence for the next 5 minutes and so on--the course of the game to a large extent is determine by the action and reactions of the 22 players on the field. They determine the rhythm and the pace of the game.

Similarly, there are such rhythms in our daily interractions with people. Some things takes time to reach fullness. Like tuning forks, everything has a natural frequency. The ebb and flow of human affairs has natural frequencies too. Going faster or slower than this natural frequency causes discord and tension. To swim without sinking within the tides of human affairs, one has to be sensitive to its rhythms. Then only can one be in total harmony with nature.

I try not to get irritated when people are late or when things do not go on schedule. We could be hurrying things beyond their natural rhythms. We can try to drive the rhythm when it is slackening. But one has to be very careful. Only the right push at the right time will get the pendulum swinging perpetually.