The Scents of Change

I spent a few years working in Singapore and those were among the happiest years of my life. I had a good job which allowed me to travel regularly across the Asia Pacific region and beyond. Singapore was a great place to live, even though I lived simply, in a rented HDB room with an Indian family.

I think my landlord loved me as a tenant because I was travelling half the time and barely bothered him. But whenever I was back in Singapore, I spent a lot of time reading in my room, surfing the Net on my then state-of-the-art ADSL connection. I didn't have a TV, so I watched Channel News Asia through the Internet--a great novelty at that time in the nineties.

I watched a lot of movies at cinemas across the city and spent time loitering at Borders and Kinokuniya book stores. I bought so many books and audio-books during those years. I took the bus to work and was perfectly happy doing so, listening to audiobook cassettes on my Walkman.

But when the opportunity arose to leave the city and base myself in Jakarta, I did not hesitate. I've always sought new experiences and working in a new city had always proved to be interesting. Prior to that, I had a 3-month stint in Menlo Park, California. Being in Silicon Valley during the height of the dotcom boom was quite exciting.  Even now the smell of Eucalyptus would remind me of those carefree days, driving along the 101 Highway and loitering around the suburbs of Palo Alto and Mountain View.

My days in Jakarta are well-documented in this blog as I started blogging during my second year there. Interesting though it was to live there, it was not an ideal place to live permanently for the pollution there was bad. 

I am reminiscing fondly about these foreign experiences of mine because they are such a contrast to the life that I'm living now in Malaysia. The pandemic has made me even more of a hermit. And the strange thing about it is that I do not seem to mind that much.

What has become of me? I guess we all change. Life itself changes. When we know that change is inherent in Nature, we don't cling on to things that much. We enjoy every experience as they come along and allow them to go as easily as they had come.  Every experience makes you a better person and one should express gratitude for it.

The smell of kretek will always remind me of Jakarta as Eucalyptus pines do of my time in the Bay Area of California. The pandemic has brought changes to every one's life. More changes will come for sure. For better or worse, let's embrace it. For change itself is the stuff of life.