A Life Less Beautiful

It's official - weeks surviving in an empty house without music: 0.714. Or, put more simply, 5 days out of a week of 7. After a week of tapping my feet and twiddling my thumbs in silence (not having a sound system and craving the iPod), I've finally given in and… put a cd into the office laptop, turned music up to loud and hit play.

The life has filled the air.

The CD which has the dubious honour of being the first to be played is a CD that I've been looking for in a very, very long time - the very best of Cesaria Evora. I'm not sure if I can honestly say this woman is little known - she's very good and very famous in the right circles, but I've not been able to find her CDs anywhere in Singapore. I've finally picked it up in the International section in a funky, alternative music store in Virginia.

And this is indeed, the very best.

I've first heard of Evora in 1997, but had trouble finding more than one or two of her songs. The ones that I have heard were indeed very good, and (happy me!) featured in this very best of album. But it's astounding, you seldom find a CD where every single song is good and yet, here it is.

I've also had the happy joy of listening to her live (pure heaven!) while in Berkeley - a place that I can honestly say I've fulfilled nearly a lifetime's worth of starry night dreams - a Terry Pratchett book signing, a Neil Gaiman reading + book signing, a Radiohead and Cesaria Evora concert (yes, very different I know), plenty of salsa dancing, club hopping, cocktail drinking, snazzy interview-going and happy memories of good friends I can sing with.

There is honestly only the dream of going to a Tori Amos concert left to fulfil then I can die happy.

While drunk on the intoxication of this music, let me digress back to what I'd initially wanted to say about this subject. Ah yes, A Life Less Beautiful.

You know, you got me thinking about the stuff that surrounds me. About the things I'm living for, about the things I value, and about the things I spend my time and energy on. As any wandering, wondering intellectual would already know, they aren't always the same thing.

To tell the truth, things haven't always been easy here. And expectedly so. I'm living in a country with an incredibly backward public sector, a bureaucratic service sector, a health care system in the Dark Ages (thank god for the weather I'm falling sick much less often), and frequently famously frosty citizens. This is not Singapore, and the difference is stark. There isn't the 24 hour roti prata store, late night teh tariks and kopi tiams where you can take away food. In many ways, this almost seems the life less beautiful, less perfect, far less convenience.

But what you said made me wonder - do I really value convenience that much? Sure, I curse and swear when BT makes me wait nearly 3 hours on the phone to get a phone line (and to think I'm paying them money for crying out loud!) but after all's said and done, I have a house that I love (yes the house is beautiful - I've actually started a "House Book", journal of things to do around the house), to my surprise, I find that I have an unknown (to myself and to others) talent for my work, and frequently get asked for advice as a guru, I have food that needs cooking but with ingredients that won't kill me. The weather has dropped to a min of -3 degrees celcius at nights, but its dry enough for my sensitive sinuses not to lose too much mucus about it. Interestingly enough too, I'm also making friends (albeit being in early stages of conversation).

After all that, with Cesaria Evora playing in the background, dancing slow salsa in an empty house on a dark wood floor - what's there about life right now that is not beautiful? I only wish you were here.

Last Saturday, in a conversation with an old university friend and his girlfriend, the topic came up about Singaporeans and how they always complain wherever they go. There is, says the girl, a chronic dissatisfaction with the way things are that exists in the heart of all Singaporeans. They find fault and pick on things, however perfect they may be, they are restless, wandering souls at heart. Perhaps it is the migrant in us all that came from our fathers and our forefathers, who had left their homelands precisely because of that same dissatisfaction, that same restless spirit that drives people away from where comfortable hearths rest. Would it be truly fair to ask the question of Singaporeans whether we are "stayers" or "quitters" when we come from generations upon generations of "quitters"? If anything, this dissatisfaction with life is not merely inherent to our nation, it is our birthright.

I wondered about myself. You clearly didn't seem to be dissatisfied with anything. In fact, if anything, you had such a spirit, such joie de vivre in the way things were that I picked up some of it, and looked upon the selfsame nation I grew up in with a childlike and foreign eye. You made me love something I perhaps wouldn't come to love on my own. Was I truly restless, dissatisfied, needing to uproot myself and settle somewhere in a greener pasture? Was this an anywhere-but-here idea?

The truth is, I can't think of a good reason why I'd like to come here to live, except for the fact that it is something new, something like a long held dream (weather aside - some cynical days I think that an excuse, I could have gone to Australia). It is the envy of everyone back home, but what is there to envy? In the end, all I am doing is risking everything, in search of nothing in particular.

There is a story about a girl from a small town in Brazil, whose dreams and heart were too big for her little town. She wanted to travel and go to Europe, make a lot of money, have plenty of exotic experiences, and return a homecoming queen to buy a farm, marry a man she loved, have many kids and live happily every after. She ended up a prostitute, selling her life and soul for money which cannot buy back the hours she had lost. She was searching for love, and ended up with sex. Yet it is a love story. (Read Eleven Minutes.)

I believe that everyone searches for something. In all my previous experiences, I've never stopped feeling like I've stopped searching for something, and found something. I don't know what this is that I am looking for, but I've always never stopped moving, never stopped searching for this thing, risking everything and potentially gaining nothing. There have been plenty of theories on what we may possibly be looking for, peace, God, ourselves, true love, the mysterious other half that completes us utterly.

I truly do not know what it is that I am looking for. But I do know that for a very brief year of my life, the last year in fact, I have felt, for the very first time, like I've stopped searching for something. There were only three occasions I remember, all less than the span of a day each, where I had felt as though this mysterious search, this inexplicable dissatisfaction was back, knocking on my door, begging me to keep going, telling me that my search wasn't over. Three days.

I must apologize to you that it is inertia that brought me here, not momentum. I had stopped moving, yet this was the final move, as though the forces that had been set in motion before I stopped were jerking me back into the past, to the journey I had found myself travelling before, even though now I have stopped. It feels to me as though the pendulum, once set in motion, is now swinging backwards. From now on, all my travels will be to take me back to what I had lost, not what I had failed to find. And I do know, I do know the difference - I'm no longer searching for something, I'm waiting now. What is infinite (a search) is now finite (a wait). And I know it's just a matter of time, standing still where I am, before you will find your way here again.