Blame it on my active mind. Blame it on my need to be always ahead of everything. Blame it on my need to think about everything and for everyone. 

Since I was young, I have always had the desire to plan ahead in whatever I want to do or achieve. For minor things, I will tend to plan in my mind days ahead. For major events such as overseas travel, I will plan at least a month ahead. 

Family and friends commend me on this character trait but I do curse myself many a times for this constant need to plan and think about everything for as many people as around me as possible. Why can’t I be one of those who are more laissez-faire? Why can’t I just let my mind empty for just a few minutes and focus on nothing but myself?

Rita
11 June 2021

Hmm, ok. Imagine clouds of green crowning the skies, covering, encapsulating, hiding precious secrets.

Imagine green of every shade imaginable – jade, emerald, olive, avocado. Leaves of every size, shape, edge and texture you can think of, with veins that breathe life blood into the very heart and soul of the forest.

Now imagine, little stirrings, scampering, darting, fluttering things, cacophonously euphonious, anxiously blissful in their secret garden.

Can’t see it?

Ok, then imagine a babbling brook, snaking its way into your very being –filling you up till the water trickles out of your eyes and ears.

You look puzzled. Alright, how about this. Imagine my mind then – dark, dangerous – occupied with little thoughts that flit and fleet, crowd and crown.

You don’t know what I’m talking about.

It’s too bad. You live right there don’t you? The new apartments – Clementi Forest?

Guess you’ll never see it.

Lockdown, Circuit Breaker to prevent the spread
Heightened Alert is now the ongoing dread 

 What can we do since travelling is a restriction?  
Many say forest bathing can be the new addition

Some say Clementi Forest is a cool green maze 
Get there before we lose this green space

 Listen to the chirping of the birds that bring some cheer
With endless exchanges that seem raucous to one’s untrained ear  

Listen to the rhythmic sound of the stream  
Flowing relentlessly unlike one’s dream

 As I dwell longer with the birds in their nest  
Somehow the rhythm of my heart found some rest

Don’t dwell on the past or worry about the future 
Simply enjoy the sights and sounds which paint a beautiful picture  :)

 

The proverbs seemed to have impacted my siblings in very different ways. My brother was particularly irritated when my father said “He who plants the tree will water it.” He felt this was fatalistic and that my father was covering up his difficulty in making ends meet and the challenge of providing for 9 children by repeating this belief in a Provider. 

 

My sister remembered my father saying “Look at the crows. A crow who finds food will invite the whole village”. Looking back, she said, she realizes how my father would share what we had and how she used to be angry as a 10-year old that sometimes she would get less food because someone had ‘conveniently dropped in’ during mealtime. Then her voice softened and she said, “But, despite there being 9 of us, we were never hungry.” 

 

I remembered my father saying to me, “If you feed the children of the village, your children will grow on their own.” I remember thinking then that it wasn’t fair. Much later, as a teacher, I found that I had to make choices, between meeting the needs of my students and the needs of my own young children. It was very difficult to teach long hours and then return to find two young ones waiting for me. I just didn’t have enough in my tank to give. On some days, I would console myself with my father’s proverb – surely, if I looked  after my students, my children too would be looked after? 

 

But the proverb did not offer consolation for long. I became resentful, short tempered, sad. Why do I have  to choose between being there for my students or my children? How can my tank be filled?

 

It was nature that gave me that respite and helped me fill my tank. In one of the PD workshops, the trainer talked to us about the need for buffer time – a time to take off the professional self, to re-connect with my self and to prepare for the ‘mother’ self. He  said that it was compulsory for the employees of Disneyland, “the happiest place on earth”, to sit in a ‘decompression chamber’ before they boarded the staff transport that would take them home to their families as having to put on happy faces the whole day was tiring too. That little anecdote was one thing I would credit to helping me keep my sanity! I used to live opposite Guilin then and one day, I got off  the bus one stop earlier and just sat for 15 minutes at Guilin before going home. I did nothing. I just sat, looked at the water, the leaves, the rocks, the sky. I did it again the next day, and the next. And those 15 minutes with nature were my moments of peace, my re-centring. Those 15 minutes were my gift of self love to myself. He who plants the tree does indeed water it.