Thinker Beware

I had a bizarre moment today when I couldn't remember if I'm 24 or 25. I forced myself to pick a number without thinking about dates, so I am still not 100% sure. I think it's 24. For weeks now I've been telling people I'm 25.

There is some profound significance to this, surely. Is it just ageing? I always thought I'd grow more sensitive to my age, though, you know?

In any case, the age thing started me on an introspective turn. One thing I've always been aware of is how quickly time passes. I used to have very adult thoughts about moments fleeting by and sands pouring away through fingers etc. when I was ten years old. At thirteen I started keeping a diary for a strange reason: to be able to remember what it was like to be thirteen, fourteen, fifteen - "when I'm twenty or something". (The diary plan fell through when my parents got hold of it. I was seventeen, and my parents were like the CIA stumbling into a room holding Osama bin Laden and Kim Jong Il. Major fireworks.)

But see, even as a kid I realised that even though I felt the same as last year, I wasn't really. Memory is a deceptive little thing that whitewashes a lot, and tries to convince us that we were always as wise as we are now, of course we always knew this or that, we'd never do anything that stupid for those motives. My diary was a way of setting my own record straight.

After the diary plan blew up I try to remember. It's not easy. It's been two years since my move to USA, and I've just about convinced myself that life in Singapore was one long, buoyant party of thrills. I've forgotten the claustrophobia, the yearning for a freedom of movement that went down to my soul. Here in the backwaters of suburban USA, my soul has room to spread out, lie diagonally across the bed contemplating its own obesity. Space is not all that it is cracked up to be. It's only in books that people retire to the countryside and live the quiet life happily ever after. And you start thinking - that claustrophobia was quite something! What's suffocation compared to this state of too much knowledge of my navel-lint?

Introspection is a funny thing. It gives you a sense of revelation without knowing exatcy what was revealed; you feel worldly and wise without knowing why. As I write this, my face holds a look of weary, but noble contemplation. I nod to myself once in a while, eyebrows raised and mouth turned down, when I type something I think is of consequence. I sit up straighter, shoulders dramatically squared: I am writing naked truths. That's pure wisdom dripping from my fingertips.

No wonder I feel older.

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