iceattitude

i have just completed a 10-day silent meditation retreat — 1) no electronic devices, talking, reading/writing materials; 2) wake up at 4 am each day with ~10.5 hours of scheduled meditation time — mix of group (in meditation hall) and individual (in own room). if one is disciplined, and taking out time for short breaks and moving between places etc, one should meditate for 8-9 hours per day.

meditation involves sitting in a cross-legged position for 1 hour with eyes closed, ideally with as little movement as possible. the first 3-4 days ("anapana") involve observing your natural breath (i.e., concentrating your mind on the flow of air in and out of your nostrils); the next 5-6 days ("vipassana") involve observing sensations on each part of your body (i.e., concentrating your mind on heat, wind, pain, etc that arise in your head, shoulders, arms, body, legs, etc).

been exactly 5 months since i came back to singapore. it's a reflective evening, couldn't go to sleep. thought i'd share a bit, mostly for my own sake, on how i'm currently viewing life.

i feel like there are seasons in life. when i joined my firm in 2016, i was really anxious to do well, prove myself, etc. it was my first job. but the past ~8 months have been more of a relaxed and balanced time. it has a lot to do with luck as well, but a part of it is certainly mentality. i feel i am better able to separate work from life, in a few senses: (a) being able to switch off from work (e.g. checking emails), almost to the extreme where i would go 3 full weeks not checking email while on holiday; (b) having a personal identity independent of work; (c) related to (b), playing down my job when meeting new people etc. and i'm in no rush to move to the next level of my job, having a significant level of contentment to stay where i am.

i will probably feel a bit more pressure to "ramp up" next year, but we'll leave it to next year. the theme for me this year has been "contentment". saturdays spent with my brother, sister in-law and niece, just chilling on the sofa. meals with family and friends. not needing to always go full steam at my work; doing my job responsibly but not going crazy. content with being single, genuinely so, and not needing a relationship to feel whole. contentment to me means that i don't feel like i need something more to be happy — i don't need to be attached, i don't need to become Partner at my firm, etc.

of course, i can't just whitewash the not-so-good things that have happened this year. it was initially painful leaving new york abruptly to come back. and a recent incident has also left me a bit sad and sian. but by and large there is a good level of contentment in my life which i am glad for.

it's 2 am and i'm not asleep yet. a mix of netflix and youtube kept me awake, and then it was the real shit that is starting to keep me awake, which is the thought, already in my mind for a while, on whether to return to NYC. i thought that i had settled on a "i will only think about it in july/august", but recent events have made me re-think this. an unexpected outcome of working with one of my key mentors in singapore has suddenly made staying in singapore a little less attractive, even if temporarily. or perhaps, put another way, the trusted relationship working with him was one reason for me to stay in singapore, and the reason is no longer as strong. don't want to over-dramatize things but it's more like this has been a trigger for me to re-think about staying in singapore. i lay in bed just a couple minutes ago, picturing NYC, reminiscing in my head about the good times there. and of course the fact that there is a lockdown in singapore is distorting things in my head, and i also know that NYC was not always rosy, with some times when i was genuinely lonely or didn't feel like i had as much to look forward to on the weekends. so in my head i am comparing my current locked-down singapore with a nice rosy pre-covid NYC, which isn't a fair comparison. but there is still this strong desire, this strong urge, to return to NYC, to explore the US, to more fully explore NYC, to live in a different city, to feel free and enjoy the novelty of being in a new place, that is there, or perhaps has always been there, and perhaps a 9 or 10-month stint did not satiate the appetite of. now the practical constraints start coming into my head — the SGD 50K annual rent, especially with a financial commitment now (counterargument: i would still be able to comfortably pay off my mortgage, i am pretty sure); the hassle of going over there (counterargument: not a big deal in the grand scheme of things); the disruptiveness to my career (counterargument: i already have some mentors in NYC — ES, CA, BK etc + i could keep things open for the future).

i've been back in singapore for almost two months now. things have not been too intense so far; been doing some ad-hoc stuff here and there. i still have mixed feelings about whether i want to return to NYC. it's no longer as clear as before that heading back to new york is the best for me professionally, given the disruption of moving to new york and then moving back to singapore again in the future. then again, i could pursue a path outside of my current firm after i head back to new york, without having to move back to the same role in singapore. so yeah, it's not clear at all at the moment.

the other thing is about the covid situation — things are still evolving and i don't have a good view on when it would be safe to head back. so what i am deciding to do for now is to park thoughts about it till july. for now, i will just assume that i am staying in singapore for the long haul, and try to make a path here, for example, by looking at strategy and corporate finance as a second home, aside from private equity work. in any case, i will not head back to new york before november.

it has been a bit of a frustrating few weeks, and i find myself wavering between fully acknowledging my frustration and trying to recognize for myself that my situation is quite OK — i still have a good job and am not working too hard at the moment; am with my family; still have the opportunity to return to new york at another time. i think the frustration lies with the fact that i don't feel 'productive' —  i haven't really been doing 'productive' things over the past three weeks. i'm not the kind who reads a lot, has a lot to do at home; most of my weekends in singapore used to be spent with family and friends. the big gap in my life currently is the inability to meet my friends, and have the enjoyments of restaurants and cafes as well.

so there has been some anger and frustration on my part, against singaporeans and the singapore government. when i decided to come back to singapore from NY, it was clear that i was making a sacrifice career-wise, but i thought that i'd at least be able to live a semi-normal life in singapore. at that time, singapore had the covid situation under control. i don't think that i regret coming back, and even if i had foresight that this would happen i would still have come back to be with my family, but i was pretty excited to meet my friends back in singapore again. unfortunately, after my 14-day stay-at-home ended, i didn't get the chance to meet my friends at all because of the new measures that the singapore government introduced. so i felt this imbalance in me because the people who flew back to singapore just a few days before me were roaming around singapore (secondhand info: i know a few people who told me anecdotally, and the number of unlinked cases shows), whereas i was stuck at home for 14 days alone. in the end, i had to pay for the social irresponsibility of my fellow singaporeans, as well as the lack of more stringent action by the government earlier in implementing the stay-at-home policy for people flying back from overseas. so yeah there's really some anger within me because, if not for such behaviour, maybe the measures don't have to be as stringent as they are right now. i really blame some fellow singaporeans, as well as the singapore government, for the fact that we are basically in a lockdown situation now. and among these actors, it is anonymous fellow singaporeans who were inconsiderate and irresponsible that i am angry with, just that i can't identify who they are specifically and resolve this anger.

the other thing that really annoyed me was the government's policy on masks — it is quite possible that, if the government had been more honest with its people and recommended wearing masks from the beginning (at least cloth masks or whatever form of masks), things would be better now.

oh well. what's done is done. just need to accept that life is different now, with significant curtails on freedom, and unsure of when these curtails will be lifted.

it just feels like a weird time particularly because i haven't really been working over the past three weeks so i've spent too much time just reading on the covid news, and feeling a bit in limbo, even if i feel vaguely lucky that i'm still earning the same compensation, and am given the opportunity to rest.

i feel quite sad also that i will not be able to see my niece for at least a few days, because i had a fever last night (~38.0 deg) and now it has subsided but i want to be safe. so that's another thing that is subtracting from my quality of life.