Shenton Way

http://www.flickr.com/photos/leonnie_sun/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

I found myself driving through Shenton Way late this morning, after a traffic cop redirected my car away from the ECP entrance towards the East and into the one going the other way. I drove past three towers balancing a surfboard, and exited right into the heart of the Central Business District, hoping to drive to get home via Nicoll Highway.

For some inexplicable reason, the CBD was jam-packed with cars, on Sunday, of all days. Soon enough, I found myself stuck in a jam along with tons of irate drivers trying to cut me left and right. Having nothing better to do, I took a good look at the towering skyscrapers and corporate buildings that house a substantial proportion of banks and what-not that drive the Singapore economy.

And I felt a pang of fear. An extremely irrational pang that I decided to blog about it. Despite the amount of cars on the road, the CBD itself was devoid of people and movement. Darkened offices, stationary elevators and sandwich shops that were closed for the day lined the streets where my car was stuck on. But it wasn’t too much of a stretch to imagine how the place would look like on a normal weekday.

The maze of concrete and steel looked like some kind of prison to me. From Monday to Friday, executives commute here from home, get sucked into their corporate offices where they labour and toil to churn out money. Sure, there’s life and vibrancy and activity, I suppose, but it’s not the kind I would enjoy. And my dear school, SMU, trains me to some extent for life in this (to use a rather cliched term) concrete jungle. But I don’t want to be here in the future, I don’t want to make my second home here, in one of these glassed-up units, dressed up in formal attire doing things that simply make an accountant’s profit numbers in his Excel spreadsheet tick upwards. At the end of my life, I don’t want to look back at realise that I spent the past 30, 40 years pushing pen or keyboard, interacting with a monitor, almost every day of my life.

I want to enthrall. I want to delight. I want to touch hearts and bring visible joy to the faces of people. Maybe that’s why I’ve always wanted to learn more music, learn piano. I want to develop the giftings God has placed in me. I want to use them for his glory, and make people happy.

And not think about money, not think about survivability. Let the money come in, somehow. God, you let me live a fruitful, happening life, and you hold me up, and let me thrive. Let me taste the sweetness of life, even in this rat-race Singapore, where I have to fight even to board the bus to the MRT station.

Because I am forever your beloved.