My life is changing. I can feel it. No, in fact it is me that is changing. I am becoming more and more like a tree – stronger, surer, but also lighter at the same time. And at the heart of this tree there is an orb of light that is growing steadily. That’s me nowadays.
I took a sabbatical from my work as a photographer last year but I have a feeling my time as a commercial photographer might be coming to an end. I’ll always love photography and I’ll always be a photographer, but I feel my life force pushing me in different directions. When I tell my friends I might stop being a commercial photographer, they ask, but what will you do! And I realise how interesting that question is, and how we can limit ourselves and others when we think change is hard and things always have to be a certain way. In fact change is core to a vibrant, meaningful life, and we should expect change at any moment, without notice.
There’re many other things I want to do. I really want to share them with you, and I will, after they take on more concrete shapes. For now, know that these things are just parts of myself that have always been there – the truest parts of myself – now trying to find expression in the world as creative work, and even I am curious about the forms they will take when they finally become “real”.
I find myself missing Japan a lot these days. Maybe it’s not Japan I miss but the space and alone-ness I get to experience when I’m there. I think I miss Japan the most when there are ideas in me trying to take shape and become alive, because with all the noise around me in Singapore – both good and not so good – it’s hard for me to create, to give birth to things, or even just to properly sit with them while they grow themselves into some sort of half-way existence.
Happy to be back blogging, but even in this “rather safe space” there are things I cannot write about. How I yearn for a place where I can write about everything with full honesty, but yet still be read. Is that why people become writers? And resort to writing novels and calling whatever they write fiction? And in that way they are known without being seen.