I currently work Saturdays and Sundays, so my “weekends” are Monday and Tuesday.
Not many people are hanging out on a Monday morning.
So, if I’m lucky, I start the day writing.
I walk to the nearest hawker center. I get a coffee. I walk back. I close my heavy, translucent windows and the amber morning turns a steel blue. I turn on the air conditioner.
I put on ambient music.
I take off.
It’s hard to describe where I go.
The void is thoughtless and without time.
It is the reason people suffer the torments of a creative life.
It is an island in consciousness. The void is an island that has nothing and is open to everything.
The void is what sensory deprivation tanks have always tried to be.
The void is one phenomenal reason to be alive.
Gottfried Leibniz, the enlightenment philosopher, argued that ours was the best of all possible worlds.
He reasoned that God — being omniscient and omnipotent — could create the best possible world. And God — being good — would create only the best possible world.
I’m not sure I’ve ever been as optimistic as Leibniz.
For this is the same world where some people don’t get to experience the void or watch their children grow up.
This is a world of tyranny, poverty, disaster, war.
But then sometimes, like today, I feel I understand what Leibniz must have been thinking.
This is also the world where human beings have the capacity for experience, where people can be generous, create incredible things, taste the world, and feel joy.
All of that is possible in this world.
We are lucky people indeed. Perhaps there is still time.
The best way to stay in touch is through my email list.
I write fortnightly, sharing my current reflections and the most brilliant ideas I’m reading