Ahh, you made the click.
Since you're here, you must have been the few friends I had whom I sent this link to, hoping you will somehow want to know what I'm up to come December 2010.
So I'm moving to Guangzhou, China by December, and only had the decency to start a blog two weeks before I leave. In truth, I think I'd be too lazy to keep this going, but who knows, I will probably have less friends in Guangzhou than I do here in KL, so I'd definitely have more spare time (read: nothing to do).
After 3.5 years in GroupM Malaysia, I still feel a little surreal about leaving the company, not to mention the country. While I contemplate which corner of my cubicle I should start emptying, I feel an urge to just slap the dust and leave everything where it is. Such is my lazy soul that I can literally trace the outlines of my comfort zone.
I started my first day of work here with nothing but a pen and a notebook. Yet now, as I struggle to clear this cubicle, I realized that my pen and notebook are nowhere to be seen. Short of blaming it on "Tommy", the office pet ghost, there must be a valid explanation. Alas, could this be a reflection of life?
From my starting point of pen and notebook, I attempted to archive everything about my job. Briefs, objectives, strategies, impact. Expectations, outcome, drama and consequences. And they started to accumulate in my cubicle. Things that I would keep for fear that I might need it one day, things that I would keep for hope that it will be useful one day, and things that I would keep only so that I can forget about it later. And now, as I scour through these things, I searched deep into the shelves of my memory, trying to recall each and every thought, reason and rationale I had behind everything I kept.
Those shelves. They were empty.
True to life, we always start out by having a fantastic gameplan and healthy doses of hope at the right time. When things don't exactly turn out the way we expected it to, we brace ourselves for consequences. Then we make Plan B. And we move on. And we keep doing it over and over again. What we hardly ever notice are all the trails we leave behind.
Stacks of documents that bore the grudge of the stubborn pen, rulers that try to outline the rules for which we play by; cards, photographs, mementos that mark a special occasion or memory. And finally, staples that try to link each and every moment back together. In life, these are the people we hurt, friends we lose, colleagues we allied and enemies we fought.
And now, when we walk away, our brains' reflex flushes all the related memories out. Those papers bear no meaning, those cards on the table an eyesore. And here, we realize, that all those times when our lives were about those things, we fail to see, that once we step outside our cubicles, things will not be the same.
As for my pen and my notebook - they were what I was when I started; and now they're gone because I'm not the same person anymore.
