Couple of years ago, I was roaming around the Art Institute of Chicago on a spring afternoon when I happened into a room that had a video on loop. The Nationals, a band that had recently been an ear-worm of mine, was the main focus and they were playing Sorrow. The extended label called the work A Lot of Sorrow by Ragnar Kjartansson and essentially informed me that the piece was actually a recording of the band playing the one song on repeat for six hours at the MOMA PS1 – I had merely caught one of many takes at the song. I watched Matt Berninger drown himself in the lyrics of the song, slowly allowing himself to succumb to its weight and gloom every time he repeated the chorus. The band seemed depressed and in a slump. But after around 15 minutes, I witnessed something subtle but significant – Matt was slowly claiming power over his emotions. His face seemed hopeful and his demeanor displayed profound understanding. Somehow in the 3 hours he had already been playing, he discovered something, playing those lyrics over and over again. That was a feeling I finally felt I connected with this month.

Habits:

There’s a power in doing something again and again. I can remember the days when rote learning was my modus operandi, filling up exercise books with multiplication tables and vocabulary recitations. Those habits have embedded in me somewhat of an intuition towards core theories in the foundation topics even today – I can do some “quick math” as Big Shaq would say. The past 8 years have been a rejection of repetition though. I have chased new experiences, surreal and incredible, and while I’ve had the upbringing to be disciplined in some regards, I would always choose something new over something familiar. This past month, however, I promised myself that in order to establish roots in Singapore I had to establish habits.

Trials:

I was very touched by the responses and support I got from my friends in response to my last reflection post where I shared a bit of the darkness I was fighting. I heard an interesting talk at a TedX event I was fortunate to attend where the main point was to reconsider some of the key drivers we’ve identified for ourselves and to decide whether they are in fact needs or merely wants. If we had conflated our wants with our needs, we should dig deeper into the want and find the foundational need. I had been wanting a support system in Singapore when actually what I needed was belonging. Some of my better friends could see that and walked my path with me. Even those who walked their own paths before me reassured me that the slope gets easier. The advice I got consistently though was that I could do something about my situation. Things were not out of my hands, but I had to let my ego die a bit. Ego, the obsessed sense of self that we all possess, was blinding me to the fact that I had once again centered myself when the universe had bigger things to worry about. August saw me be deliberate in my attempts to get out of a slump.

Confluence:

I think back to Matt Berninger playing Sorrow for six hours a lot. For a piece that was simple in concept, it was much more profound in impact. There is value in participating in habits and repetition if one can be intentional about them. There is value because somewhere along the way you are not slave to the habit anymore. Instead you are deriving immense potential from the wisdom attained in that one sliver of the universe. Repetition is not a boring person’s play, in fact, it is the mark of the steward.

The trials of July reminded me of things that had been essential to my happiness before. For the past few years, I had played witness and traveler. I had seen myself as a steward of the environments I was in, embodying the storyteller in my conversations to others and ultimately letting life transform into a dance between the self and the universe. Yet, back in Singapore, I had fallen into old patterns. It’s not surprising, familiarity enables relapse. Unfortunately the habits of old were not good ones and the patterns I had looked to for comfort seemed to lead down the very paths that had driven me to want to take a break from Singapore in the first place. I had to form new habits and new patterns. I had to get back into groove and entangle myself once again in the dialogue with life itself.

These were things I focused on in August. Going to the gym, starting a podcast, expanding my regularly meeting book club, investing in new and old friendships that could be sustainable, learning to bake bread, spending Sundays with my family  – there were a number of ways I was giving myself space to explore novelty while practicing habits. All of them were helping me grow.

There are threads in our life that trace back to key moments – I call them pivots. I know I’m at one of them right now. Decisions made here will affect how I behave and respond in the future. Short-term considerations that forget the larger drama that we are privy to make The National’s six hour performance a mere slot in the overall day. But those six hours accessed something much much larger, and so too must I.

August has been helpful.