After the storm ... What's Next?

Winter Comes Upon Us

The winter of 2013 - 14 will be remembered for being particularly bad - frigid temperatures and unexpected snow storms that brought many cities to their knees. It was apparently caused by something called the Arctic Vortex. This was the first time I have ever heard of such a thing.

I had an opportunity to experience this for myself when I landed in New York right smack in the middle of a sudden snow storm that shut down the airport. My connecting flight to Boston was canceled. As I traveled into New York City to spend the night in a hotel, the entire city was gridlocked. A trip from the airport to the hotel that should have taken just half an hour, took two and a half hours of bumper-to-bumper traffic. When I finally got out of the airport van, the cold air that smacked me in my face was shocking to my tropical sensibilities. Frankly, my admiration for people who live in winter climates grew by leaps and bounds. It took mental and physical resilience to live here. Those of us living in balmy climates who wished for picture perfect snow white scenes on Christmas Cards do not know half of what we're asking for. By the way, snow gets blackish and dirty quite quickly. It's not pretty at all.

Marie and I will remember this period of our lives as being particularly challenging for other reasons as well. Other than the craziness of running a family of 4 kids (the last few months without domestic help again), guiding another son through the major PSLE exam (see: School Results (PSLE no. 2) - what I'm learning about school grades), busy work schedules, finishing my course assignments, early morning online discussions and lectures, we also engaged a designer to renovate a new home last June. We capped it off with a monumental move into our new abode in January 2014, two weeks before I traveled to the U.S. for the very last module of my course (which was when I landed into this unexpected snowstorm).

Challenging Times

Dartmouth College, a great place of learning

We had known in advance of these events, had planned for them and had survived with a whole gamut of emotions from elation to frustration. It is hard to do justice to our experiences in the past year with a few succinct words. Marie said it was more more like desperation than frustration - she had to endure more of it when I was away in the States; leaving her alone with the kids and the new house. It felt like juggling a thousand balls in the air all the time, none of which could drop. It felt like a constant stream of questions, decisions and incidents to handle. We couldn't let our guard down for even a moment. We hadn't intended for it all to converge into a crescendo at this one point in time. So perhaps it was no surprise that on 30th January 2014, 4:30 pm, U.S. Eastern Standard Time (EST), when the last lecture of my 18 months course was delivered, I felt both a sense of relief and let down that I had a completed a most challenging period of my life; and yet without any fanfare. Shouldn't there have been fireworks, champagne popping and inspiring Disney music? We only had our rather reticent professor thank us for the last one and a half years (of course later on I had the pomp and pageantry of a college commencement; but that was later on).

After the Storm 

Family happy in the new home ... finally

Now almost two months later I thought I was supposed to have more time after these major events. The time that I had set aside for my course work was like a hole that you dug in the sand. The tide came in and you didn't know where the hole went. My instincts told me, wait, slow down, take stock before deciding on the next steps but life seemed to hunt me down with more 'important' things that needed attention urgently.

Finally, I had a rare Saturday morning when I didn't have to rush a kid to a school activity and could sit down to breakfast and the papers. I'm sure it was God who arranged the time and the two articles in the papers that give me a one, two punch when I read them (I attach the links to the electronic versions here).



The first: "The Folly of Thinking We Know" (The New York Times)
The second: "Why being too busy makes us feel so good" (The Washington Post)

The first article talks about the fallacy of thinking it is possible to know everything that we want to know. The second article describes the absurd badge of honour that many of us display these days of busyness to the point of being overworked and exhausted because it drives our sense of self-worth. We think we are important and of value to society just because we have no time for anything but work.

Mr. Know-it-all

The reason why these two articles read together really hit home was because my business at the workplace is much about finding information and making information known; and of course a large part of my daily life is spent at work. I started work at this current work place fours years ago on 18th March 2010. Maybe if my boss knew how little I knew about the work then, he would not have offered me the job. But from day one I gave myself this personal motto: "I will only not know something once." The first 90 days was filled with asking, questioning and diligently studying any piece of information I could lay my hands on about the organisation.

With time, when people in the organisation noticed that if they posed me a question I would find them the answer, a line began to form. It struck me that this need in the organisation was something that I could build the core purpose of my team upon. I trained my team to "Either provide the right answer; or link the seeker to the person with the right answer". I made sure my team never gave the answer "I don't know" or "My department is not in charge of this" - "No Wrong Door" Policy as they say. One of the staff on my team said recently "Wow, are we supposed to be the Google of this organisation or what?"

Life in a snow storm

While it felt good to be the source of information for many in the organisation, it was true that I couldn't know everything, especially information that specialists spent years training for. It was also an enormously heavy burden to bear. I learnt that more important than providing information was teaching others how to find information for themselves - not fishing for them but teaching them how to fish.

Slow Down ...

The temptation for me now has been to run out to fill my newly 'free' hours with more of the same work. These two articles are like speed bumps telling me to slow it down, to consider filling my life with the important stuff, not merely more activities. They remind me of the writings of a wise man, purportedly the wisest in the world. A man named King Solomon whose musings were captured in the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Bible. In his own words "I applied my mind to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under the heavens" (Eccl. 1: 13) and he found that "this, too, is a chasing after the wind" (Eccl. 1:17).

A Wiser Guy

Even in a snow storm,
there is beauty

If we only gave this book a superficial, cursory read, we would think the author was a guy who was clinically depressed and in need of therapy. Everything was "meaningless" or "folly". This time as I applied the reading to my situation, I realised that the words of the book was a warning to those of us who pursue only what can be seen with our visible eyes - work, riches, success, pleasure. He does not deny that there are good things here on earth - "Go, eat your food with gladness, and drink your wine with a joyful heart ..." (Eccl. 9:7a); "Enjoy life with your wife, whom you love ..." (Eccl. 9:9a); "Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might ..." (Eccl 9:10a). However, he warns us that the pursuit of these to the exclusion of an awareness and a respect for the God of the universe is folly. "Remember your Creator", he exhorts all of us. Otherwise, even with the full extent of his unrivaled wisdom, he could not make any sense of this world - bad things do happen to good people, good things do happen to bad people; and if there was no precious eternal afterlife with God, then what was the point of this short and painful, present one?

Start and Stop with God ... the best bet in any Storm

The passage of the past 18 months for me could be likened to a Tsunami. The gale force magnitude of the events drove Marie and myself to action with little time to ponder the consequences. Yet, now that the events were over, I realised that there was a greater danger - like a person paddling just to keep afloat in a storm, I did not know to stop paddling even though the storm had passed. Marie feels that God is telling her this is a winter period of our lives. Winter is the time to hibernate, to slow down ...

Someone asked me recently how I planned my career. The honest answer is that I have never planned my career. At every point of my work I have only tried my best to do what I understood to be God's calling for me. The rest has been God's doing. God seems to be calling me now to stop, to listen to what He has to say and to be sensitive to His promptings to choices ahead of me. Unless I want to end up with a life of "folly" and "meaninglessness", I think I better obey.