A big warm hello to everyone who subscribed to Treading Water over the last 2 weeks!
Today’s newsletter took a little longer as I've been busy with a few things. I graduate from my coaching programme in a few weeks, so I've been feverishly catching up on assignments that I’ve been procrastinating on and should have completed months ago. I've also been slowly piecing together ideas for a couple of new projects—both of which I'm excited to share about very soon.
And lastly, I turned 33 (yay?), or as we sometimes say, I made yet another trip around the sun—a phrase I’ve always enjoyed as a reminder that many things in life come in cycles and seasons, and there will always be chances to try again.
I do sometimes get this feeling that time is running out, but I've also been holding close this line that Frank Herbert writes in Dune: "Be prepared to appreciate what you meet."
If anything, isn't this what getting older is all about?
Over the last month or so, I've been thinking a lot about the concept of 'forever lessons'. These are lessons that I suspect I will never finish learning, but the point is in the continuous striving towards, rather than in completion.
A big one right now is the lesson of authenticity and balance. If a friend comes to me with a problem, sometimes I want to show them empathy and compassion, but I also want to grab them by the shoulders to shake them out of their spiralling self-absorption.
Both responses are authentic to who I am, both come from a place of love, and it is likely this friend needs a healthy dose of both. But what does it mean to take a balanced approach when, in the moment, I'm likely to find myself favouring one over the other?
There is, unfortunately, no correct answer. Depending on the context, the tone of the conversation, your relationship with this person, what they had for breakfast, or what personal crisis you're concurrently wrestling with, any number of variables from your delivery to your choice of words to the weather could dramatically alter the course of the conversation.
But while there is no correct answer, you can learn to intuit the right thing to do in the moment. In a podcast I was recently listening to, neuroscientist and psychologist Joel Pearson talks about how it is possible to train your intuition, provided you train it on the right data.
For instance, if you want to get better at arguments, you need to have more arguments and pay better attention to what's happening when you have them. If you want to get better at solving business problems, you need to tackle more business problems and observe the different things that happen when you make different decisions.
Over time, it's not so much that you start to only make good decisions, but that you begin to make fewer bad ones. (there's probably a forever lesson somewhere in here too)
And so here are a few other ‘forever lessons’ that I've been working on:
1. Have urgency but don't rush
As I've gotten older, I've started to observe how knowledge is useful, but it is really experience that teaches us.
I’ve seen this most clearly in how, in both myself and many others I know, we all carry our own versions of 'I got the thing that I thought would fill the emptiness, and it didn't fill the emptiness'.
And the problem wasn't that we set goals or that we were ambitious, but that we were too precise. We wanted what we wanted, and nothing else. What I'm learning is that it is important to be decisive and go after what you want, but at the same time let go of wanting things to work out a certain way.
Some might describe this as not being attached to outcomes. I call this the willingness to let life surprise me, or the willingness to live in a world of 'maybe'.
Maybe this won't work out, but something else will. Maybe I'll lose this, and I'll survive it. Maybe this will go great, but it won't matter as much as I expect it to. Maybe I will get what I want, but it will arrive in some form that I can't even imagine yet.
There is this George Saunders quote which I love, where he says,
So much of this artistic life, I think of it as self-gaming. You’ve got a chance to tell yourself all kinds of stories about what you’re doing. If you tell yourself the right stories, you become more positive and powerful. If you tell yourself the wrong stories, you don’t.
And so I'm slowly learning that choosing what stories to tell is also choosing what stories to let go of.
2. Tell the truth and maintain my privacy
As someone who writes often about my experience of the world, I struggle a lot with navigating that line between what I want to keep to myself and what I'm willing to offer up for public consumption.
On one hand, writing is an anchor in my life. It gives my days structure and makes me more disciplined with how I spend my time. It helps me work through my life experiences, and in turn helps others do the same (or so they've told me). I also just thoroughly enjoy doing it; it is one of the very few activities in which I can access that flow state and be fully present.
At the same time, it is the primary way that most people first encounter me and the work I do. With that, I’ve had experiences where because they’ve read some of my writing, people think that they know me, or they expect me to behave or work in a certain way.
On many occasions, I’ve also wrestled with this feeling of having exposed too much of myself, of wondering if I'm just mining my life for content, and whether what I've written is true, or just a story I'm trying to tell myself.
Here’s how I try to think about it these days:
In work (writing, networking, coaching, etc), I ask, “How can my experiences be of service to others?”
In life and my personal relationships, I ask, “How can I be honest and courageous?”
And so I draw my boundaries accordingly, deciding what to share and what to safe-keep, and I know that these are all versions of me that are authentic.
3. Feel my feelings and identify as more than my feelings
When I was growing up, I remember being so terrified of my emotions that I would literally visualise putting an unpleasant feeling in a box, putting that box on a shelf in a room, and closing the door to that room.
Over the last few years, a lot of the 'working on myself' that I've done has involved learning how to access and work with these emotions. And I've realised that there is a reason why I've never opened these boxes—because feelings suck. They are horrible, thorny things that just slow everything down and make life unnecessarily inconvenient.
What really helped was when I learnt that it is possible to feel your feelings, but not identify with them. Writer Haley Nahman came up with this term called an 'elastic mood', which she describes as being a mood that is so overwhelming you mistake the intensity of it for the longevity of it. For me, this is every single thing that I feel. But it has been helpful for me to remember that I am not just any one feeling.
In moments when I am angry I can also feel compassion. When I grieve I can also be grateful. When I feel regret I can also feel confident that I will never make the same mistake again.
And I think there's a universal lesson here in that we often forget that most things do not exist in isolation. You are not just that one successful thing you did years ago. You are not just the blunder you recently made at work. You are not just the petty argument that you picked with your friend.
These days, I try to remind myself that life is lived in the moments when we remember to see who else we are and how else we can be.
What are your own forever lessons?
THE DEEP END
(This is a new section of the newsletter where I write about something that I'm doing or trying to change in my life)
So here's a crazy story.
Despite how I seem in real life, I am actually extremely introverted. I like the corners of rooms, keeping to myself, and just generally avoiding people. But over the last few months, I've gotten curious about whether this is who I really am or just how I've gotten used to being. As much as I treasure this side of myself, I've also seen the ways in which it has cut me off from connecting with others.
Since then, I've accepted almost every invitation to networking events and house parties. To be clear, this is something I do not do. But I am miraculously still alive and I even made a few friends along the way.
Sometime last week, I happened to be at Humble Origins, a coffee shop that I swing by for beans whenever I'm in the area. The staff are great, and they serve (imo) some of the best coffee in Singapore.
They also source all their green coffee from Myanmar, which made me realise, I should ask them for places to visit in Yangon since I'm headed there soon.
But of course, I had to make this difficult for myself by over-thinking the entire thing, to the point where I had to tell myself to just shut up and ask.
So I did. Amongst suggestions for food and coffee shops, I also got some advice on precautions to take. And then an unexpectedly nice thing happened: the owner who just got back from Yangon remembered that the local SIM card she had gotten still had unused value on it, and insisted I take it.
Which came as such a surprise to me because ... why, I'm just a stranger, are you sure, don't you need it for yourself, okay, okay! If you insist! Thank you for making my life easier.
For anyone who's always wanted to be less introverted, I highly recommend reading Jessica Pan's Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want to Come. In it, she quotes behavioural science professor Nicholas Epley, who says, "Nobody waves, but everybody waves back."
This is how I'm trying to think about human interactions these days. If you want to connect, someone has to go first. And often, that person has to be you.
A lot of this is still extremely uncomfortable, and I'm still very bad at it. But it is getting easier to see that sometimes, when I do uncomfortable things, nice things also happen.
Stuff that moved me this week
I had the chance to check out National Gallery’s Tropical: Stories from Southeast Asia and Latin America which I thought was fantastic. It ends on 24 March, so I really recommend dropping by.
I finished Expats, another series on Amazon Prime. I really did not expect to like this, but I feel like my soul expanded a little after watching it.
I also somehow ended up stumbling onto the music of Thai singer-songwriter Stoondio, and this is all I’ve been listening to this week.
That’s all, I’ll catch you at the next one 👋🏻