Lunch break/thoughts while walking

Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies and discover meanings no other brain ever managed to encounter.

— Albert Camus, Notebooks

At lunch break, I try to walk out of the museum and go somewhere. Usually it's a spot in Fort Canning park, where I open my lunch box and eat while a film about the 1984 archaeological dig plays in the background.

Once when I was doing this, Jacob appeared with his lunch too, after some inconspicuous questions and a hopeful attempt of finding me within what is quite a large park. That was good.

Last week, I was listening to Charles Foster talk about the 'language' of killer whales as I walked, and how much richer, deeper and detailed it is compared to our speech:

"I’m often frustrated by the inability of my language to reflect the wonder of the world. I intuit that wonder, and then language tells me that I’m getting overexcited and I ought to calm down. But I prefer to trust the intuition. I know that propositions formulated in language can’t do the job. How can I possibly describe my love for my children, my outrage at the cruelty of men, the smell of a wood fire, or the sun on the back of a gull—let alone the dance of these things with one another?

We know from our everyday experience that words fall short of the splendor; that little of our real understanding is mediated through words; that most of what we get even from a formal lecture is subliminal (perhaps communicated by pheromones, or the interlocking of auras, or whatever)."

Later that day I was walking a far more road-side, noisy and dusty way to Little India, and listening to Robert Macfarlane talking about how language shapes our landscape, and vice-versa. His opinion of human language is more redemptive, :

"... poetry has been a huge force and presence in my life. The three poets who I met earliest were the three H’s. They were Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, and Gerard Manley Hopkins; and in a way, for that troika of poets, words have a kind of palp and a heft that is as strong as a pebble or a gale. And I was fascinated by writers who fought and sought to give to their language aspects of matter, and who sought to give to matter aspects of language."

Macfarlane specifically mentions the word smout,  'which means the hole in the bottom of a stone wall up in Cambria, which is left so that small creatures can move through it but sheep can’t get out' and its counterpart in Sussex: 'smeuse', which refers to 'a hole in the base of a hedgerow left by the movement of an animal. To get out of the museum, I sometimes walk through a little gap in the scrawny hedge by the car park, my own little smeuse. I suppose, in that case, I am the animal.  

Things you wouldn't believe

Last Sunday was a day of revelation. I discovered that segue is pronounced seg-way, not seeg as I'd thought. I also found out that because of the vertical way that time zones are delineated, certain places in Russia - despite having vastly different cultures and climates - have the same time as Singapore. Hong Kong has the same time as Singapore, and yet the experience of someone there and someone here, especially at this moment in history with the riots happening, is so dissimilar. It boggles the mind.

So far, I've largely enjoyed work. Sometimes I sit at the desk and think 'I have nothing to do, I'm so bored', but other times I'm reading articles about Mexican culture, or observing an artefact being taken out of a display case for conservation work (and the tricky maneuvering needed to make sure it doesn't touch the adjacent artefact on loan from Queen Elizabeth) or drafting a tour script which involves thinking carefully about what narrative I hope someone will take away from my tour of a gallery, which is something I'm particularly concerned about since the gallery I'm in charge of covers a period right smack in the middle of Singapore's colonial history.

I'm trying to settle into a rhythm of waking up, doing a bit of exercise, going to work. So far it has been working - sort of. I tend to get to work 5 minutes later than I want to, but since nothing is pressing at the moment and I'm still getting used to the whole work routine, I'm giving myself a little grace on that one. Oddly waking up five minutes earlier doesn't make me get to work on time, so I think it's just urgency after I get back from the run and getting over the disinclination to put on clean work clothes onto a still quite warm body.

Strangely enough one of my favourite times of the day is the morning commute to work. I pop in some head phones and tune into a podcast - most usually one from On Being, the Bible Project, or (most recently) emergence magazine. I've listened to interviews on subjects including silence, prayer, killer whales, gangs, the anthropocene, and the theology of work. Sometimes I listen to podcasts on the way home but other times I feel rather brain dead and instead put on some Dusty Springfield or one of the Sidchoir term playlists for some good old sacred music. (Ne irascaris makes my soul soar, while Hymn to St Cecilia puts a spring into my step!)

I made a chocolate and beetroot cake last night, and improvised with the icing by putting in some silken tofu - let's see how that goes when Jacob comes over to make our monthly newsletter. The newsletter was inspired partly by the prayer letter-emails I'd receive from friends who had graduated or friends who had gone on years abroad, and partly by the chatty newsletters I subscribe to from Hannah Brencher and Wild We Roam. I want it to be a document of our time here together both for our friends but also for us, to see how God is faithful even when we might not see it.

So in other words, despite my trepidation, things are well.