A sand in a grain of world

I’ve never heard him play.

He would conduct, but not play.

How can we inspire when we merely expire.

You complete work, but you’re not completing your soul.

You dredge up the splinters years later, unrecognisable, asundered, lost.

There are more food than book pages in Sunday’s LIFE.

-

First, they closed Page One. Then National Geographic was shuttered.

The H&M $14.90 shirt triumphed over the world.

-

We still call the red brick “the MPH building”.

Books died from it a decade and a half ago.

Insensate to the world beyond,
you remain behind glass doors, 
a smirk etched on your lips,
cocooned in air-
conditioned, Cartiered
comfort. 

No need for designer couture when you’re already so
low, below ground level, in the mausoleum of high life. 

A simple white t-shirt will do, amidst jacketed
handmaidens, and a husband with porcelain
pockets, in exchange for his people’s 
hard-earned coffins back home.

Give them straw for your glass.

Cheers.

I eschewed graphic organisers as a child.

I loathed the step-by-step workings we had to do sometimes when I already had the answer.

I didn’t see the point in writing “ten hundreds ten tens ten ones” or drawing counters for them.

I was one of the talkative ones in my upper secondary English class, that exasperated our teacher to no end. We were a fast track class forced to go through step-by-step syllabus. We did not see the point.

One method cannot fit all.

One must find meaning in her context before one is inspired to learn.

Outliers in a class mean misfit between expectation and actuality.

Is it enough to say I don’t know what the future will bring, but I’ve faith that it’ll work out? That jobs aren’t everything but I’ll still find a way to bring back the dough, that you two are living your ideal - albeit enormously challenging and pro bono - jobs anyway? That it’s tough for me as it is to keep getting offered positions similar to the one that I’m leaving behind - even when I’ve told them why I want to leave this position in the first place? Because I know I need to earn my keep and my family’s keep as an adult, but money isn’t everything?

Because I always feel like I’m disappointing you by choosing to leave this job in pursuit of what my heart wants?

We are taught to think ourselves ordinary. We cannot conceive of another job, another life, another umwelt. We scoff at challenges. We stick to status quo. We consume. We don’t create. The malaise eats into the soul. 

It dies an ordinary death, extraordinary in its proportions. 

It’s the snowstorm of the soul.

* * * * *

It’s the little things wrought large that I cannot stand. The peripherals, the important rendered in faux-serious tones, the superficiality of appearances necessary to earn their daily bread, the waste of manpower, the misfit of job to person, the keeping up of facades.

Six more weeks.

When people say it cannot be done, think it can be done and do it. You will soon find them helping you without you expecting them to.

Then it is done.