NO PROGRESS WITHOUT CHANGE
AT THE END OF THIS MONTH, I will be relocating from the heart of town where I’ve lived for the last eight years, to the edge of town where I’ve tried to avoid living for the last eight years. What brought about the sudden turnaround? It’s not age, or settling down, or because I dislike where I am or due to an unreasonable spike in the rent. If anything, the incentives to stay are becoming more attractive by the day. I’ll no longer be able to run home to change for a work event or to walk home from Spize in the middle of the night after a late supper of Maggi goreng ayam. Or walk home from Orchard, Clarke Quay or pretty much anywhere downtown. You can bet I will be missing that perk for sure. No, I’m moving because I need to inject some change in my life. It’s also financially more responsible, and probably more convenient for work but primarily it’s because I want some disruption in my personal life. As many gurus I’ve interviewed over the years have explained, change that is managed is good. It induces ideas, creates opportunities. It’s when change comes about unexpectedly that problems arise. Translation: I’m getting out of my hood before my landlord kicks me out for sending him too many emails of complaint. I’ve personally been quite lucky with property finds. My current household is a strange walk-up that my friends and colleagues refer to fondly as “the haunted house”. It’s old, private, has immensely spacious rooms, a large expanse for a garden that’s occasionally maintained by a caretaker (by maintained, I mean he shakes the coconuts loose from the trees once in a while so they don’t tip over from the weight) and a number of stray cats that sometimes makes the balcony of my ground floor apartment look like a scene from the Japanese cat collecting game on smart phones. My new place is nearly as large as the current one, and I’ve got big plans for it. Ideas have been running in my head ever since I first considered moving there. It’s thrilling, energising, like an adrenaline rush from a workout without having to move from your comfy chair. Sure, property experts will tell you to wait, look for alternatives and keep your options open. In short, be logical. But life isn’t logical and neither is change. It’s impossible to manage it in that manner. You can think about change all the time, to plan how you’ll execute it, to consider pretty much everything else that may happen. But when it’s time, change just has to occur or you’ll miss the boat. I’m sure there are plenty of us who wished we’d got on the Google IPO when it first happened, or that we’d bought Apple or Pixar shares when they were just emerging and getting ready to disrupt the system. If you got in on the action for these, lucky you. But if you didn’t, you can only blame it on your own fear of taking a chance on things. Change is inevitable. Make it happen, and you’ll be all the happier for it.