Exploring Change

"So how has exchange changed you?"

I might be one of the rare few who will respond to that question with an "I don't know". But honestly, I do not know and I am myself stupefied by this lack of an answer when the question was directed towards me, especially considering how much I preach about the pursuit of a meaningful life and the dare to take up life changing experiences. 

And while it a month too early, I think this is a good time as any to look back and reflect on a period where I was far away from the warmth and comfort of family and friends, in a strange land that is both Antarctica and Spain in the same year. It has been a period which I had earmarked as a time to do some soul searching, but that has instead left me critcising the often over-maturity and sometime immaturity of my decisions. 

I still feel that I am very much the same person I was before, though perhaps I have picked up some new pleasures in the form of grocery shopping and (very horrible) cooking. I recall my father's surprise on learning I had made all the way from the airport to the hotel by myself, navigating through London's transport system for the very first time, thereby offering some rare praise of 'having grown up' that I reveled in. But I told him, when you have money in your pocket (and taxis everywhere), one can never be too scared to take some risks.

That explained the lack of change. You cannot change a person by sending him on a vacation. True change requires adverse circumstances that makes a person struggle and come to a life changing realisation that will force him to change himself. For the Singaporean male, it is usually National Service. For the immigrant, it is the difficulty in adapting to a new land and a new culture, far from home. For everyone, it is responsibility, not simply for our own lives and actions, but often the lives and actions of others. Changing circumstances, events and people that cross that internal pain threshold within us, these are what makes us change, for the better or for the worse.

Though if one were to carefully dissect that question of how much something has changed you, it is asked under the assumption that the past was not good enough, that the whole engine had to be overhauled. And so we replace the engine, we force ourselves to change because it was asked for, only to find the car does not purr proudly as it once used to.

When all that was really needed was to tighten that bolt.