In my counselling course, I’m one of the oldest students. One or two of my classmates have similarly grey hair, and I always thought before COVID intervened that we should have coffee and find out who actually was the oldest. Most of the time age vanishes, and then suddenly, out of the blue, returns. I was chatting to a classmate via Zoom a week ago about her parents, and slowly realised that said parents were younger than I am. As a friend now in her eighties said to me, I never quite thought this aging thing would ever happen to me.

If I look back, I realise that for a very long time, in my thirties and forties, I wasn’t aware of aging at all. I didn’t feel anything change in my body, and was a little puzzled that I was in fact older than my undergraduate students. Some if this was also generational. I came to live in Singapore in 1994, having only visited once previously, and with no lived knowledge of the past there. Like many migrants, I constructed a prosthetic past for myself by knowing Singapore and its history only too well, and because of this I felt a deep affinity with my undergraduate students in the late 1990s and into the early years of the new millennium. Unlike Singaporeans of my age, but like my students, I had no personal memory of Singapore before that sudden rush of development from the late 1960s to the 1980s that transformed the landscape from a colonial port city to a modern metropolis. I only learned of it through books, and the memories of friends and family. By 1994, Ngee Ann City had already been built, and the stretch of Orchard Road from the Thai Embassy to Centrepoint was pretty much as it is now, give or take a few refurbished facades. I remember walking one night soon after I came in the darkness there, feeling the air conditioning blasting from mall doors when they briefly opened. Like my students, I became nostalgic not for lost rural landscapes but for the leafy, spacious HDB estates that replaced them, like the old Hillview Avenue estate where we lived for a decade before we were SERSd and moved to Bukit Gombak. And so, into my early 40s, I didn’t really feel my age at all.

As I moved towards 50, this began to change slowly. The first thing I noticed was a change in my vision. Apart from a brief period of wearing corrective lenses at school, I had spent all my life without glasses. I’m naturally a little long sighted. When I was a child I would sit  in a chair and read a newspaper placed in the floor, much to my father’s puzzled amusement, and was always the first of a group at a bus stop to be able to make out the route number on a distant bus. In September 2008, I flew from Singapore to Toronto for a conference. I arrived, tired and jet-lagged in the late afternoon. By the time I got out of Pearson Airport, the sun was just setting in a clear sky and, as my taxi drove along an elevated highway to the city centre I heard a scuffling noise in the front. It was fasting month, and my driver was opening a packet of dates to eat. He offered me one, and we talked about his childhood in Pakistan, and his experiences in migrating. I had to check the address I was staying at and, with my hands still sticky with date, I pulled out my netbook, one of those compact laptops with tiny screens that were popular at the time. For the first time, quite suddenly, I could not read the text. On my way back through Pearson, I bought my first reading glasses, which I would replace time and time again with more powerful ones. 

Changes began to happen more quickly. I found that my hearing had begun to deteriorate, especially in environments where there was a lot of background noise. I was also less sharp mentally, or at least in a different way. In my early 50s, I resat the GRE in preparation for a career change, and found the problem-solving questions much more challenging than previously. I could still figure out most of them, but my mental ceiling was somehow lower, and I had to consciously prepare for a fog of panic that would begin to roll in. I can still do calculations, I’ve picked myself up a few times, most recently in the Psychological Assessment class I’ve just completed, where I’ve become reacquainted with standard deviations, normal curves, scatterplots, and other such delights. But some mental flexibility is now missing: it’s harder to stay on task and things are harder to learn. And things are harder for the body, too. After a cycle ride I ache the next morning,  not deliciously in the muscles, but in the joints. My body grumbles. I look at my skin sometimes, on my neck or my forearms, how it is looser, duller, how its texture has changed. And, of course, I never quite thought this would happen to me.

At this time of year I often play a game with the seasons. If my life is a year, what stage am I now at? Clearly later than the present moment, in early August, watching for the first red leaves in a tree, surely too early, ripening blackberries, or the seeds that gather among the foliage. Linden seeds first, like little bunches of cherries hung beneath a rotor blade, as thin as an insect’s wing, falling and spinning after a gust of wind, then the horse chestnuts, green and prickly, now the size of small plums. I’m at a much later stage now. Perhaps those September days that are still sunny, that you think will go on forever, before the rains come.

Or I could think of it in another way. Like walking into the water at Third Beach. It’s flat there, and when the tide is up you can stay upright for a long way, walk out between the lines of rocks, the waves at your toes, then your ankles, your calves, and finally above your knees. At some point you have to acknowledge that change of state, and to start to swim. It’s a new medium. The cold wraps you up. You will get used to it, but you are not sure how it will be further out. You have to learn, later in life, how to move again, how to swim in this unfamiliar environment. And you realise, you have brought too many things with you. They weigh you down. You should have left them behind on the beach. And yet at some level you don’t want to give them up. Of course you are not alone, not yet. Those to whom you are closest to are still with you on your journey. Change is inevitable, but you can’t help but look back at the sunlit beach that you’ve left behind. You feel your new body, the gestures it is still able to make. And yet there’s also that backward glance, at what is left behind in the sunlight, all those things you didn’t do. 

There’s a moment at the end of Leow Puay Tin’s play Family about death and the cycle of rebirth, how the soul can’t ever quite give up the temptation of wanting to be reborn. I feel like that sometimes, but wanting to still turn back to this life, to things that I did not complete. Some of this curiosity is good. But at some time I need to turn away, and look at a new horizon.