In the past few days we’ve had a heatwave, with temperatures going up to the mid thirties, hotter than it often is in Singapore. Our apartment, despite the lack of air conditioning and ceiling fan, is still relatively cool. At night we sleep with the window open, and with a huge black Honeywell floor fan rasping away. I sleep fairly well, but on the first night of the heatwave, I woke and was completely disoriented. I thought the sound of the fan was the sound of rain, and that I was back in Singapore, at one of those moments when the skies finally open after a few days of dry weather and mounting humidity, when the storm drains and the longkangs fill up with water. I got up and I was surprised that the door wasn’t where it should be. I thought I was back in the Bukit Batok flat, looking out over the HDB estate and the MRT line, and that I only had to walk forward in the darkness to find the door handle that I could turn to enter the living room. I shuffled forward, only to bump into our IKEA mobile closet, stuffed with clothes, almost like another person’s body. A second’s puzzlement, while I processed what had happened, and then I realised where I was.

This persistence of memories is something that I’ve encountered all my life, but that seems to be stronger as I age. New learning does not stick in the way it used to. I can still count to a hundred in the French I learned at high school, but I have forgotten the first ten numbers in Japanese, which I learned for our trip to Japan less than two years ago. When I was younger my pronunciation would change after a time in a new environment, so that I fitted in with the locals: after three years in Vancouver, despite trying to roll my Rs, my accent remains stubbornly foreign. Recently we drove out of Vancouver on a five-day road trip. We spent some time in the mountains of Manning Park, and this month’s pictures are from a moment there: the very big in the view of mountains from the Cascade Lookout, and the very small in the chipmunk in the parking lot, waiting for discarded scraps of food. On the way out of Vancouver we ordered our favourite cinnamon buns from Grounds for Coffee to pick up for breakfast. I used their app for the first time, but couldn’t work out how to claim the free coffee that comes with its first use. I went into the cafe to pick up the order, and the barista patiently explained how to do it. I clicked through a few menus and still couldn’t figure it out, so I offered the phone to her, and she fixed it effortlessly. What was interesting was an expression on her face that I begin to see more often now, with a faint smile masking an underlying exasperation, the expression you see on the face of a young person trying to help out someone who is older and bordering on incompetence. Part of me wanted to say to her, you’ve got me wrong. I’m not like that — I’m not really old: I’m very good with technology. And then another part of me just tells me to accept what the present and the future holds.

Returning to life after COVID has produced a few of these moments. Through zoom, I’ve looked at myself far more than I usually do over the past year or more. And yet I’ve also staged myself, so that I manage the ageing process. I put a zoom shirt on, sort out my hair, switch on and adjust the ring light behind my screen, and in the last few months, use the blurred background to reduce the depth of field behind me, making my image on the screen pop out into a mobile portrait. Now I react with people in three dimensions again, and such staging no longer works. I see my whole body in a shop window, noticing how I’ve begun to stoop slightly, and fill out a little around the waist. And in the current heatwave I’ve noticed that my skin is thinner, and reddens more quickly in the sun. Several friends of my age now have serious illnesses, some of them chronic. In September, I’ll be counselling older adults, and I think of how I’ll draw on my own experiences in encountering others who are much further on this journey of ageing than I am, and who have become lay experts in this process. I notice that there’s often a frustration with the self, and anger about not being able to do what used to come easily. And this anger can easily be focused not on the self but on a proximate other – one’s partner – or the world. 

Part of this frustration isn’t just with personal shifting competencies and capacities, but also with how I live in the world. Since I was very young, I’ve always been committed to working for social change. And yet the world, despite my modest efforts, does not seem to have changed for the better. After the extreme heat in Western Canada, a long summer of fires awaits us. Climate change has decisively arrived. And if this is the future, the awfulness of the past atrocities that made Canada return. Part of our road trip was to the Okanagan, British Columbia’s fruit-growing area. If we’d had time to travel further east, we’d have come to Cranbrook, near to the site of new graves found at another former residential school site: this time on the territory of the ʔaq̓am First Nation. So as I age, I try to give up some privileges, I move from critical knowledge to placing myself in a caring profession, and yet I still find myself unable to act in this world that is burning up, a very difficult world from what I had hoped for. Perhaps, in a Hebrew phrase that I’ll l learn more of on my upcoming practicum, I should only hope for something much smaller — tikkun olam: repair of the world.