It’s been five months since I last wrote. I began writing this post in the living room of our HDB flat in Bukit Batok, Singapore. Nine o’clock in the evening, and the children at the playground below have fallen silent. The ceiling fan turns above me, and the block opposite is lit up — the long strip of light that marks the lift lobbies on each floor, and then random windows, a patchwork quilt of light, some dimly illuminated, others dazzlingly bright. Every few seconds or so, there’s sound of a car or a bus on the road outside the estate, rising and then falling away. In the spaces between, if you listen very carefully, you can hear the chorus of frogs from the hill, or the call of a bird in the darkness.

I continue this post in Vancouver, waking in the morning after a long day’s flight. It’s not yet light, and I can hear the wash of traffic on Nelson Street, just beyond our balcony, look out to the bare branches of trees in the low orange street lighting of the West End. Our neighbours’ roofs, above the level of the lights, are a seam of blackness that gives way, as you look up, to the brighter lights of the top of the towers on Davie Street, and then to darkness again, pricked by the moving lights of a plane.

In our five months in Singapore, if I’d hoped for a clear way forward in life to open, I was disappointed. But there was something useful in waiting, in taking time to stand still. I felt that as I did so things began to settle. After a time of quiet you notice the layers of your life, how thick and rich they are, and begin to realise that you should not simply clear them away and begin again.

What are these layers? First of all, a sense of being at home in Singapore, and somehow, when I met up with friends, with people with whom my life has been bound up over thirty years, of not needing to explain myself, as I feel here. This was true of various circles of friendship beyond the closeness I have with my partner — three people who I’d characterize as my very close friends, in different, wonderful, ways, and whom I saw regularly, but then also a much wider group of people I saw less frequently. That sense of being at home extends, beyond friendships, to a form of connection with a place, through food, through the experiences of the built environment, and also of historical connection, of knowing how I am part of a series of still unfolding stories.

In Singapore these layers, or perhaps strands, in my life wove back together. I began research again, commencing a project on intellectual history in Singapore through the life of S. Rajaratnam, diving back into the pleasure of archives, of photographs, notebooks, annotations to books, and newspaper articles. And the beauty of such research is that I have no annual review to answer too, and no expectations of where I publish: I can think in a larger sense about the nature of academic research and writing, and potential audiences.

I also facilitated my first Guided Autobiography group, with alumni of the University Scholars Programme even as the programme itself is absorbed into the new NUS College. I didn’t get everything right, but the group was fascinating to me in two ways. First, in getting to know people who were very like my former students (although none were actually former students) affectively, in a very different way from the intense intellectual connections in the classroom I’d experienced as a professor. Second, the continued affirmation of the power of groups, and how groups sustain their members: how groups provide answers to much of the discomfort I feel with the individualizing and diagnostic elements of one-to-one therapy.

Finally, I was also in a situation of being a caregiver, for six weeks, for my mother-in-law, who came to stay with us.  There were many dimensions to this experience, but one that struck me was how the day-to-day experience of care grounded us on our estate. Walking far was difficult, and so we were confined to two or three blocks: the covered walkway, the seniors’ centre under a neighbouring void deck, and above all the eating house, with its coffee shop, its bee hoon, cai png, and zi char stalls, and the sundries and grocery  shop where I’d buy 早报 every morning. In our working lives, we’d treated the estate as a dormitory leaving the flat at dawn, and often returning after sunset. This rhythm persisted on the estate: no matter how early I went downstairs for the newspaper, I’d see lines of people in office wear, heading towards the MRT, or schoolchildren half-asleep, pulled by parents or caregivers. And yet we wouldn’t join them: we’d become part of the much slower rhythms of everyday life on the estate, the retirees who drank coffee and then beer under the fans in the eating house, the very old who walked slowly, pushing shopping trolleys, along the corridors and on the walkways. For the first time, too, in years, I had a close relationship in Mandarin, falling slowly back into a comfort in the language.

My sense of being grounded in Singapore was also accompanied by a sense of giving things up. I hadn’t read much newly published Singapore literature over the past three years, and while I still have friends in publishing and in literature, it was good to no longer have to be an expert: I could read what interested me. And my experience of group work made me also less attached to expectations of maintaining and developing skills in individual counselling, something I’d told myself I should do, since that was the trajectory of just about everyone who graduated from my programme at UBC. One of the things that interests me is how professionalized counselling has become, with its focus on career development, of improving skills, and of producing just the right intervention, asking the right question. And how support groups and ongoing supervision do not just develop, but also normalize. Mindful learning is always good, but I’m also intrigued by peer counselling that makes use of resources of care in a community, and which doesn’t reify expertise and training. I haven’t quite given up that focus on one-to-one counselling, but it’s less central to my thoughts about the future than it once was.

In Vancouver now, I’m back in that shifting of the seasons. Frost on roofs and the ground in the morning; snow on the mountains, with more to come. Above all, the grey outdoor light of Pacific Northwest winters, and the warmth of the wood in our apartment. Solstice is coming soon, and then a new year.