It’s cherry blossom time in the West End. This year the first blossoms came very quickly on Comox and Barclay Streets, with tiny star-like flowers that thickened to something like a veil or net of blossom, but never quite came together in a solid mass of colour. These are now falling, and their remaining flowers are smothered in red-brown leaves.  We are now into the second wave, the Akebono and other cultivars, shorter, broader trees on which bell-like flowers hang in much heavier clusters. In cloudy weather they are an unearthly cold, icy pink; when the sun shines, the whole tree becomes a dazzling white cloud. Magnolias are opening too: first the big pink ones that look like fingers tipped with nail polish as they emerge from their sheaths, and then, a week later, the white star magnolias. Camellias come at the same time, evergreen bushes that, almost overnight, become studded with red rose-shaped flowers, so perfect that they seem to be artificial. The first tree in our neighbourhood to blossom is always a pink magnolia on the junction on Haro and Cardero, nestled against the warm brick of a 1920s apartment building. Its blooms have fallen now, and yet the leaves have not yet come, exposing a perfectly built bird’s nest in a fork at the very top of the tree. The last tree to bloom is usually a cherry tree behind our apartment complex, in Ted Northe Lane, one of the West End laneways named after people who have shaped our community. As I write, its buds are crimson, swelling, but have not yet flowered.

Cherry trees and their fallen blossoms, of course, are a ready metaphor for the fragility and brevity of life. I’m curious to look at where I am now, to notice a process of falling and settling in my life story. In the last few months I’ve facilitated an online guided autobiography group with NUS alumni, this time virtually, drawing on participants in their 20s, 30s, and early 40s living all over the world. Our centre of gravity has been Singapore, we’ve also had group members who now live in Korea, Thailand, Luxembourg, the United States, and Canada. When I ran the first group in Singapore from October to December last year, I served more as a group leader and facilitator, not sharing my own stories with others. This time, we had two smaller breakout groups, with more space to share, and in my small group, in addition to facilitating, I did the regular task of writing and then reading out a thousand words on a weekly theme. Others in the group mostly appreciated this: my willingness to be vulnerable and to share, and the way in which all of us sharing as equal eroded hierarchies. One participant said that I’d moved from being more “Prof. Holden” to “Philip” during the group. At the same time, being an active participant and yet also the overall group leader perhaps introduced a conflict in roles: my own storytelling, as all storytelling did, normalized some experiences and excluded others. I’ll now pause the GAB groups until October, reflecting on what I’ve learned.

Writing weekly was an interesting exercise in reflection on my own life, and while I kept pieces I’d written from GAB training three years previously in reserve in case inspiration failed, I never used them. In my GAB training, in addition, we’d skipped the final theme – goals and aspirations – in the interest of time. I thus now wrote on it for the first time for our final group meeting. To understand where I was going, I had to go back, and review where I’d come from, and particularly my attempts in my 50s to get off that escalator of an academic career that was taking me ever upwards in a direction that I didn’t want to go. What I realised, looking back, was that just as I began to leave the pathway of my career a series of events happened that made planning impossible: illness and death in the family, struggles with residence and citizenship, and then, in the last few years, the pandemic. In these changes I tried to maintain a clear path, to move gradually, in small increments, from one career for another, to move from, as I think I put it some years ago, from criticism to care. And yet, the further I moved on in this change, taking my electives and then my Masters in Counselling Psychology, the more I came to question the notion of career itself. I felt initially that I was somewhat lost, but that surely I’d eventually find my way. Things would begin to coalesce, as they did before. I’d discover a moving walkway, as I had before with academia, and I’d step on it and be propelled along it again, into a new life. 

This hasn’t happened. Strangely, I’ve come to a place for which there are no maps. I look ahead, and there are plausible routes, ways in which I can tell a new story of my life. In one, I return to Singapore. I become a citizen. In Lee Tzu Pheng’s words, I start digging into the banks of humanity’s rich soil. In another, we stay here, and I begin to find purchase points in this society — friendships, alliances, a purpose that So far have eluded me. And yet, as I age, some of these possibilities fall away. My return to Singapore is not dependent on me, but on an individual working somewhere in an opaque bureaucracy, whose actions I will never know. As I and my partner move into old age, that fantasy of autonomy and a self-made life seem ever less real.

In a few days I fly to England to a research project, and another journey – a return, with my partner and sister, to the village and two in Lincolnshire that I left when I was five years old, never to return. That movement, forward again, only through going backwards. When I return the blossoms will all have fallen, and the trees will be in leaf, shading our balcony. But just for this moment there’s a stillness, a curiosity, almost a sense of mourning in watching blossoms fall as others bud to take their place.