The sun sets on a Singapore we want only to forget

The Singapore of my wonderful childhood, was one that was very different to the one I now find myself waking up to. It was one where we could find pleasure not in the clutter of the pompous paraphernalia we now seek to embrace, but in a simplicity we can no longer find beauty in. It was a world of places marked not by the cold hard stare of concrete, glass and steel that had rendered them faceless, but one where escapes could be found in the unique charms of places that even today, we seek to forget.

Twilight in a world we seem to want to forget.

Colours after Sunset

Colours after sunset, 7.50 pm, 5 January 2013.

Sunrise on a day some said the sun would not rise

7.04am 21 December 2012. Sunrise over the Straits of Johor.

The night before the end of time

A couple of photographs taken of the orangey night sky about half an hour following sunset on the last evening before time was supposed to end.

The first was taken at 7.28 pm and the second at 7.35 pm.

A quiet moment

I often take the time to take a quiet moment away from life’s day-to-day routine. And being away on this trip to Hong Kong helps me to do just that and reflect on the paths I have taken in life, and in doing so, I am reminded of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”, a reflection that can only be a reflection, arriving at where we are only as a consequence of the roads we have taken. While we may as in the words of the poet, “tell with a sigh” of the road not taken, it is a road one which we can’t go back on. And certainly, in taking the road we have taken, whether less travelled or or not, makes the difference in our lives.

A quite moment to reflect.

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood ...

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
two roads diverged in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

- Robert Frost, 1916

A quite moment to contemplate perhaps on the road not taken ...