Run for your life

My usual long run day is Saturday. This week however, I was invited to a #TEDxSingapore event, The Undiscovered Country. This indeed was a hotbed of ideas, a come with an open mind, leave your prejudices behind kind of event.

So instead, I ran today, a Sunday at Sentosa. This was supposed to be a just run session. No routes planned, where I see a track or road which I think will lead me somewhere interesting, I will take it. No pace in mind, in a section that invites me to kick I will kick, and where  the view is compelling I will slow down to admire or even stop to snap a photo. This is still a workout though unstructured it serves to build cardiac fitness because of the distance, build strength in places where I kicked and climbed hills. In addition, it allows my mind to go wherever my mind wants to go. Almost a naked run, but as I wanted to track the distance, I had on my Polar RC 3 computer.

Along the way, I heard echoes of some of speakers from the past two days. So in this post I shall try to connect the many little red dots as my take away from #Undiscoveredsg.

I will probably jump around in telling my story of my TEDx experience because the ideas the speakers spoke of connected dots with each other which in turn connected dots with me and my story.

Lena Chan was why I chose to run at Sentosa today. Before this weekend I did not know that Singapore had a far better biodiversity than some bigger countries, that there are 384 bird species, 318 butterfly species residing in Singapore and I most certainly did not know that although there was an increase in urban spaces there was also a bigger increase in green cover. While I have ran and explored both The Central Catchment Area and the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve, I have not recently run on Sentosa, hence why ran there this morning. I should also explore Chek Jawa on granite island. I just learned from Inch Chua that Ubin meant granite in Malay. Yes shame on me.

My many international friends and colleagues had often commented almost derisively about Singapore’s apparent lack of nature and biodiversity. Now I can cite Lena Chan and Inch Chua too. Inch had related her 3 months stay on Pulau Ubin. She had described the silence in the hours before dawn, the rustle and sighting of the kancil, and the orchestra of bull frogs and other animals during the night which had inspired her in the making of her latest album. On the Imbiah Trail that I ran on today, I caught sight of butterflies, and there was a pleasant whiff of Jasmine, woods and earth. All good. And perhaps it is time I learned more about animals and plants.

As a young boy and teenager, I have always been out playing, trekking and camping in the forests of the Central Catchment Area and the Bukit Timah Nature Reserve both of which were close to where I used to live. So I could relate to all, that Inch had described. As an infantryman serving NS,  I charged up and down hills and bivouacked in rubber plantations and forest trails. As an adult I continued to spend time in these trails, running. The nature had been my playground then and still is now.

Dylan Soh had kicked off the session and said that the little red dot should try, because if she did not try, then she will not know and the fear will grow but if she did try then she will know and the fear will go. So I tried running to Sentosa from Harbourfront.  And it was fun too on the boardwalk, as I sprinted along the travellator which was going in the opposite direction. It was early enough in the morning to have not caused a scene.

Then there was Eugene Soh the accidental artist, who was sought to prove people were right about what they said about him no matter if what was said was good or bad. I see a little of me in that type of thinking.  People had labelled me crazy and they say that I have proven them right, when I just got up one day and decided to run a marathon after breaking my leg in a go kart accident. That go kart accident in itself was a crazy idea. This connected with what Aaron Maniam said about how we become the stories that we told. Eugene too had just gone and tried doing stuff, which was what Dylan said the little red dot should do and in trying people will see that the little red dot was actually a big dot. I too should.

More dots connecting to other dots.

Going back to nature, Jerry Ong described how he integrated nature into his design for Khoo Teck Puat Hospital. I had written about the pond  in an earlier post on repeats for pace. The hospital is truly an amazing place. Sadly it was also where my dear mother passed away a mere two months ago. I miss my mother.

Both Cheong Koon Hean and Tara Hirebet spoke about designing smart cities. Though both had different angles. Perhaps this picture taken from Interesting Engineering was what Tara was talking about.

From Professor Hans Rosling I took home the fact that factfulness is what we should be mindful of. We must get our facts straight first and foremost. He has plenty of presentation tricks which I must learn too.

Randolf Arriola spoke about life looping. Music philosophy based on cyclic nature of life, where you start from silence, build up into chaos, from which order comes and then back to chaos again then finally silence. That evoked memories of a vaguely remembered chemistry lecture on reactions many years ago. Randolf’s dot connected with Aaron Maniam reminding us of what Elliot wrote

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

Which reminded me of the notion that a man can never step into the same river, for not only is the river changing but so too does the man. Randolf’s music was brilliant and totally enjoyable.

The most profound idea came from Shiao Yin who advised that we should try to live in the gap between what we really want and the way it is in reality. Those were not her exact terminology for the 2 extremes. To me it is the acceptance that we cannot always totally achieve our passion but we must be doing the best we can to achieve. We should mature our passion into compassion and forge opportunities.

The most astounding idea was from Professor Tan Tin Wee. I was astounded to find out that we might actually be less friendly to our environment if we were to save our emails and attachments rather than printing them. This is because the servers and data centers that store all these data will need to be built bigger to accommodate the increasing amount data. Bigger data centers mean more energy consumed both from the actual running of the server as well as the cooling of it. However there is hope yet. He proposes to link the heating of super cold LNG before it can used to cooling of the monster computers. He intends to build super computers on Jurong Island. Ingenuous.

My final take home is from Zakir Hussein Khokon a Bangladeshi construction supervisor who writes beautiful poetry. We locals look askance at these workers who build our homes and our national icons such as Gardens by the Bay. They keep our streets and  gardens clean so that we may have a clean UNESCO heritage site. Yet do we understand them? I hardly think so. Through Zakir’s poetry I came to understand that these guys who leave their families to work here are just like us. They actually have an affinity for our Singapore. One of his poems is a testament to his love for our Singapore. There was even a line that reads Majulah Singapura. So when on this morning’s run, I came across Abdullah a worker from Bangladesh who keeps the Imbiah  trail free of litter and deadfall, I stopped and spoke to him for a while. Like many he left a family back in Bangladesh and misses them very much. He says all Muslims are brothers, pondered a while then added all men are Bhaiya. I agreed.

These are my take away. If you were at #Undiscoveredsg what were yours?