airlock

changi airport terminal 2, 7 jan 2019, 2047 GMT

as part of the interminable (and to an ever-increasing degree unwinnable) battle against jetlag i’ve recently – on the advice of a well-travelled friend – taken to changing the time on my clocks/watches to that of the destination, sometimes 24/48 hours in advance but in any event while i am waiting for my flight at the gate. bereft of a view of the Outside World and of deadlines/ appointments, there is quite little point whilst airside in cleaving to the original timezone. in a way, i think, there is something to be said for bracing oneself for life on the Other Side by pretending that one is already there, which i suppose is the main reason for the whole exercise. in law, where two parties have mutually proceeded on an erroneous view of the facts or law, one party is in some circumstances precluded (‘estopped’) from pleading the error against the other later on. in this way the law recognises that in at least some cases the virtue of truth can be normatively outweighed by other virtues. maybe, then, changing the time is a way of proceeding on the fishy assumption that what i leave behind is subordinate to what lies ahead, or at least of estopping myself from protesting otherwise.

9/9

a telling sign that i’ve flown back to the uk a bit too much: i’m complacently leaving packing to the last minute, at least by Singaporean standards. the flight leaves in 12 hours but clothes and bags are indelicately strewn across my bedroom floor. presumably a tacit if futile rebellion against my unbending itinerary, compelling me toward Changi; Gatwick; my London apartment – and then, in a week, the sparse cobbles of Middle Temple. perhaps refusing to keep my possessions solidly & discretely bounded by luggage is a puerile expression of some inchoate and ridiculous desire to linger a little longer, to pour myself indelibly into the cracks of this maddeningly familiar place. in a sense i always will.

subtle art of not giving a

two weeks to starting work- a bit untimely to be dusting off old vulnerabilities to drape around myself forlornly, like a cloak… now to convince myself that these are growing pains, instead of (which is likelier) the slightly premature march of emotional atrophy. should i be keeping these vulnerabilties safely stowed instead- or is the consequent indomitability the province of cowards? (inviting then the further question: what if anything is wrong with cowardice per se?)

n.b. typing these syntactically dubious ramblings is so soothing and strangely cathartic that it hardly ever matters that i am not always making sense, certainly to the ever-dwindling few who read these and occasionally even to myself. have been writing ‘purposefully’ for so long now – essays, pleadings, legal advices – that it is refreshing to write with no clear end in mind, evenly but carelessly kneading words into a page like loading blanks in a magazine

jitter

ok i feel like i am rapidly – if finally – emerging from the chrysalis of school into an unrelenting unswaddling environment but am still trying to peel off pupal/larval residue. five years of reading law has considerably steeled me it is true – i feel more stoic now; fussier but in quite a different sense. but law school is just that – school; it could only ever make me fall in love with the craft of law. i’m not sure that even now i’m prepared for the business of law, where self-promotion is an interminable exercise, craft is more or less presumed (whether rightly or wrongly), and getting briefs is invariably zero-sum… God help me!

why do i have 264 draft posts

however pointless and constantly deflating the past year might have been (e.g. paying an obscene amount of tuition to learn the art of Writing Opinions or to be told to “make more small talk about the weather” in a Client Conference) — still scary to be finally trading in the student world (with assuringly determinate term times and vacations and even exams) for the Abyss of Adulting. i am still a distance away but it is no longer a safe one – just dawned on me that pupillage starts in 3 months: a yearlong navigation of what will look like ceaseless probation before chambers takes the decision on me. i am classically Singaporean and hence love my plans, and the open-textured nature of pupillage (and what – if anything – lies thereafter) grates with me more than a little.

but even with pupillage there are attendant rubrics and criteria and thus (to that extent) tolerably predictable outcomes, a sort of second-order method to aforesaid madness. much preferable to the damnable anarchy that pervades other areas of our lives, that defies any quantity of graft and the best (or worst) of intentions………..

But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith. (Phil 3:7-9, NIV)

I think I might be knowing true liberation. I think (but might be heretically wrong in thinking that) some Christians get it ‘roughly right’ the first time around – they submit from the outset and lead suitably holy lives, invariably with blips that to my mind would be nothing more than rounding errors. Their submission is abstract (- I stopped short of saying theoretical, which might be unfair -) and considered. And I suppose if Heaven kept score they would be duly rewarded – they chose to submit, in a sense, volitionally.

My lot seems to be different. I am submitting now, but arguably only because God has twisted me into compliance, like a crooked pipe. But this submission, because to a large extent compelled, is unmeasured and full-bodied. And so it happened that yesterday on the day of an important interview, my mind was occluded by guilt and accusation and my body weak with despair. And thence came a thought that hadn’t been familiar to me in far too long – God, this interview is something that the best of people will attend, in the best of conditions and with the best of preparations, and even they will be guarded about their chances of success. Yet all I can do is to drag my body to the venue – you have to do the rest.

The last time I felt this rending incapacity had been on the floor of my room at Exeter – the day after two exams I thought I had consecutively bungled. Having drained my eyes of tears I had prayed and wrung my soul of residual hubris, and felt comfortingly vacant. Yesterday I felt able to do that again. There remains a lot to be done with me – but at least I’m not standing in the way so much anymore

how is God in His perfection (and, importantly, mercy) capable of making someone so flawed and unsustainable? how does the existence of one so imperfect (that the description becomes risibly understated) not irk Him?

the one ‘positive’ in all these is that I am now too small, worth too little, to ever be disappointed, to ever think that I am receiving less than my desert; too insubstantial for my words and protestations to find – or deserve – volume. the one virtuous cousin of shame is acquiescence. each uneventful hour is a bonus; I cherish it furtively with the jealous grasp of an imposter – but even silence is fitful and temporary. even the consistency of nullity is too soothing a punishment. the world’s only fitting response to me is an interminable, palpable, stabbing crescendo of rejection/expungement. this must be what Hell is.

Hell is, probably, also a marked path, paved with fire, with a pitchfork to one’s back. exams are looming; even the indulgent respite of mourning isn’t open to one.

da wei

amazing how expectations can change in so fleeting a period. not very long ago i really wanted a Distinction at BCL (because that was the done thing) and meet some career goals by the by. but i’m beginning to find untold comfort in feckless invisibility, in sliming down the back of my chair like the carcass of a burst pimple, glinting meekly in the nascent spring sun…

i mean there’s honestly very little to live for when even middlingly-below-average ceases to be attainable, where remorse is your best attribute. reminding myself that my family, my parents, are the reason i have to keep healthy and present, even if in so many respects i don’t deserve their (bemused but ultimately, inexplicably, unconditional) love, their confidently faithful texts, their fervent prayers on the back of nothing but my enigmatic midnight SOSes.

the thing is, villainy isn’t even a good look on me. i’m too nerdy to be smooth, too insecure to be unrepentant, too Christian (yes yes yes, even now) to be blasé. so i’m trapped between all worlds, unsuccessfully attempting to be someone i shouldn’t want to be and someone i’m not even sure i have to be. folly summarises me fitly.

but if there’s a silver lining (and lining it is) it is my realisation that i want to be a good lawyer too much. i need to want to be a decent person more. i need to crave God’s audience more. these things are simple but should be A LOT more important to me

p. 51

am dealing with (vaguely incapacitating) self-beratement of quite a different genus this time.* with exams and interviews etc the threat and fears are comfortingly external. one easily palms them off to God and leans into the axiom that there is a Plan being forged, and our moral agency and volition are subordinate to the effectuation of said Plan – this takes the heat off personal failings, which take on assuredly indeterminate significance in the end result. a ‘nasty’ interviewer or a ‘curveball’ essay question at least give us avenues to shake our fists at the Universe; we ‘cheat’ by drawing attention to the scale of our problems and dismissing (imperceptibly) the relevance of our abilities and decisions. in the course of university applications i once agonised over extracting presentable academic references from a tutor who seemed resolutely determined to dislike me but found untold comfort in prayer – the renvoi of the believer. if i was disliked by – or even, indeed, unlikable to – him, that lay beyond my powers to change, and if that state of affairs persisted – well, that must be the Plan, and so by definition could do no violence to it.

but what of failings not so easily attributed? when one has exercised his volition to bring about a repugnant result it never did lie in his mouth to say that no volition existed to be (wrongly) exercised. the notion of reality conforming to the Plan becomes unbearably far-fetched. after a certain point, surely one has to accept that the tracks were not meandering, but that the train has simply derailed, and even if ignorance of this may tolerated in a passenger sitting in coach, it surely shouldn’t be tolerated in the conductor. and thus the interminable ache that pulses with the realisation that we have managed to drive ourselves into a pit with no obvious avenue for reversion.

if there is any room at all for comfort, maybe it’s the fact that the shittier the situation we find ourselves to be in or the shittier we find ourselves to be, the more obvious it becomes that there’s nothing to be done but to trust, yet again, in an extrinsic source. minor flaws invite self-help; massive ones demand prayer – and this no less when the problems we have to address are constitutive of who we are, than when the problems can be pinned on something safely external to us. and if this at least is one thing that we can take away at the nadir of human experience and moral failure then i suppose it could be much worse than this.

“My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit;
    a broken and contrite heart
    you, God, will not despise.”

* if this blog seems disproportionately dreary i suppose it’s because positivity is easy and intuitive, and so rarely gives rise to written expression; but negativity demands assiduous examination and unpacking…

‘Sorrow is better than fear. Fear is a journey, a terrible journey, but sorrow is at least an arrival. When the storm threatens, a man is afraid for his house. But when the house is destroyed, there is something to do. About a storm he can do nothing, but he can rebuild a house’ – Alan Paton