The title of this post (the words of Marcel Proust) is one of my favourite quotes, and it’s been on my mind this week. It’s been two years since I travelled outside of Singapore. A combination of restrictions implemented since the pandemic and having young kids – who until recently were unvaccinated – has meant that returning to the UK – or going anywhere else for that matter – has not been practical.
Singapore’s area is 279.6 square miles. It’s not a large space, but it certainly hasn’t been the worse place in the world to wait for the storm to pass. I do, however, desperately miss travel. Before the pandemic, we were always on trips and adventures – both for work and pleasure, but then in 2020 everything changed, and since then, we have spent every day on this little island.
One of the reasons we came to Singapore five years ago was to have a base to explore this part of the world as a family. And we did that well for the first couple of years. Travel, I always felt, was great for personal growth and development. There’s nothing like immersing yourself in different cultures, peoples, and environments to gain new perspectives and a better sense of what it is to be human. Coming to Singapore for me was meant to be the ultimate journey of discovery, and in many ways, it has been. But unexpectedly, that discovery has not just been about the new landscapes. Some of the greatest developments I’ve experienced have happened over the last two years. Unable to travel, being far from family, and living in a relatively new environment, have kind of pushed me into seeing everything with new eyes.
At the start of the pandemic, the whole experience was novel and dramatic, and each day brought new developments. But as the new world settled in, and we all came to realize that things weren’t going to go back to normal – in the short term at least – I found myself having to adapt to the new circumstances. There were no other options. My writing provided me with some escapism. I started to take it more seriously, and in so doing, I came to enjoy it more (quick plug – my first novel, The Madness of the Faithful, is out July 28th). The key was to make it less about the output and more about the experience of creation. I also focused more on physical and mental health and found this led to improvements in general wellbeing. I know these kinds of changes are somewhat pandemic cliché (hey, I never baked banana bread!) but ultimately what they meant is that I – and perhaps we as a family – changed more in the last two years of being stuck on a small island than over many more years of travel and journeys around the world.
It’s important to note that we have been lucky not to have been severely affected by loss or illness, during the pandemic, like many families across the globe. However, in a unique situation, new eyes came to us in a way we never would have expected. Two years on, it feels strange to reflect on this most unexpected period and the character arc we ourselves have journeyed on because of the experience.
