I lived in Japan for only two years, but I made them count. The first year, I used the Seishun 18 Kippu to explore all of Chugoku. I climbed Mount Fuji during my second year. I vividly recall telling the Japanese couple whose couch I crashed that this was literally a once-in-a-lifetime chance for me. I loved travelling on the move and never needed any respite.

Since my wife’s a non-teacher, I find myself being saddled with childcare duties during the December holidays. I can probably navigate the inside of the gigantic indoor playground at AEON Mall even if you blindfold me - that’s how much time I spend there every trip.

It was during a leisurely lunch at Espresso D’ Works that I got contemplative and realised that I should be grateful for my immobile stay anyway. Simply because I got to experience time differently.

In my real life, I stride towards school, determined to complete that one task that would help me alleviate my workload and stay afloat above water. Not to mention how I might have to optimise spare pockets of time to settle admin work related to my kids. Managing my life like Tetris blocks, being hyper-conscious of time, being alert and wired.

In December, I just respond to the stirrings of my soul and do stuff that strikes my fancy at that particular moment in time. One day, I finished extracting all the Chinese idioms from past PSLE papers because I wanted to know exactly which 成语 I needed to expose my boy to. On another day, driven by the desire to declutter my photos, I wrote a blog post titled “Pros and Cons of Condo Living”. I would never have expected that people would be interested, but that post earned me over a thousand views (and counting). All because I took the time to blog about my experience. I even wrote an ode to bamboo based on all the things I learnt about this amazing plant this year.

Two colleagues in their 70s are still working as flexi-adjunct teachers at their school in spite of their retirement. I cannot understand this bloomer mindset, but I am writing this as a reminder to myself that I am the kind of person who relishes empty days so that he can do things not to be productive, but because he simply feels like it.