In a week’s time I’ll have my last class meeting of the semester. I’ll be finished with required coursework, although I am registered for the Cross-cultural Counselling course that is offered over the summer, and still in two minds whether to take it. I still recall my first class in the MEd program, in September, 2019, before the world changed: our first counselling role plays in a room that is now shut up, sitting opposite each other without masks, or any real idea of what masks were. We’ll finish our last class via zoom, and I’ll say goodbye to that little grid of faces, that constant watchfulness, that has become a little too familiar. And then, for the first time since I began the program, I won’t dive into preparation for a new semester. My practicum does not start until September. And it does not seem that we will return to Singapore. Last month, ANA emailed us to say that our flight was cancelled: rebooking would involve a 12-hour layover in Haneda, with the transit hotel closed. We tried other airlines, but there were growing complexities: quarantine at both ends, and the need for tests to transit through Taiwan. In the end, we decided to wait. And as we wait, COVID-19 has suddenly returned again in BC in a third wave, spiking up, with the highest daily case count yet recorded. Vaccines are coming, but slowly, and there are new restrictions, with restaurants closed for dining out. And all of this is against the backdrop of an early spring, with other natural waves rising, cresting and breaking. The cherry blossom is here in the West End, first like a veil or thin pink cloud on the trees on Haro or Nelson Street, and then slowly thickening until it dazzles the eyes. There are magnolias, too, with blossoms as big as my hand on their thin leafless branches, the colour growing more intense at the base of the flower, so that they look as though they have been dipped into purple ink and then pulled quickly out.

In learning counselling skills, I do feel that I’m now past an important turning point. Last week, I had my evaluation at the end of the intensely supervised practicum held at UBC, the one that we call Clinic in our program. The responses from supervisors were positive, focusing on my strengths. My basics are in place: the ability to listen, to affirm, to pace the session while following the person I am in conversation with, to wait at times and at others to think of what question to ask. It’s like learning a musical instrument, perhaps: I can play, even if still relatively unskillfully, and I have a sense of how, through practice, I can develop. One of the things that intrigues me is that I’m beginning to develop a sense of flow in the counselling process, something which I’ve felt in other areas of my life: in teaching, in public speaking, and also in writing. When words somehow come out of your mouth and, inexplicably, arrange themselves beautifully. Or when, in writing, you begin to shape words, and then edit, and follow a line of story or revision simply because it feels right. You are becalmed in an ocean of letters or sounds, and then suddenly a wind fills your sails and you begin to move, slowly at first but then with increasing certitude. Something like that is beginning to happen in session now from time to time. And it’s realised through an aesthetics of the counselling process, which I can think of both terms of narrative — without the theoretical apparatus that narrative therapy brings—and in terms of poesis. You hear a flat story, the kind of summary that you get in novels that links scenes together. You listen to this story, and then you begin to work with it, to ask your interlocutor to make it richer, to slow things down, to choose a scene that you might experience again in real time. You listen for images and metaphors, elaborate them, and together follow them back and then forward into the present. This summer I want to go back to Lorraine Hedtke’s work on the Crafting of Grief, and to think more about wider ways in which I can understand these aesthetics, the flesh and bones of counselling as a healing art.

And then there’s that summer to come. I’m grateful for the time that I’ll have to explore. I’m already looking forward. In the last couple of weeks I’ve also had a few experiences that show me that I’ve turned a corner away from academia, but not perhaps from scholarship. A seminar I gave via zoom in which I’m aware that I’m a little too distant now from that community of scholars that I was once part of. Another book workshop in which I could contribute historical knowledge of Singapore, but not quite speak strategically as part of that community. Yet I also sense a way forward, when the archives open, and when the panic of the pandemic recedes, a return to work on much smaller, but more focused projects that explore particular histories. In the Fall I’ll be immersed in practicum, and the world of work that surrounds it. But for the summer I get to wander a little, to follow a few paths, to live in the moment and attend to others, while always a little worried that the lassitude of aging will sweep me up. Today on English Bay, the leaves of the horse chestnut tree by the bandstand were just beginning to open, tiny tents of green. In four months the trees will be heavy with spiky capsules, splitting open to pith and then mahogany of the seed: I’ll look back, I’m sure, and wish I had done more.