When I started my first academic job at NIE in the 1990s, I remember a conversation with an older colleague on the cusp of retirement. Ageing wasn’t a linear process, he said, but came in sharp steps. For a long time you hardly noticed the transformations that were occurring, and felt that nothing had changed. And then suddenly a series of changes came at once.

I’ve felt this sense of sudden change in the last month. We returned to Singapore at the end of July, as one leg of a yearly migration I’ve grown used to. After the slow pace, lush greenery and small scale of Vancouver’s West End, we’re back in our high-rise HDB flat in Bukit Gombak, nestled among other tall newly painted concrete blocks with a slice of a view of the hill. Below us at night the playground’s packed with screaming children letting off nervous energy. We avoid rush hours, but the MRT always seems crowded; search for a place to sit, and you encounter slumped figures wearing headphones in the courtesy seats, refusing to meet your eye or the eyes of people more in need of respite than yourself. The weather’s been hot, too, often hitting 35 degrees. In the last few days smoke from the fires in Sumatra and Kalimantan has produced a persistent haze, and a dryness in the mouth. I remember when I lived in Singapore year-round and friends who knew Singapore well and had been away returned, they’d always remark negatively on the crowds, heat, and lack of civic consciousness, and I, having lived here without fully noticing, would feel defensive. Now I’m the one seeing with fresh eyes.

Returning I do notice the heat, the blue bins overflowing with waste that clearly isn’t recyclable, the PMDs and electric bikes you have to continually dodge on the footpaths to the MRT station. Yet none of this is new, and somehow in earlier years it didn’t bother me so much. The difference, perhaps is my age, and perhaps a sudden sharp step in ageing of the kind that my NIE colleague mentioned.  After sixty, as we’ve learned in the successive heatwaves in Europe in particular, the body deals with heat less well. Hearing also changes in subtle ways: you become more aware of, and annoyed by, background noise, but also less able to filter it out. Conversations with your partner, if you’re not careful, have little pieces missing, and sometimes you don’t want to keep on asking the person you are in conversation with to fill in the gaps. I’ve done hearing tests, and I’m not quite at the stage where I need a hearing aid, but the cognitive load is greater, and it tires you. Add to this the ageing body. I’m lucky that, compared to many of my peer group, I’m physically healthy, and yet since my return to Singapore a persistent lower back problem has returned. Again, I can manage it: I visited a physio, and made a renewed (although, given my past record, no doubt temporary) commitment to doing stretching and strengthening exercises. Yet all of this effort produces weariness, as if I’m swimming upstream against a persistent current. I no longer leap out of bed in the morning as I used to, and, if I’m at home and resting, I often find myself falling asleep after lunch.

My dilemma in responding to these changes is what precisely to do. Singapore and Vancouver now offer opportunities for active ageing, mixing different forms of physical exercise with mental stimulation. To a degree, this is all well and good. Yet, as I’ve written before, there’s a sense in which such activity may become a denial of the ageing process: one can flatten the arc of a life, but one cannot escape its overall shape. The world’s quite noisy, and I find myself actively seeking out quiet for contemplation. In conversation with younger friends, my role has often changed. Ten years ago I could advise: now I listen more, and explore alongside them. The self starts to fall away, and in many ways I relish this. And yet I do want to remain connected to the world, and especially to other generations of people, to be challenged by others who are different from myself.

I and others of my generation I’ve been talking to in the last few weeks have reached a turning point: we are now caring for only a few, very senior members of our parents’ generation, who are frail and forgetful. Spending time with the very old, rather than the memories of my own parents who have already passed, inevitably makes me think about my own and my partner’s future, with a curiosity that can tip at times into anxiety. Yet there’s also surprising joy, and a sense of discovery.

We’ve been visiting an older relative a lot since we returned. Late in life, I’ve noticed, we often become picky about food: perhaps the loss of taste means that we focus on texture, or on strong-tasting substances like durian. This relative of ours has come to like a certain kind of nut. To cover my traces, let’s say peanuts. They sample different brands that we bring: Tong Garden, Camel, and the like. We’re talking in Mandarin, and I can remember that camel is luo tuo 骆驼 but I cannot remember the tones. So I check Pleco on my iphone, itself a hand-me-down from an age before AI. I find the tonal pattern, speak it out. And then, looking further into the dictionary, I find phrases. 瘦死的骆驼还比马大。A camel that’s starved to death is still bigger than a horse. My dictionary glosses this as the intrinsically superior are bound to outdo the inferior, but I read it differently, on first sight, as no matter how much you try to fit in, how small you make yourself, you’ll still be the wrong size. 羊群里头出骆驼 seems more obvious: to stick out like a camel in a flock of sheep. As we now do increasingly in a changed world. We juggle language for a little, and then we ask: would you rather be a sheep or a horse or a camel? A horse, we are told. Why？ 马比较容易坐. It’s easier to sit on a horse. 

We eat our nuts. In this room, somehow, all those outside changes fall away. In old age, we enter a forest of words that tangle and clutch at us. In my sixties I still haven’t quite lost my way. I want to stay on the edge of the forest, or find a clearing where I might rest for a while, and look around at what is present for me now. But the woods are lovely, dark, and deep.