Finding joy in sudden detours (VIDEO)

JULY 3 — I’d planned to write about MacOS this week but that will hold for a bit.

Right now I’m on a bus — getting on the first one that came my way because it was raining too hard to walk to the train.

An 18-minute walk turned into an hour-long detour and it gave me time to think about what I wanted to write here.

There were things I was happy about — I was out of the rain, I wasn’t paying RM40 in Grab fares, I now knew how to get to various places via the bus and my train ride would only be 10 minutes long, once I actually made it to the train.

It got me thinking about the many times my life had taken an unexpected turn.

From aspiring programmer to magazine editor to PR executive to columnist slash sub-editor and various gigs in between, it’s been a wild ride.

File picture of luxury megayacht Nord anchored in Hong Kong waters on October 7, 2022. According to the author, working in a media organisation can feel a bit like being part of a ship’s crew. You’re hoping the captain knows where the ship is going and in the meantime you’re doing your hardest (like everyone else) to make sure the ship doesn’t sink. — AFP pic

I’d never been the ambitious sort and I thought I’d be living a quiet picket fence kind of life and yet here I am right now, writing my column on a bus.

Last week was my last as a sub-editor and no, I haven’t gone anywhere. Same workplace, different responsibilities, new working hours and job title.

Working in a media organisation can feel a bit like being part of a ship’s crew. You’re hoping the captain knows where the ship is going and in the meantime you’re doing your hardest (like everyone else) to make sure the ship doesn’t sink.

It’s just funny for me because I’d followed this ship’s crew from another boat and another captain.

Over the years, I’ve seen colleagues disembark to other shores and once in a while they’d come back onboard.

The world has changed in the over 10 years I’ve sailed with this particular crew. It’s become more of a challenge to face headwinds and rough seas, sailing past the grim wreckage of other boats or those with ever-shrinking crews.

This ship and its name has held despite numerous coats of paint and fixes, as well as too many people disrespecting what still is the first and oldest newspaper of the new federated Malay states, predating even the formation of Malaysia.

While “The Paper That Cares” is no longer the paper’s official tagline, I’d like to think that the people that still get up every day to keep it running do care — about the stories, about its readers and about each other.

Whatever the future brings, I will face it like I have every change in my life, by taking a deep breath and a step forward.

I leave you with Fuji Kaze’s Working Hard and like he sings, I will try to “trust the process and be brave.”