Malaysians need more time to rest and dream bigger dreams

APRIL 5 — “A friend of mine is stuck on a train,” I saw someone tweet.

It feels sometimes that for many of us, feeling stuck isn't just a public transport reality.

Just a week or so ago, I was put in a bit of a funk by what I saw as the government fighting too hard to maintain the status quo instead of promising reformation.

I still think that way but I have come to terms, and a sense of peace, with my feelings.

That was only made possible by forcing myself to fully rest on my break days and now I'm taking a week off to recharge and get around to all the things I haven't managed to do because I was too ill or busy.

My house got a deep clean. My website is up again after a disaster with my last web host and the messy process of moving to a new host.

There was time to learn about nonvolatile memory express (NVME) solid state drives (SSDs) that are the size of ordinary memory sticks, and have just installed one in my PlayStation 5.

I have also succeeded again in angering that special demographic that always gets incensed with my tweets but it's not my problem that they choose to waste their time on something I screenshotted from Facebook.

There is something lovely about the languidness of just enjoying free time, without setting goals or plans.

As fractured as my childhood was, I still have fond memories of idle moments.

I remember lying down for my afternoon nap, and watching the clouds sail by through my open bedroom window.

Sometimes I think about the many sunsets my family and I passed by in our battered (from my mother's driving) Wira and the slow drives past Likas Bay on the way home.

Then there were the quiet evenings at home reading or serene weekends at the public library. I suspect my parents loved the state librarians for being the equivalent of free childcare.

They knew I would be safe, that I would not wander off, too busy reading book after book, with the librarians keeping a watchful eye out.

At home I might be tinkering with a screwdriver with the old radio or mucking about with the family computer or perhaps even looking through random pages of an encyclopaedia.

Those seemed like idle times, with idle hands, but I would never have been as articulate or as comfortable with techy things if I hadn't had all that time to learn, and think.

The writer says every 'Malaysian's time is important regardless of stature or status, and the sooner we all realise that, the sooner we might earn a better status than being known as the country that should really start laying off the nasi lemak'. — Picture by Firdaus Latif

Now it seems people keep rushing to places. Speeding even in residential areas, as if they are the only ones who need to get somewhere.

Making their children fill every spare hour with extra tuition or religious activities seems to be the modern parental affliction.

Adults too need to switch off. It is said that Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein had sparks of ideas not after long gruelling nights but while they happened to be idling.

The plague had forced the temporary closure of the school Newton attended and while on a break at his family home, he saw an apple fall and it made him wonder just why it fell straight down. Thus were the beginnings of the law of gravity.

Sleeping on it is often sound advice. The subconscious is a funny thing and often works on things in the background but what it needs most, to do its best work, is rest.

Yet we have created this society that demonises leisure and deprioritises rest. Hustle, why walk when you can run, faster, quicker, maximise your time, hack your brain, hack your body, hack the hours of your day.

I feel quite tired just rereading that sentence.

We keep hearing people (including former prime ministers) go on and on about productivity but why is that more important than the general good, and everyone living content lives?

Why must we promote work ethics that take everything from everyone else to give to a small subset of people, who feel no gratitude for it anyway?

It is time to demand more time. Not more overtime, God no, but more reasonable hours for reasonable pay and to stop giving so much face to millionaires bleating about being forced to pay a liveable wage.

Every Malaysian's time is important regardless of stature or status, and the sooner we all realise that, the sooner we might earn a better status than being known as the country that should really start laying off the nasi lemak.

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.