JadeD

My wife (in case you are wondering, she is not a stewardess or ex-stewardess) and I met up with our old school friends for a buffet dinner in a hotel the other day. Besides catching up on old times, all of us admitted one cruel fact: we couldn't eat as much as we would have eaten like when were younger anymore! How sad, it was an all-you-can-eat buffet! The food was really good, by the way.

And our conversation topics couldn't run away from those ‘good old times’ back in the hostel. Suggestions on traveling plans were quickly met with budget and annual leave constraints, kids and whatever obstacles that we could conjure up.

A friend suggested a new business idea. He was quickly met with those 'been there, done that' remarks or similar sentiments.

Assumptions that all our friends are probably leading the same life and having the same difficulties as us rendered superficial concerns for other people’s lives meaningless. And we are too tired to go into the details.

Are there no new discoveries? No new interest anymore?

“Symptoms of mid-life crisis,” a friend suggested. But we are only in our early thirties! “Yes, if we are going to live until sixty,” he said, not without a tinge of pessimism.

There is hardly anything that interests us anymore. Agreed. Our metabolic rate has slowed down. Agreed. We don’t eat as much anymore. Agreed. We are not so adventurous to try out new things like we were younger. Agreed. Newspapers reports hardly catch our attention. Agreed. TV commercials are all trying to sell things. Agreed. We are too bogged down with work, housing loans, car loans and office politics. Agreed!

Will simple and stable life give us excitement and happiness? I wonder. That was the aim for many of us, isn’t it? If everything is within our game plan and control, there is hardly any surprise. Will life still be interesting?

Perhaps we have lost our child-like curiosity. Perhaps we have stopped asking trivial questions. Perhaps we are too molded to conform. We can’t think out of the box anymore. We are too afraid to step out of our comfort zone.

We entered school with question marks in our head. We graduated with full stops.