SEPTEMBER 4 — My tomato plant is finally starting to fruit after constant pruning, fertilising and threats.

It feels almost miraculous as on the flip side, the weeds in my garden and the vines on my fences are daily staging a hostile takeover.

Being busy and temporarily immobile from various ailments has led to me falling behind on a lot of house cleaning and yard maintenance.

I’m taking leave just to catch up and all that and gardening, while doing some physical rehab for various injuries (wrists/arms/quadriceps) so it will be exhausting but I think (I hope) it will be worth it.

You see, the happiest people I know have hobbies.

A friend of mine is obsessed with pandas, and I think that devotion, to the point of flying to China, and spending a lot of time at Zoo Negara, has kept her active—making friends, writing accounts of her time with the pandas makes her life varied and interesting.

It’s not that she lives a life free of worry as she has her own personal struggles, including with a long-term health condition that she manages as best she can.

Despairing is easy, choosing not to despair takes effort but that effort is sometimes necessary to stay sane.

We need to learn to remember

I spent a little money on Hobonichi Day (much less than I did last year, most of it on shipping) to get my planner and journal for 2025 and found myself amused, watching the mad scramble online and in-store for the same brand of planners.

Funny, so much fuss about things made of paper.

Yet last weekend, I read through my journals from 2020, and I could see on the pages the slow unwinding of my mind and the tenuous grip on sanity I had that year.

I could reflect on how much had changed, how much I had changed, in the years since and I think the extra effort to put words to the skin of dead trees does matter.

Ah, the dreams and plans I had for 2020, and how they dissipated into the ether as we lived under the tyranny of not a government, but something so small it could crawl right into the crevices of our bodies and kill us.

All viruses exist to replicate and to fight against attempts to stop them.

The conversation about low birth rates and all the hand wringing about them bother me—because insidiously it keeps circling back to the thought of encouraging women to just stay home and have babies.

We are not viruses.

The truth is infinite growth is unsustainable — something I think about as I prune my tomatoes and gardenias.

Too many leaves on my tomatoes means the nutrients go to them and not fruit, too many leaves on my gardenias and unchecked growth means I spend too much time watering them.

No, I am not advocating eugenics or culling our population.

It’s about responsible shepherding of resources and quelling the urge to act like viruses, spreading and building, resisting the calls to slow down.

The sinkhole incident makes me sad, thinking how over so many decades, we keep building things in the city without thinking whether they should be there at all.

Today it’s a person, tomorrow maybe an entire building could be sinking into the limestone caves and caverns eroded by time and leaky pipes.

Everything you know and love could be gone in a heartbeat so while it makes sense to plan for the future, you must also live in this present because it is all you truly do have, right here, right now.

Right now, I’m loosening my tendons with a foam ball, after I was done tying my tomato vines up, checking on my lemongrass, rearranging my tiniest dolls in their new, thrifted dollhouse.

Tomorrow might never come so I’ll take my joys now, as small and as mundane as they be, along with a pain au chocolat.

May you always have or find time for a pain au chocolat.

* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.