Spring Chicken

Two hours into the 26-hour journey, I was suddenly reminded of how I felt last year after visiting Ottawa. I'd told myself I would never go on such a long and tiring journey again. Clearly amnesia ruled, seeing how I selectively forgot the bad and remembered the good. Quite clearly too it wasn't the best way to start this journey - with stomach-churning dread. So there I was, doing mental sums every 15min to calculate how much more of the journey was left.

Surprisingly, what helped were the pilates exercises - the action of tightening core abdominal muscles seemed to make the journey less unpleasant. Perhaps it's the physiology of tightening the right muscles that made me sit up better and last longer, or perhaps it was simply a way of distracting my bored-till-insanity mind.

I guess I got a workout - core muscles, as well as all other muscles to pull my "half my universe is in this suitcase" luggage from Singapore, through Seoul to Vancouver, and finally Ottawa (I was under the weight limit by just 100g!). So imagine my surprise when I finally met my Canadian contact and the first thing she said was "My, you look really energetic!"...

Given it was already 1am in the morning + "freeze your socks off" night winds, we had pretty decent conversation on the way to my place. From what she briefly described about herself, it's evident that she's a veteran in instructional design. So when she asked and I told her how old I was, she chuckled and said "Spring chicken!" [Ok ok, part of the context is also that she has 2 kids about my age, who are working in Vancouver. So I could well be her daughter.]

Indeed. There is so much to learn - not just about what's in the books and what happens in reality, but also about how people learn from the times they fall and fail. It sounds cliche, but my greatest lessons have really often come from my mistakes. Perhaps my mistakes reflect my finiteness, and that finiteness renews my hope and the promise that I don't walk on in my own strength.

No matter how old "hen" we get at doing the things we do, let's keep a "spring chicken" attitude, so that we won't shortchange ourselves of the learning possibilities :-)