- Jun 22
- 4 min read
Updated: Jun 25
I spent a random morning with my niece last week art jamming.
I am not particularly into painting but there is something calming about sitting in a quiet room for three hours just throwing random colors on a white canvas. The last time I recalled using acrylic was probably in primary school. In fact I don’t even remember what I drew. My niece is eight-going-on-nine and totally fascinated about drawing just about anything.
The studio was located on the 4th floor of a quiet Orchard shopping mall next to an upmarket cafe that had all day breakfast and an expensive looking decor. Both were under the same establishment.
Art jamming lasts for three hours, which is the approximate duration it takes to complete one painting. Each person gets one complimentary drink from the cafe and one canvas board to paint on. She took the ice chocolate while I had the sour plum ice. Towards the end, we ended up getting one additional board before heading off to have some fish and chips for lunch.
The great thing about painting (or maybe art in general) is that regardless of age or experience, there is never really an ugly picture. While some art collectors might try to put a price tag on a piece of work, this is usually tied to the reputation of its creator or that it has some cultural significance. Otherwise art is just art—it is original, perceptive and personal. You just go with the flow and draw whatever comes to mind without any expectations or the faintest idea of how the end product might look like.
For someone like me who has been trained for many years to think in terms of net present value and quantifiable outcomes, it can come off as incredibly contentious as to whether I did anything productive at the end of the three-hour doodling session. Aside from contributing to the shop’s overall top line, our paintings were most certainly far from being commercially sell-able or even “exhibition-ready”.
And then after lunch, as we were walking to the MRT station to part ways, she looked up and asked, “Can you ask mama if I can come over to play and stay over again tonight?”
Paul Graham has an interesting anecdote about how to measure the “shortness” of life, especially when it comes to spending time with kids[1].
“If Christmas-as-magic lasts from say ages 3 to 10, you only get to watch your child experience it 8 times. And while it's impossible to say what is a lot or a little of a continuous quantity like time, 8 is not a lot of something. If you had a handful of 8 peanuts, or a shelf of 8 books to choose from, the quantity would definitely seem limited, no matter what your lifespan was.”
Interacting with young children makes you wonder how much of time has passed, and also how much is left. And it will probably be just a few more years before my niece stops asking for sleepovers and starts wanting to hang out with her own circle of friends more than with me.
It can be difficult to conceptualise the shortness of life. But when you think of time in countable units, everything suddenly seems finite and few. It makes you also think about how much of your daily life can easily be consumed by simply doing stuff that you don’t like to do, or doing things that disagree with your core values.
These days I usually wake up without the alarm from the phone sounding off in my face. In fact, I seldom leave my phone by the bedside overnight nowadays. I rarely check my messages with the same frequency I did in the past.
I am even half thinking of jettisoning my Apple Watch that logs my steps and sleep down to the last digit. That precision is a constant reminder that we have become excellent at measuring everything but know the value of nothing.
At 730am, I make my coffee at home, toggling between the usual dark roast beans I get from the local merchant and burgundy-infused ones from Yunnan. After months of practice, I am glad to say that my flat white is more perfect than the ones I get from the cafes outside (I use two shots of espresso of course).
If I am overseas, I usually find the cafe that opens the earliest and am usually one of the first in-store customers that show up for the first cup of joe.
The value of an empty morning is priceless.
Mornings are when my mind is the clearest. Most mornings are reserved for coffee, reading and thinking about stuff. Other times it is reserved for sitting in a quiet space for three hours throwing colors on a white canvas with the people you love.
Life is short, never mind what the rest of the world says. There is no pride in being stuck in a perpetually busy state. Pay attention to only the things that matter, prune the bullshit, and start doing the stuff you want to do today.
“When someone contradicts you, they're in a sense attacking you. Sometimes pretty overtly. Your instinct when attacked is to defend yourself. But like a lot of instincts, this one wasn't designed for the world we now live in. Counterintuitive as it feels, it's better most of the time not to defend yourself. Otherwise these people are literally taking your life.”[1]
[1] From "Life is short", Paul Graham, https://paulgraham.com/vb.html