I started a new job a few weeks ago. The office is near Blok M, which means that after all these years, Blok M and I are back in each other’s lives.
I have known this place since I was around 7 years old.
Back then it was already a kind of modernized market, rows of rukos and toko kelontong packed close together, the small shophouses that sold a bit of everything. I remember a stretch of vintage book stalls in particular, stacks of old titles I was too young to read but liked looking at anyway. Nothing polished about it, nothing designed to be photographed, but not the chaos of a wet market either. It was a place where adults navigated confidently and I tried to keep up, holding my parent’s hand, mostly just taking it all in.
As a teenager I came back for a different reason. Every year there was Ennichisai, a Japanese cultural festival, and I made a point of attending it annually. I would walk between the stalls eating Japanese food, watching the ceremonies, feeling like I had found a small pocket of something I loved inside a place I had always taken for granted. I looked forward to it months in advance.
Then university took me away, and Blok M quietly fell off everyone’s map. No new development, no reason to visit. The kind of place you mention and someone replies, oh, that area? in a voice that says they have already moved on. I moved on too.
And then, somewhere in the years I was busy elsewhere, they built the MRT station. I came back after graduating and almost did not recognize it. A proper park now, full of people sitting and strolling and doing nothing in particular. New cafes and restaurants. Young people everywhere with no urgent place to be. The area felt alive in a way it never was when I was a kid gripping a hand through the market crowd.
The place had been transforming the entire time I was not looking.
Keep that thought. It comes back later.
The Banana at the Lobby
Somewhere in my first week at the new job, without planning it, I developed a ritual.
Every morning before going up, I stop at the coffee shop in the office lobby. Ice americano, always the same order. Then a banana from the minimarket next door, always the ones slightly past their best because those are what is left by the time I arrive. I eat it standing near the counter while the ice in my cup slowly melts, watching people stream in from outside with that early morning urgency that makes you feel like you should be moving faster too.
I did not decide to do this. It accumulated, morning by morning, until it became the thing I do.
Then one morning I actually slowed down enough to notice what I was tasting. The banana was soft the way overripe bananas are, sweeter than I would have picked on purpose. The ice americano was sweating in my hand. The lobby light was a bit too bring for my liking, and I just stood there. Not going anywhere. Not thinking about the day yet. Just there.
Something in me said yes. this. exactly this.
What embarrassed me later was how much it meant. If someone asked what I did before work that morning, I would have nothing to offer. I ate a banana at a minimarket. I drank lobby coffee. I existed for about four minutes before the elevator arrived. That is the whole story.
But it stayed with me the entire day, and I have been trying to figure out why.
The Invisible Audience
I have a hypothesis.
Starting a new job is peak performance mode. Everything is a first impression. You are aware of how you walk into rooms, what you say in meetings, how quickly you reply to messages. There is a constant low hum of trying to be someone who has things together.
But if I am honest, the performing did not start with this job. It is something I do everywhere, even alone. When I am in the middle of living something, a conversation, a slow morning, a walk through a park, part of my brain immediately starts composing thoughts about it. Framing it. Thinking what could have been if the sun was a bit cooler. The experience has not finished happening and I am already turning it into what it is currently not.
I am never fully in the room I am standing in. There is always a version of me in the corner, watching closely, narrating a worst-case scenario for an invisible audience that does not exist.
Which is what made those four minutes at the minimarket strange, and precious. The banana is not impressive. It says nothing interesting about who I am. It is not a story worth telling anyone. And maybe that is exactly why it works. It is the one moment of my morning where I am not performing for a single soul.
Just a person eating something before a long day.
The Things I Prayed For
Standing there one morning, somewhere between the banana and the elevator, an uncomfortable realization arrived.
Oh, to be complaining about the things you once prayed for.
Most of what I quietly complain about these days are things I used to want badly. The new job I feel anxious about is a job I worked hard to get. The commute that tires me is the commute of someone who finally has somewhere to be. The routine that feels repetitive is the stability I once worried I would never have.
Even Blok M. I spent years barely thinking about it, and now that it has become genuinely worth visiting, I catch myself walking through it half present, already composing the next activity in my head instead of actually looking around.
This is what Blok M had been trying to tell me since I came back. The place transformed while I was not looking, and it did not need my attention to do it. The park was already full of life by the time I noticed. The good things were arriving the whole time. The only real question was whether I was present when they did.
I think I have spent a large part of my life living in the wrong tense. Wanting in the past, worrying about the future, forgetting to collect what the present is actually handing me.
Blok M did not wait for my attention to change. It just changed. Which means all those years I spent assuming there was nothing worth going back for, I was simply wrong, and being wrong cost me nothing except the years themselves. That is the part that actually unsettles me. Not that I missed something. That missing it had no consequences for the place at all. Only for me.
Being grateful and present is not just a nice way to feel. It is the only way to actually receive what you spent so long asking for. Otherwise you keep moving from one version of wanting to the next, and the life you prayed for quietly turns into wallpaper. Exciting the first week, invisible after that.
The banana in my hand at 8 AM is the answer to something a previous version of me would have been relieved to know was coming.
The Four Minutes
I do not think the fix is some grand shift in mindset. It is smaller than that. It is remembering, in the middle of an ordinary Tuesday morning, that this is the thing I used to want.
Blok M waited years for me to actually see it again. The banana only needs four minutes.
I am starting with the four minutes.