Written from my desk at Savills.
I crave routine like you would crave sleep or food. Which is, I cannot deal with the absence of schedule or the prospect of idle vegetation and air-conditioning at home. I need an order, a strict one, an order which stems from high school, an experience so rushed and so packed and so filled with short-term destinations — a train with a long itinerary of stops ahead of it — that I eventually staked out my entire existence on scheduling. I need things to do, even if it means mindless work, means folding envelopes and checking up names and doing things I can already tell I won’t be doing in the future.
I crave routine like you would crave sleep or food. Which is, I cannot deal with the absence of schedule or the prospect of idle vegetation and air-conditioning at home. I need an order, a strict one, an order which stems from high school, an experience so rushed and so packed and so filled with short-term destinations — a train with a long itinerary of stops ahead of it — that I eventually staked out my entire existence on scheduling. I need things to do, even if it means mindless work, means folding envelopes and checking up names and doing things I can already tell I won’t be doing in the future.
Of course, I didn’t know this was the case until I actually ended up here, in this office. The reason I gave myself for wanting an internship over the summer was the sake of getting “experience,” whatever the word, so often thrown around, actually means. Experience in the workplace, getting up at 7:30 in the morning everyday, experience wearing Oxfords and typing up spreadsheets and learning etiquette at business lunches. Experience, as I realize now, that might be necessary somewhere in the future, but is surely not necessary at the moment. I am eighteen, vaguely close to actual adulthood — and life — but am not quite at the precipice of falling into it yet. I have time. I wanted to be able to tell myself that I didn’t waste away the summer lounging around — but perhaps lounging around would have been a more recuperative use of my time.
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I like my desk. I’m by the window, a wide window enviably overlooking the Kowloon harbor. The skies are magnificent; because they’re not blocked by buildings, as so much of Hong Kong tends to be, the nimbuses and swirling cirri stretch upward to infinities. The weighty clouds, just barely grazing the Tsuen Wan mountaintops, dwarf the buildings below them, as if they were stacks of Lego and not the concrete edifices we all know them to be up close. And I also see boats drifting by — the Star Ferries, wooden junks, an odd liner — streaking the blue water white in their wakes.
I wonder when I’ll ever work my way to an office like this one.
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Something scares me about the nature of office life. It might be the permanence of all of it — the lack of a collective knowledge that this is all temporary, that this will all end some day, the way kids in high school count down the clock together to the inevitable goodbye. Everyone is here because they chose to, here until they leave; everyone is not finding their own path but already well on the way of journeying across it. Everything is set and decided — tomorrow follows today, and then after tomorrow comes the day after that, in a cycle that guarantees no end.
Maybe I’m scared of letting go of childhood and of innocence, of the promise of youth and of the freedom to do whatever you want rather than whatever is wanted of you. People here are professional, tidied, learned. They are here to earn money, to forge careers, to network — all goals I’ve never quite understood nor felt the need to dedicate myself to. Part of me feels as though it’s a necessary change, a shedding of the skin that eventually hits everyone at some point in life, but another part of me wants only to cling onto what I feel like I’m drifting away from: the summers of youth and adventure and being free from obligation.
Maybe it is simply life I’m scared of — real life, conventional life, life according to adults, and career building, and reading the newspapers over coffee in the morning and meetings in the afternoon. Life as I’ve seen people around me live, but never quite accepted that I, too, would one day start on. On the edge of adulthood, I’m scared of being flung straight off the cliff in a free fall, realizing I’ve hit the ground only twenty years from now, in a house with a job and an unclear memory of having been young once. I don’t want to wake up one day awash with pain and regret that I didn’t cling onto the top for dear life, if only just to breathe in the air at the zenith just a while longer.
Or worse, I don’t want to hit the ground feeling nothing at all, numb to the sheer happiness of what it felt like to be a teenager, the very opposite of refinement and meetings and work at 9 in the morning, lunches at 12:30, and dinners into the evenings but not going through into the late nights. I don’t want to have forgotten who I am.
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Where am I headed? Where have I been?
The answers keep shapeshifting and correcting themselves in my mind.
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I must admit I really enjoy being around the people here. We live our teenage lives surrounded by peers close to us in age and parents with decades on top of us. We don’t mingle with others going through different phases of life, have no chances to get lunch or chat on the MTR with people who are 24 and fresh out of college, or 32 and have recently gotten married and had children, or even those who are 60 and close to retirement but still have it in them to not only go for a drink with the company’s team but to be the ones chugging the most. In these three weeks at my company, I’ve been surrounded by an entire array of experiences, a long catalogue of the many stages life will eventually drag me on through at some point. A preview of what’s to come which I honestly don’t entirely hate. Strange.
A part of me thinks I’m being cynical or naïve to resist growing up. There are other joys out there, greater joys awaiting people who eventually get funneled on to a new stage in life. Interning is proof of that — hard, experiential evidence that moving on may not be as bad as I had made it out to be. I had always been attached to my youthful self — particularly the self I was at fifteen — but maybe it’s time for closure on that period of my life. Maybe it’s time I learned to let go.
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Uncertainty is a recurring motif in my life.