An important part of who I think myself to be as a person is taking the shortest route possible. What can I say? Work smart, not hard. Efficiency is the name of the game. I’m the guy who will zip through crowds, torso twisting this way and that. I’m the guy who clicks his tongue in irritation when my bus is halted by a perfectly-timed red light. I’m the guy whom Ross Gay befuddles when he exhorts the merits of dilly-dallying.

But what all this means is also that I’m the guy who never takes a second, minute, or hour to appreciate what whizzes by him. The satisfaction of having reached in the quickest time possible is empty in the sense that the process in between is milled down to checkpoints to be optimised, not scrutinised. The mindset of speedrunning through anything and everything is ultimately founded upon a disdain of the now and impatience for a future perceived to be better than whatever the world can offer me right this moment. In other words, I am restless. In other words, I am unsatisfied. In other words, I am unhappy.

Which is why I’ve been trying to take stock of my surroundings, starting with my commute. This is the first time I’ve had a daily commute, since I was in secondary school anyway, that has been anything more than 15 minutes long. A shocker, I know. The walk, train, and bus combined takes up about 2 hours total each day. And, trust me, the amount of people doom scrolling throughout the journey would astound you. I’m trying not to do that. Every time I glide past Lower Seletar Reservoir I want to see how the sun breaks through the clouds, the hue it lends to the sky, and in turn lends to the water, an osmosis of light. Every time I slink past the colonial houses I want to imagine who’s living inside, and who before that, and who before that, up till I reach the British guy who named these quarters, because of whom the bus stops I hop over are called After Pakistan Road and Opposite Auckland Road West. To put it more simply, I’ve been trying to make my commute not apart from my day, which would make my experiencing of it shorter, but instead a part of my day.

If I really think about it, this isn’t really about commutes. It’s about NS, and by extension, any period of my life that I would rather fast-forward. But to treat these 2 years as a commute to blaze through with the least suffering possible would be to let 2 years of my youth go by unattended. Is to ignore the things I could learn, only in frustrated anticipation of the things I want to learn in the future. But that’s not how it works. Living without learning every second is to live in a constant state of stasis, which is in fact, a constant state of deterioration. So even though I would like nothing more than to be in New York right this second, if I’m in Sembawang instead, I might as well gaze at the beauties around me anyway. I might as well pay attention to the sun whenever it rises, which, a miracle, is every day.

There's no good reason why sportsmanship should exist. No athletic achievement is founded upon goodwill, but is instead propelled by going higher, faster, and stronger. No economic model that pits two parties against one another settles into a state of equilibrium in which both sides cooperate. And no historical experience informs us that the winners are the ones who play fair. On all logical bases I simply can't think of one.

On the other hand, there are plenty of terrifically sensible reasons why sports should exist in the first place. An inherent trait within the human condition is a general dissatisfaction with the current state of things, which is mostly what has allowed us to flourish into what we have become: world-owners. This inevitably begets an unslakable thirst for self-improvement, a thirst that all athletes possess to some extent. Furthermore, community and tribalism, two sides of the same genetic coin, are what help the us survive against the them. It's a no-brainer that in a society beyond primitive spear-fighting we have developed a more civilised (or at least televised) method of competition in sport. The evolution from flint arrowheads to footballs has thus largely followed a straight line.

And, really, there is no ostensible difference between sport, and play, and games, and war, for that matter. Where we locate these activities on the spectrum of infantilism to masculinity doesn't stop them from sharing the common genome of being two (or more) parties attempting to best one another on some arbitrary metric of success. In that sense the only thing that separates military showdowns and Jenga is the size of the stick you wield.

And so, just as there shouldn't be strikers rescinding penalty calls after a referee's mistake, there really shouldn't be any reason for German and English soldiers, on a cold winter night in the trenches, to emerge into one another with a busted football and Christmas songs tickling their throats like cocoa. Nor should kids let other kids use the slides first.

But, indeed, it happens.

Of course, I've deliberately left out the most intuitive conclusion, which is that all humans are irrational, which in turn means irrationality is all human. Of course sportsmanship doesn't make any sense; how much of the stuff we are made on does? And so, the comforting corollary is that what makes us human, setting aside the pursuit of ever-increasing goals, is to recognise that those in the same pursuit are as human as ourselves, animating us to hobble towards the finish together after a nasty fall, or agree to share a gold medal with a language-eschewing handshake, or forfeit an online chess game when your opponent has WiFi woes.

Humans like to think we are solitary creatures, but we can't be. We must be perceived by others, constantly, in order to maintain any semblance of sanity or identity. Sportsmanship, in a way, is to perceive; to acknowledge; and to respect. And as a result, without sportsmanship, sports itself becomes hollow as an Olympic flame. It's only when we light others' torches that we can all bathe in the common glow.

I am a poor wayfaring stranger

I'm travelling through this world of woe

Yet there's no sickness, toil nor danger

In that bright land to which I go

Since watching Sam Mendes’ 1917, I’ve never been able to forget the haunting melody of the film’s musical pièce de résistance, the folk song “Wayfaring Stranger” sung by a despondent soldier to his exhausted compatriots in the heart of a French forest. That moment spoke so much to me: present in his voice was a desperate helplessness, bespeaking an inability to deal with the trauma of war, but equally a maturity in understanding one’s own mortality, as he yearned for the eternal salvation of heaven. For sure, that is a chilling thought to come from the mouth of a twenty-something; perhaps for that reason, I shelved away that standout scene as a nugget of purely fictional brilliance. Yet, having enlisted in the army myself, and having heard many an army song, I can’t help but revisit this memory in a different light: his poignant tune is now so deeply personal to me, not just the stuff that films are made on, but an anthem of my own life. Indeed, there is such a subtle importance to army songs; as vignettes of military life, they simply have so much to say — not just about the experience of warfare, but how each soldier’s human experience is informed by these extraordinary circumstances.

To me, army songs are staggeringly beautiful — despite, or maybe because of, their immense crudeness. For this group of adolescent males, their chants are interspersed with cheeky levity, and more often than not sexual innuendo. In one audacious misdirection, one transforms the sombre SAF pledge into a proclamation of one’s imminent freedom on Book Out Day; another pokes fun at the SAF’s shoddy military equipment, describing subpar rifles firing backward. Yet, juxtaposed with this childlike mischief, there coexists an equally palpable recognition of the grimness of one's circumstances; to be forced, either by governmental decree or extraordinary wartime situations, to trudge the mud beside strangers is an inevitably heavy responsibility. In a soldier's psyche, and therefore in the songs he sings, the threat of one's own mortality always looms overhead; mix this with bawdy, playful verse, and the result feels both jarring yet viscerally appropriate.

In C130, the song in which soldiers recount parachuting from a military aircraft, we playfully describe paraphernalia mishaps: “If my chute doesn’t open wide / I got a spare one by my side / If that one doesn’t open too / Oh hard ground I am coming for you!” Here, the morbid becomes comical instead, as one muses about falling in various inconvenient locations: “If I land in Sentosa / send me back by cable car” is as Singaporean a remark as it is undoubtedly hilarious. Yet, the tone sustains a drastic transformation, ending the song on a grave note: “Tell my mom I’ve done my best / Now its time for me to rest / Tell my girl I’ve done my best / Silver wings upon my chest.” In a military culture so undergirded by toxic masculinity and misogyny, this plaintiff cry to one’s female loved ones sounds so very human; furthermore, the earnest image of angel wings escapes cliché and is an unexpected moment of welling emotion.

Beyond the lyrics, I've always been struck by just how chilling the melodies are. There is a certain moving quality to any form of communal singing, evoking a beautiful unity against common odds. Yet, while choirs sing to an audience, and football fanatics chant to each other, the shared tune of a marching song is for no one to hear (except perhaps your sergeant rather tickled by the whole charade). In that way, I've noticed how lonely marching songs sound, only meant to dissipate into thin air. "If I die, will you bury me / with my rifle and my buddy and me" For those who've heard the song, you'll know that each melismatic syllable of "bury me" sounds like a desperate cry, calling out to anyone else on the front lines, to preserve some shred of human dignity for a comrade by embedding him into the very earth he once tread, a final avowal of death.

Of course, it is important to note that, for me and my fellow National Servicemen, the cognisance of one's mortality is a performative one for the most part; realistically, we will never be activated to fight in our lives, and our military experience will be a 2-year thorn rather than a mortal threat. Yet, regardless of whether such morbid subject matter constitutes posturing, there remains a sincere recognition that the probability of war is non-zero, which is a genuinely unsettling realisation to grapple with for these boys freshly extruded from adolescence, myself included.

Left, left, left right left. For all soldiers, that is how life goes on — one step, and one song, at a time.

written in collaboration with cat k

There were seven saga seeds on the ground before him. Each was bulbous and shiny — and so, feeling inexplicably drawn to them, he picked them up, lodged them in his pocket and continued on his way to the cemetery. What he didn't realise, though, was that time had worn through these pockets, and by the time he arrived, he had left a trail of little red dots following him. He swept her area, laid his offerings, mumbled his laboured attempts at one-sided conversation; it was only then that he turned around, jolting when he realised his mistake. Yet, something compelled him to leave them there, perhaps as a quiet symbol of his journey, for someone else to discover. And so there the saga seeds lay, forgotten, until it began to rain.

. . .

There were seven saga saplings in the ground before him when he returned.

He was surprised when he saw this row of little soldiers marking the way to her, the long absence having left those seeds behind in memory. He knelt down beside one. In his heart, where there once was love, pain, wistful grief, there now sprouted a nascent wonder, an amazement at how such luxuriant beauty could flourish in so desolate a place.

An idea struck. Carefully loosening the soil around the sapling next to him, he lifted its roots from the dirt before walking towards her grave, plant cradled in his arms. With one arm he splayed the grass into a makeshift well, and with the other lowered the sapling into its new home, the soil under which she lay; until he sensed they became one, root and bone intertwined.

. . .

There were seven saga trees before him when he returned again. He stood in front of the one apart from the rest, its wide swaying branches towering over her headstone. Above, the tree's crown, its undulating leaves scattering crystals of light; below, a sea of saga seeds, rubies shining jewel-bright, blanketing the uneven earth.

A distant memory returned, then, from all those years ago. Pausing ever so slightly, he crouched to trail his fingertips over each tiny red bead. He picked up just seven, tucked them into his pocket, and walked away.