New Year's resolutions can make for hard reading, especially in a year with sputtering economic growth and spiralling geopolitical risk, not to mention cost cutting and belt tightening, all of which can suck the cheer out of a festive season. Pledges to eat less, drink less and spend less just add to the gloom.
So I have decided to focus not on what I want to cut back on, but on how I want to enlarge my life.
This is no small step for a careful saver like me who has for decades embraced the Singapore ethic of squirrelling money away for a rainy day and, along with it, the modern cult of personal productivity which spurred me to purge my life of time-wasting activities such as watching television and reading storybooks.
Both seemed like indulgences I could ill afford. Instead, I have for years read almost exclusively non-fiction, the sort I need for work or for self-improvement.
Such a regimen trains you for a life that can seem awfully purposeful. But if adhered to too strictly, it fails to free you and instead tethers you to a powerful vacuum cleaner that sucks the joy out of living and leaves you wondering what you are storing away time and money for.
So this year, I resolve to do the opposite and think hard about how to waste time.
I use the word "waste" intentionally, a verb the dictionary says means to "use or expend carelessly, extravagantly or to no purpose". Its synonyms include "squander" and "fritter away".
I wish to devote this column precisely to extravagance and those aspects of life that seem to serve no purpose, at least not any that we can touch or tote up in our bank accounts or lists of achievements.
Many years ago, when I was still in school and had the time and space to wander around those magical places called libraries, linger among the shelves and delve into the books I chanced upon, I stumbled across some lines of poetry about buying "hyacinths for the soul". For some reason, that phrase enchanted me and I never forgot it, perhaps because it reminded me of that time long ago and those stories I read - stories from around the world about people and places and happenings that piqued my curiosity, fired my imagination and, yes, fed my soul.
The phrase likely comes from the work of a 13th-century Persian poet named Muslihuddin Sadi, who is said to have written these lines:
If, of thy mortal goods, thou art bereft,
And from thy slender store two loaves
alone to thee are left,
Sell one and from the dole,
Buy hyacinths to feed the soul.
Last year, I started reading fiction again and was transported to worlds I would never be able to travel to physically, no matter how big my budget. I was moved to tears by Madeleine Thein's novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, on China's cultural revolution, and thrilled that Tan Twan Eng's Garden Of Evening Mists taught me some of the history of a place I love - Cameron Highlands. I found myself wanting to tell my family and friends about what I learnt from reading those books. I cannot wait to discover more literary gems, especially those by Asian writers.
In a lecture he delivered in October 2015 on the future of reading and libraries, British writer Neil Gaiman spoke about visiting China in 2007 for the first-ever Communist Party-approved science fiction and fantasy convention. He wondered why science fiction, which had been disapproved of for a long time, was now allowed.
He asked a top official and related what this official said in reply: "It's simple, he told me. The Chinese were brilliant at making things if people brought them the plans. But they did not innovate and they did not invent. They did not imagine.
"So they sent a delegation to the US, to Apple, to Microsoft, to Google, and they asked the people there who were inventing the future about themselves. And they found out that all of them had read science fiction when they were boys and girls.
"Fiction can show you a different world. It can take you somewhere you have never been. Once you have visited other worlds, like those who ate fairy fruit, you can never be entirely content with the world that you grew up in. Discontent is a good thing: Discontented people can modify and improve their worlds, leaving them better, leaving them different."
American writer Maya Angelou stopped talking for five years after being raped at age seven. "In those five years," she said in an interview, "I read every book in the black school library. I read all the books I could get from the white school library. I memorised Shakespeare, whole plays, 50 sonnets. I memorised Edgar Allan Poe, all the poetry, never having heard it, I memorised it. I had Longfellow, I had Guy de Maupassant, I had Balzac, Rudyard Kipling. When I decided to speak, I had a lot to say, and many ways in which to say what I had to say... And I was able to draw from human thought, human disappointments and triumphs, enough to triumph myself."
Fiction, it seems, is a good waste of time.
What of music?
Just over a year ago, I was speaking to two friends whose seven-year-old daughter is now learning the cello. I mentioned cellist Yo-Yo Ma and the three of us discovered that some 20 years ago, when we had not known each other, we had gone separately to watch him play with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra at the Victoria Concert Hall. What was amazing was how well we all remembered that concert - actually I had only managed to get tickets to the lunchtime rehearsal - and how moved we had been by his playing. I had gone with a friend who is a classical music aficionado and I remember turning to him at the end of the Elgar Concerto and swallowing my words when I saw tears rolling silently down his face.
A couple of months ago, over tea in the office, a colleague surprised me by describing in vivid detail a trip he had made to Amsterdam, from Cambridge where he had then been studying, to catch a performance by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. It was clearly an experience he would cherish for the rest of his life. Since coming back to Singapore and starting work, though, he has had little time for concerts, he said. That made me sad because he spoke with such depth of feeling about the beauty of a Mahler symphony.
Why listen to classical music, or any other kind of music for that matter, especially if you have no plans to make a career of it?
Musician Andrew Balio, founder of Future Symphony Institute, a think-tank dedicated to classical music, believes classical music "opens for us a door into a space that exists beyond our physical world, and what we hear moving in the music through that space is us. The symphony takes us on a journey through the secretive shadows and the uncertain vistas of our human condition. It touches those things of value within us, and it invites them to witness the miracle of transubstantiation wherein the dross of our daily existence, however trivial or tragic, is changed into the possibility of salvation".
Mr Balio also reflects on why he thinks classical music audiences are ageing: "Obviously, our elders come to concerts not because they hope the music will make them better at maths or more successful in their careers. There is no use to which they plan to put the music they come to hear, cleverly plying it to realise their five- or 10-year plans.
"I think if we asked them, we would find that classical music for them is only about beauty. I think they would sympathise with John Ruskin, who said, 'Remember that the most beautiful things in the world are the most useless.'
"And maybe this is the real reason that audiences for classical music are aging: That it takes us so much longer to shake off the utilitarian mindset that pervades our modern world, so well-rooted it has become in our unexamined ways of thinking and being."
What would you like to waste time on this year? I leave you with that question and wish you a Happy New Year.
