In July I realised I had been moving through Singapore with my eyes half-closed — not literally, but in the way you stop registering a corridor you walk every day. Same lift buttons, same hawker auntie's wave, same crack in the pavement outside Blk 4 that I had stepped over for three years without seeing. So I set a small rule: before breakfast, before messages, write down one thing I noticed. Not profound. Not clever. Just true.
Day four: a gecko on the bathroom wall, tail curved like a question mark. Day eleven: the exact shade of orange the sky turns over Outram at 6:52 a.m. when the haze is low. Day nineteen: an elderly man at the void deck feeding pigeons from a paper bag, speaking to them in Hokkien as if they were relatives who arrived early. I wrote each on an index card and pinned them above my desk until the row looked like a fence of small attentions.
Attention is not a talent. It is a practice you can misplace and find again.
The exercise changed my mornings more than my evenings. I started waking five minutes earlier not from discipline but from curiosity — what would today's card say? Some days the answer embarrassed me with its plainness: wet umbrella folded wrong, neighbour's shoes outside the door, smell of garlic from someone's kitchen. Plainness is the point. The city is not short on spectacle; it is short on people who pause long enough to describe the unspectacular accurately.
By August I had stopped the daily cards but kept the habit in softer form. I notice the MRT platform gap more carefully now — that yellow line, the slight step down. I notice how hawker centres sound different at 10 a.m. versus 7 p.m.: morning is clatter and water running; evening is chairs scraping and orders called across steam. I notice my own impatience when I don't notice, which might be the most useful discovery of all.
I am not writing this to prescribe a method. I have no programme to sell, no morning routine optimised for strangers. I am writing because on day thirty-one the card said: "Rain tree outside window — one branch lower than the others, touching the railing when the wind pushes." I cried a little, not from sadness but from the relief of being present somewhere specific. Singapore is not abstract to me. It is that branch, that railing, that wind on a Tuesday.
The cards are in a box now. I might string them into something longer later. For today this entry is enough — proof that looking slowly changed the shape of my weeks without changing my address. I still live in Everton Park. I still take the same train. But the crack in the pavement has a history in my notebook, and I step over it differently: not absent-minded, not sentimental. Just aware that even cracks belong to someone's story if someone bothers to write them down.