I was at Peets, my favourite coffee house in Los Angeles one morning, when I spotted a homeless lady, struggling to push her makeshift home, her shopping cart with all her overspilling possessions. It looked as if she had tried to fit the contents of three shopping carts into one. The cart was on the verge of toppling and she was struggling to get it up the curb, which she eventually did.

The things we hold on to, might not always be physical things. But we are often rooted by the things that we hold dear. My good friend Ann, who recently passed away, left behind receipts from purchases of TV dinners, letters of complaints to the same manufacturers of TV dinners complaining about the decreasing size of their meatballs; she left behind Cat Fancy magazines and dusty angel figurines.

I myself am guilty of being a ‘karang-guni’. When I first went to Boston in 1996 to study music at the Berklee College of Music, all I had to my name, was a purple suitcase, filled with some books, my blanket, some clothes and toiletries. I remember my roommates looking at me, eyes wide with surprise and chiming almost in unison : “You came all the way from Singapore and you only brought that one suitcase?”

Fast forward to today and I can hardly find the space to store Claire’s toys, my books and the rest of the barang-barang I have accumulated over the years.

Just as a lot of Ann’s physical possessions had to be donated or thrown away, I’m sure I’ll be embarrassed at how much junk my loved ones will have to get rid of after I’m gone from this earth.

But perhaps it’s the intangible things that might prove harder to discard.

My attitudes, my pride, my pre-conceived notions, my complacence, my last-minute procrastinating ways…my bad habits, my stubborn ways.

What do we hold dear?

Are the things that we hold dear weighing us down and keeping us from flying?

One of my favourite places to visit in Los Angeles is a rustic Benedictine monastery up in the foothills of the San Gabriel mountains, about an hour’s drive from where I live.

Clambering up the hill from the monastery, one finds the cemetery where the monks and the oblates following the order of the St. Benedict are buried when they pass from this life.

With its rows of handmade concrete crosses, the sprinkle of Joshua trees and the soft, occasional hum of the wind, I’ve always found it a place of peaceful serenity, where one can contemplate the brevity of life, and come face to face with the reality that to dust we shall all return someday.

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One of my favourite storybooks is 'The Giving Tree' by Shel Silverstein.

The themes of love and sacrifice are intrinsically intertwined in our lives and it helps to always reflect on where we are, where we've come from and where we are going.

This column is my 'journal' of sorts, to explore the intersection between the roots and wings of this life.

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It always strikes me, whenever I read the names and the short memorials inscribed on these crosses, that nowhere is it mentioned on the loved one’s tombstones, what role they had in their careers, how much they earned, or how many possessions they had. Instead, oftentimes, ‘Beloved Mother’, ‘Dearest Father’ and even ‘Beloved Son’ or ‘Loving Wife’ are the descriptions that are left as a bookmark of the person’s life.

And so it should be, for the only thing we can take with us from this life are the relationships we cultivate with one another, the joy of knowing that we gave of ourselves in love, the peace that comes from making a difference in someone else’s life…when it comes down to it, these are the things, the intangible things, that will be worth accumulating in life. These are the things that don’t take up much physical space, and yet will leave its permanent mark, on the hearts and minds of those who matter the most.

Top photo from here.

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