33 Smiles

Thank you.

What a strange and confusing year this has been. As I mark the first day to the rest of my life, I have decided to start it with a smile. It's hard you know, smiling. I have always been amazed at people who serve for a living, how they have to smile even when they don't feel like it. It's the easiest thing to do, doesn't cost a cent and yet the hardest thing when things are just not happening. But today I started smiling, with a call from an eccentric aunt who heaved God's blessings on me via the phone, my mum who cornily added that before you know it, you're forty. Thanks mum. After a detoxifying morning purge in the loo (care of a detox kit I recently purchased for myself) and changing to work clothes to dance mixes of Ayden's "Believe In You" I was on my way... music blasting in my ears. I get up the train like I normally do. And I squeezed a smile. What I normally don't do. It's a phone text greeting from one friend, and then another. I was soon smiling again.

After Amran (Ayden) my best friend died I found that smiling was something nearly impossible to do. At least one that was wholehearted. Back when we were all taking sides to who was right when the Americans showed their bully hands and discussed the horrors of dying with a very bad case of flu that was ironically named after Hong Kong, I was busy trying to hold an impossible fort made of a rag tag team of professional misfits (myself included) in a company that was an industrial misfit of it's own, Amran was becoming Ayden with diamond of a future in his hands. Why I gave up what I was naturally good at (to work at miracle-making for a staple pay) no one will ever understand. I was escaping through the success of my friends in the only way I know how. I held my hands together waiting for the applause for my friend's future. Then the tragedy of all tragedies struck, and Amran died suddenly. I was totally lost and totally out of control. My colleagues noticed that even my signature smile and laugh was gone. My best friend of 27 years was now gone. A humbling reminder of our own fallibility. It was September 11 2001, the Iraq Invasion and SARS all rolled into one for me, believe it.

Fast forward to now. I am thirty three today and wondering what's going to happen. Thirty three is truly monumental, I mean, Jesus died when he was thirty three and I wonder if I will ever do anything monumentally important at all. I am once again, back doing the creative work that I have loved and hated. In the past I would have pampered myself with a silly expensive gift, but this year it's a detox kit made up of tea bags and pills. Maybe this year I want to give myself cleaner colons. We all change, people. : )

So many things have happened in their place and a reminder of God's incredible presence. Take notice of this beauty everyone, whatever religious inclinations you have and believe it. It was a year of unimaginable losses. But it was also a year of fantastic gains as well. All the incredible new people that have made their way into my life and given me new meaning and the ones who stayed with me through the thick and thins this far. You know who you are. Your words and actions that give me strength. Your heart that makes space for forgiveness. It reassures me of God's magic. The magic that gives song to speechless mouths and smiles on barren hearts. If it is anything I learnt, it is this: that everything can and does fall apart. But it is only with our courage and strength from God, through His pocketful of angels that rescues us, puts us back on our feet and pushes us all forward to pick up the pieces again--one by one. I am aware of this strength. I have seen it in one way or another, from your kind words over a good coffee, a movie, an email, a prayer and of course, your smile. If it is only one short life, it is indeed a rich one with people like you in my life.

Thank you for your thoughts. Thank you for YOU. And thank you for always putting a smile back in my life. I write my songs with you in mind.

Thank you with all my heart.

Jef Tan

11 November 2003