Shoelaces are strings that only complicate your life

I went for my usual CIP session at Bishan Home last week. At the end of it all, I just wanted to cry.

S and I helped the residents with basic motor skills, and we were assigned to helping out with shoelace tying. I had particular difficulty with that, because in all my 9 years of shoelace enlightment I had only attempted bow tying, not threading it through the holes. Well, I didn't die from a fit, and within 10 minutes I was managing well, surprisingly.

It takes only a few minutes for 'normal' people to learn such trivial skills, but to these residents, we had to painstakingly explain to them; simple instructions, clear and slow and repetitive. Turn by turn they sat in front of us, innocent smiles and childlike curiosity, enthusiasm and questions galore.

"Jie jie", they tugged at my sleeve, "teach me how to tie my laces, ok?"

Then they eagerly sat themselves down, all eager and squirming with excitement. Mind you, they weren't children of 4 or 5, but grown men and women into their 50s. One of them took up a shoe marked "Ah Yong" and promptly started tugging at the laces to pry them loose. I was apprehensive at first, and wondered how I should even start telling them the right way to undo them, much less thread them in and do up the bows and the works.

"Cross them over. Yes, yes, that's right. Now make a small circle like this. No, no. Don't thread them through any hole you like." Each directive had to be accompanied by the corresponding action. Some got it, but some didn't. Even after we had demonstrated almost 5 times or so, and guided them through every hole, every cross, every loop and every knot.

And somehow I didn't get frustrated. I wanted to cry. Whether it was shame, or guilt, or happiness I do not know.

Because each of them gave me a forgotten smile, a smile that had always been lying dormant at the back of my vaguest memories, and now I saw it again, for the first time in many years. I had forgotten, because they weren't those Colgate ad smiles- in fact they were smiles pieced effortlessly out of decayed teeth, dentures, and missing teeth. A correct knot, a right step, a loop done well. Each of that was enough to earn a smile, and a kind of inexplicably simple glow in their eyes.

So complicatedly simple. Too difficult for me. All too natural for them.

And to think that once I could do it so easily. Little Cathy who loved to sing, who loved to play, who loved giving people toothless mischievous grins and who loved blowing kisses.

The woman Catherine who only smiles for ads with her straightened pearly whites. Who looks almost airbrushed pretty during photoshoots, simply cannot smile. All she does is cry. And cry. And go crazy.

"Jie jie! Jie jie! Look!" Their smiles almost wounded me. One held up a fully done up shoe, eyes turned into slits out of sheer joy.

They all had their shoes labelled, yet this didn't stop them from sharing them for the shoelace lesson. We're the weird ones. We're so unwilling to share what isn't marked in black and white. We take over lands, take over hearts, take over minds, and change a person completely, and they're not really "ours".

They colour, and I look over their work. It's all colourful, meticulously filled in with colours of their choice. And when I say their choice, I mean that they really do choose them at random. Blue for the face, red for the skin, purple and all else for the hair- a wild riot of all the wrong colours.

But who are we to say they're doing it all wrong? Maybe this is what they see in their hearts. No conformity; no convention, just uniqueness, just something taken out of an untainted heart and expressed on paper. How would you know this isn't the perfect, most idealistic way to see the world? To see us, not merely as people with the "right, normal" colours, but seeing ourselves as our hearts do.

But can I? Can I bring myself to? Can I stop this thing that wills me going mad?

I don't want to go crazy sometimes. Do you think it's fun to go delirious with goodness-knows-what emotions all jumbled and mixed in all the wrong proportions?

I don't want to grab that pack of medicine on my desk too. I want it all to stop.

I just want to be simple. You want me to be so.

So when I stop posting entries, you'll know I've changed for the simpler.