New corridors, new chapters
A view from my building at golden hour.
On Friday, I left – for the last time – my office for the past two years, a cubicle in a squat building ringed by grass and paving-stones. Similar blocks nearby once housed students from the medical college next door; a new basketball court has since been built for today’s postgrads. Beyond my window, a rain tree maintained its stately shade, and beyond that you could see the flats of Bukit Merah and Tiong Bahru.
The office sat within the larger campus of the Singapore General Hospital, and my walks to work each morning would take me past the pharmacy and transplant centre, past the lobby where I would wait for visiting hours when my grandparents were admitted upstairs. A beloved Bengawan Solo used to supply coffees and kuehs for visitors, but closed midway into my first year. Likewise for the Starbucks next to the urology department; both were replaced by less familiar tenants. Other parts of the hospital, like the sheltered walkway outside the National Cancer Centre, seemed always to be under renovation, but new buildings, including the Outram Community Hospital, also appeared on the grounds.
All this added to the sense, on those brisk morning walks, that the hospital was always changing around me. Beyond the corridors of the hospital, the world of health and social care was also being transformed: I was slightly more than a year into my job when COVID-19 upended so many of the rhythms and expectations we’d come to rely on. Of course, in a much more immediate sense too, the hospital itself was never at a standstill. Cohorts of doctors came and left (I soon lost count of the friends from school who were posted there for a rotation or residency), and each day saw new patients, heartbreaks and emergencies. I was privileged, in my job, to experience some of this. Even on the difficult days, it was impossible not to walk through the hospital and be reminded of the real lives and families passing through its doors.
Slant light on the walk home.
My favourite moments were on the rare days when I could leave the office at ‘golden hour’, and see the whole hospital bathed in the warm evening glow. The campus sat on a hill, and the evening came unfiltered to settle over its buildings, turning the white walls to a pleasing pink, then bronze. Those moments were somehow always able to dissolve the daily contingencies of work with their otherworldly light; a breath, a lifted weight. On days when late evenings at the office stretched into night, the sunset sent its shadows tilting across the campus like a dial, and leaving the building afterwards, the fluorescent office lights brought a different kind of comfort.
There are many things I’ll miss about this job – fulfilling work, a wonderful team – but most of all the way in which it came to grow and form my sense of self, slowly showing me the purpose I’d unwittingly signed up to in the first place. I’ve heard it said that your first job, in that way, is like your first love. In this first attempt to write about it in the past tense, I am already beginning to feel the full weight of that comparison, along with a slow measure of how the lessons it has taught me will shape all the experiences to come. I hope I’ll keep a sense of the immediacy of life (and lives), a desire to do right by others, and perspective of the wider tapestry that surrounds my work. And as I move into my new office tomorrow, I’ll be looking out too for the windows, and the trees.