I really enjoy Maria Popova's blog (although I hate its name, which makes me feel slightly queasy).

Recently she wrote a reflection on Pico Iyer's Autumn Light: Season of Fire and Farewells.

Autumn, she summarizes, "is not a movement toward gain or loss but an invitation to attentive stillness and absolute presence, reminding us to cherish the beauty of life not despite its perishability but precisely because of it; because the impermanence of things — of seasons and lifetimes and galaxies and loves — is what confers preciousness and sweetness upon them."


It's not autumn in Sarawak. It's the rainy season, and the vegetation, far from dying off, is ramping all over everything.



But there's something autumnal in the air, something bittersweet that makes us feel we're poised in a moment that preludes great change. Can you anticipate nostalgia? I think you can, and it's a little uncomfortable.

Like a mosaic, this feeling is made up of a number of different pieces.

We adore, for instance, Kuching's plethora of wild green spaces, which must be such a haven for wildlife, and are such a relief for the eye. But it seems unlikely that they will last. Developers will inevitably start to infill.

And we learnt during our history walk the other week that Kampung Boyan, the lovely little area that we traverse on our way to the Botanic Garden, along with a slew of sister-kampungs all along our easterly riverside walk, are going to be redeveloped, and their inhabitants rehoused. "I am confident," says the chief minister, that "we can modernize traditional Malay villages in Sarawak."



Now, I understand that things have to change. Others will assuredly want precisely the sort of accommodation that we live in -- a modern block of flats with security provided and no garden to worry about. So developers will respond (perhaps over-respond?) to the need.

And according to an assistant minister, it is currently impossible to improve basic utilities, drainage, and roads in the traditional kampungs, let alone provide recreational parks and football fields, "as these villages are just too congested". Hence the need for change, it is argued. I don't know how the inhabitants feel, but it's certainly not unlikely that they would prefer modern housing and new facilities to their traditional homes and their highly organic setting.

But in both cases, much will undoubtedly be lost.

In similar vein, the What About Kuching festival featured a little photo exhibition on the art of the tinsmith. Spotlighted in one of Kuching's murals, the handful of surviving traditional tinsmiths in the Carpenter Street area know that they are operating in "a sunset industry". Most days we walk by, there's still a fair amount of clanging and banging going on, but it's hard to compete with mechanization, mass-production, and plastic.







It's not only the tinsmiths. We wonder about many of the traditional little shops along these historic streets. They're mostly run by older people. What will happen once this generation passes on? The river ferries, too, are piloted by old guys. What next? (Nigel would love to step in as a boatman, but unfortunately the terms of our visa prohibit commercial endeavours...)

My mother, at probably the same sort of age that I am now, used to hate all the building that was transforming our island home. She would regularly lament: "Soon there won't be a green field left." I used to react against her conservatism, and defend the impetus for change and "progress". And I still do, in many ways. I understand that the beautiful Kuching we fell in love with can't be preserved in aspic just for our pleasure and convenience. And it is still beautiful, make no mistake. Nevertheless, I feel saddened by the thought of imminent loss.

Iyer argues that Japan has always had a particularly perceptive take on transience: "We cherish things, Japan has always known, precisely because they cannot last; it’s their frailty that adds sweetness to their beauty... Autumn poses the question we all have to live with: How to hold on to the things we love even though we know that we and they are dying. How to see the world as it is, yet find light within that truth...

"The main temple in Nara has burned and come back and burned and come back, three times over the centuries; the imperial compound, covering a sixth of all Kyoto, has had to be rebuilt fourteen times. What do we have to hold on to? Only the certainty that nothing will go according to design; our hopes are newly built wooden houses, sturdy until someone drops a cigarette or match."


(The Japanese philosophy of "wabi sabi" apparently also involves a respect for imperfection and an acceptance of the natural cycle of growth and decay.)

As scientist Alan Lightman puts it: "I don’t know why we long so for permanence, why the fleeting nature of things so disturbs... [I]n every nook and cranny, nature screams at the top of her lungs that nothing lasts, that it is all passing away... Oblivious to our human yearnings for permanence, the universe is relentlessly wearing down, falling apart, driving itself toward a condition of maximum disorder."

Yet, despite this clear message all around us, we resist and regret change.

Lightman continues: "If against our wishes and hopes, we are stuck with mortality, does mortality grant a beauty and grandeur all its own? Even though we struggle and howl against the brief flash of our lives, might we find something majestic in that brevity? Could there be a preciousness and value to existence stemming from the very fact of its temporary duration?"

What to do then? Well, I guess we need to roll with the changes, rather than fling ourselves fruitlessly against them. And I suppose we can do our bit to preserve what's precious, and help cushion those buffeted by the negative effects of change.

And for sure, we need to take care not to lose our appreciation of today by worrying that its joys won't last... Carpe diem.