Money/ Time

I have been volunteering with T.H.E.S. ever since the start of the AY2014/15 semester 1 and the first elderly that I visited was Uncle T. Ever since then, I have regularly been arranged to visit him. With today’s visit, I might have most probably visited him for 7 times and had listened to numerous stories from him. Sometimes those stories were even repeated for a few times, over and over to me. But nevertheless I kind of deciphered a different message out of those stories all the “time”.

For those unfamiliar with Uncle T, he is an 84 (turning 85 this year) year old visually impaired man who lives alone. Although most of us tend to speak Hokkien to him all the time, he is actually a Teo Chew and usually speaks Teo Chew. He does not have any children and neither did he settle down to get married. All that he has are just some of his living siblings and nieces/nephews who occasionally call/visit him.

Due to his visual impairment, he usually stays at home and spends most of his “time” in silence; no radio, no television and no other entertainments but only the sounds of alarm clocks ringing at stipulated timings for him to keep time. The only “time” he gets out is when he needs to settle some paperwork at the bank with the social workers or when the volunteers bring him down on a weekly basis to a nearby coffee shop for his favourite buttered coffee. That would also be when he gets to finally have some proper human interaction and do his one-week’s-worth of talking with the volunteers. Based on my observation, he does not usually seem to be really keen on engaging a two-way conversation with people; instead all he wants is to most probably speak his mind off after being silent for a week. Judging by the fact that I am an extroverted person myself I can really relate to the feeling of finally being able to speak and be listened to after being silent for a long “time”.

Uncle T lost his sight at the age of 68 59 and this would also mean that he had been not seeing things for about 16/17 25/26 years. The things he shared with us tend to always be about old “times” and I felt that the concept he have about the world may be fixated at whatever that happened before the “time” he lost his sight; the 90s and before. He may not be really well educated and his understanding about the world and society may not be as well-versed as most other elderly (especially those who worked as PMET) I met along my life. But from all the sharing from him, I knew that he certainly experienced lots of things and had indeed been through a really tough path.

He worked in several different jobs throughout his life. Some really paid well, while some were purely hard, manual labour. Some of the jobs he did include, selling buns/ drinks/ fruits at the roadside stall, radio technician for the British Army, cleaner and as a construction assistant who fills up sand trucks. Of all the “times” he shared his past careers to us, he never failed to share about how much he earned working in those jobs and how hard it was to earn “money”. (The only thing missing is that he did not seem to remember the year he did those jobs, and that made it quite difficult to relate the value of the money in those days)

He will regularly share about a Shanghainese friend of his who earns big bucks working as an aircraft engineer and also mention some other past volunteers who had graduated and are busy with their careers. Initially when I heard him talking about how people are earning lots of “money” out of their careers and are having comfortable lives, I would not deny I actually felt that he was being rather envious of people earning more than he what he probably did. I once replied him, saying that the jobs most of those examples he stated are not as easy as what he thought and that those people need to bear lots of responsibilities and duties in order to be justified with their pay.

However what I failed to understand is another message he was trying to convey. It was that many people during his time were in-fact not as fortunate as us. Most families cannot afford to send their children through school, let alone university education. Graduating with a degree during Uncle T’s time would also mean something really big to a person’s family that would bring pride and glory. It was very unlike today where it is quite common for people to either be able to clinch scholarships/ sponsorships, bank loans or to have parents who can afford to pay for tuition fees.

From that I realised that people of our time are indeed really very fortunate to be given the advantage of “money” to fund for our education which will in turn lead to better employment opportunities than whatever Uncle T had. The aforementioned advantage would also enable one to develop better spending powers and enjoy more comfortable lives.

To sum everything up regarding “money”, I find that it is very important for us to cherish our opportunity to seek higher education and also be appreciative of the career opportunities we are going to have after graduating with a degree. Things may be tough for us after graduation, but it certainly beats the tough life Uncle T had, earning meagre amount of “money” despite working so hard though his youth.

As for “time”, I will just keep it short and say that we should really cherish the short time we have in this world, make responsible choices in our lives and not live with regrets. Judging by the tone at which how Uncle T always give relationship advices to us on how people should not bear high expectations on their (potential) partners, I can tell that he might have some regrets in life, especially regarding the fact that he did not settle down and start a family. Now that he had lost his sight, he seemed to have lost all his hopes to salvage the situation and make up to whatever that was lost.

Lately, I have been listening to this album titled “The Dark Side of the Moon” by a British progressive rock band, “Pink Floyd”. In that album, there are two tracks which really caught my attention and I found that they covered issues that were rather relatable to our daily lives and whatever I got out of my engagement with Uncle T.

These two tracks are namely track 4 “Time” and track 6 “Money”.

“Time” was about the transient nature of life; how people tend to waste their youth away and regret when it is too late. Whereas “Money” is about earning big, spending big; just like what Uncle T tend to emphasise a lot.

Do check out these 2 songs if you are love rock music like I do [:

~Cheers~

- Joel Chew