For the first time in 20 years, I bought a public transport concession pass for tertiary students for $45.
The urgency of financial planning is becoming increasingly imminent; making conscious daily budgets, choosing cheaper alternatives, searching high and low for discounts or promotions, and putting aside a fixed amount for savings every month even if it means clutching onto my expenses tighter than ever before. Sometimes I would ride my bike instead of take a bus just because riding a bike is free, but taking the bus isn’t.
Step into town and see all these busy people in formal wear tapping their access cards into beautiful high-rise buildings, clocking 10 hours a day in a small cubicle. Facing an animate screen, drumming on a keyboard like their lives (and lives whom they’re responsible for) depended on these. Regardless of status here, everyone is trying to live, or at the bare minimum, survive. These black suits, polished boots, classy high heels and beautiful dresses are not just symbols of dignity—they also represent the never ending process of people providing for themselves and the ones they love. At the end of the day, that man in the smart suit is going to drive home in his Hyundai to an ordinary looking apartment on the outside, but stepping home to an extraordinary feeling of warmth. His wife will greet him before his lazy but blissful dog, then he changes into baggy home clothes where bliss and comfort are truly found: at home, in front of the TV, on the couch with the people you love and need telling you that they love and need you too. His daughter comes home late because she is taking on her first job, also in the city and requires formal attire from her but she is taking home more experience and insight into the working industry than she is taking home money. Stripped of these smart attires and professional demeanours, it’s all about love, warmth, and intimacy.
Tertiary concession is not just a nostalgic reminder for myself of the past; gone are the $0.58 train rides from the westernmost area of Singapore to the extreme east. Now it costs $0.77 to take one stop from my house to the nearby shopping mall. Pangs of nostalgia when I see my juniors from my alma mater doing certain things at the shopping mall that I once did, but now things are so much different for me. Tertiary concession is also a smart attempt to salvage the bank account that I once never had to worry about. But above all, tertiary concession pricks and pokes at my heart, urgently questioning the needs and desires that I must bear—what would I be willing to do for those I love, and how heavy of a weight on my shoulders must I be mentally prepared to carry in the near future? Once stripped of my right of a tertiary concession ownership, how will I sustain myself, sustain those who need me, and those whom I willingly want to sustain?
Find me that sense of Home, that sense of calling, that sense of commitment and duty. The moment I retire my tertiary concession.
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