A COMMONPLACE NOTEBOOK

30 Years of Diaries

I've kept journals since 1993. This one just happens to face outward. Notes on what I read, watch, think about, and notice. Whatever holds my attention long enough to make a home in my memory.

For the ones who still believe in the blank page as possibility.

The Five Minute Journal The Five Minute Journal
The Five Minute Journal
SGD 33.00
Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make- and Keep Friends Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make- and Keep Friends
Platonic: How the Science of Attachment Can Help You Make- and Keep Friends
SGD 14.00

An adult gap year taught me what mattered. I returned and closed Revel, my commerce business. These are what remain: journals and self-help books I hand-picked in my retail days, too good to discard, now seeking new hands to write, reflect, and carry them forward.

Shop discounted tools

The Five Minute Journal, Blue The Five Minute Journal, Blue
The Five Minute Journal, Blue
SGD 33.00
Write It All Down: How to Put Your Life on the Page Write It All Down: How to Put Your Life on the Page
Write It All Down: How to Put Your Life on the Page
SGD 14.00

The opposite of a hot take.

A salon for my wandering mind. You’re invited, but fair warning: I think in tangents, write in spirals, and rarely arrive where I started.

Featured
The Architecture of Second Acts
The Architecture of Second Acts

It was raining on our last morning in Perth, and we stayed close to home, and we found something worth carrying forward. Which is, I think, what last days are for: not grand farewells but small noticings, the kind that accumulate into meaning, into the particular texture of having been somewhere with someone, paying attention together, sheltering from the rain.

What Fiction Does When We're Not Looking
What Fiction Does When We're Not Looking

Maybe the point isn't transfer. Maybe fiction is more like scales on a piano? You're not learning specific songs, you're training the capacity itself. You're practicing the cognitive motion of imagining that someone else's perceptions are real. Whether you then apply that capacity morally is a separate question. Fiction gives you the instrument. It doesn't make you play the right notes.

Threshold: The MRT and the Art of In-Between
Threshold: The MRT and the Art of In-Between

I want to say something profound about thresholds. About how we're all suspended between departure and arrival, neither where we were nor where we're going. About liminal space as metaphor for the modern condition. But standing here, sweating slightly despite having spent my entire life in the tropics, what I'm actually thinking about is whether I positioned myself at the right door.