Throughout the drive, the thought of who I should thank this year kept lingering on my mind. Curiously, I asked my friend to think about hers as well. Adding to that request, I said instead of working on a list for the year, maybe we should also think of a list of all the people we would like to thank through our lifetimes. Would that list be ten, fifty, hundred or even more?
We fell silent as we began to go through our own list. I started to focus on 2018, thinking of those who had been kind to me, who had believed and had given me a helping hand when no one was around. Once I completed my 2018 list, I went back to 2017, 2016, and it became harder and harder. My mind was getting unstructured, and my memory was just jumping from one moment to another.
As a trained engineer, I knew I needed to build a “framework” for this task if I wanted to accomplish it. I then decided to start from the beginning of my life, i.e., on the day when I was born, my list shall begin with the most important person in my life, i.e., my mother, and moved on to my early childhood, then my school years in Malacca, Canterbury, London, and my life in France, in the USA and finally returning to Asia. With that, it became clearer, I could remember people who had helped me at school or at work and later in my personal life. Faces began to pop up, memories started to flashback, a smile came on my face. I felt the joy of beatitude as I finally realised how good life has been to me, that it has always surrounded me with people, there for me at every moment of my life! That day, I arrived home feeling very fortunate and happy!