By Myles Ludwig
Would the boy you were be proud of the man you are?
I was having a G&T with a colleague at the old Long Bar in the Royal Selangor Club in the twilight of Kuala Lumpur when he posed that question to me.
Founded in the late 1800s as a social club for the best of British colonial society when they ruled Malaya, it has survived flood and fire and is very pukka. Its mock Tudor architecture of whitewashed stucco and dark stained wood facing the padang, the cricket pitch, is a beautiful anomaly amongst the naked construction cranes and over-reaching buildings of the city center that shadowed the lanes where the real and messy life of KL, once a tiny mining town, thrives.
Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham would have felt at home in the club whose current members are a Whitman’s Sampler of KL elite: businessmen, government functionaries, royalty, a mix of ethnicities —Malays, Chinese, Indians and, at that time, very few expatriates. No women were allowed in the Long Bar. I think I was the only American, though I had worked in Southeast Asia for many years.
That question called for considerable reflection. I didn’t have a ready answer then, but I have never forgotten the question, or its implications.
I ask it of myself every year. Like many people, probably everyone, I take stock of my life annually. I don’t mean checking the temperature of my fluctuating daily moods, but a view of what I have accomplished or failed in the past 12 months. It’s a process that begins about now and culminates with the turn of the year. A personal inventory of the goods in my soulhouse.
Some things I have achieved have given me a sense of personal pride. They are milestones and they tend to be less and less material than they were when I was younger and hungry for the accumulation of things. There are disappointments, especially those of cruelty to those I love. These have brought me low with feelings of shame.
It’s the improvement in those relationships that have been my greatest and most sustained source of satisfaction. At this age, I recognize that clichéd feeling of chagrin that if only I had known then what I know now about life, I hope I would have acted differently. But some rips can require more psychic energy than I have to repair them and apologies may be consoling, but seem insufficient.
I have lived many lives and not nearly enough.
Some things I fear I will never achieve, and I am hesitant to admit that. I fear the idea that the best parts of my life are behind me. I hate that idea.
But there is also the possibility that the future holds a different set of rewards for me. Rewards I cannot imagine. Maybe I haven’t fulfilled my destiny. Maybe that term, fulfillment, takes on a different meaning in these years. As Daniel Klein wrote in Travels with Epicurus, one cannot stay forever young, nor is that a state to be desired.
No cake tastes as good as the first bite.
Thinking back now to that moment in the Royal Selangor Club, I remember that I wasn’t sure how to answer that question in the Long Bar and I don’t think I am any more certain now than I was then.
Expectations of one’s self are a double-edged sword.
The difficulty is as Edward Hall, the father of the academic discipline of intercultural communications, wrote: “It is never possible to understand completely any other human being and no individual will completely understand himself.”