Category: Noticing

The hotel dining room is a social place, but not in the way a dinner party is social. Groups generally do not co-mingle, their boundaries are maintained throughout the meal. However, groups are aware of other groups, and adjust themselves according to the space implicitly required for the group....

I’m currently listening to the audiobook “Never Eat Alone” by Keith Ferrazzi, but this is not about that. It’s a treatise on the power and importance of networking, useful in the work I am doing (coaching software teams and building positive team culture), but a lot of the book...

We’ve come to realise detecting birds in the environment by their calls arguably gives one greater success than through sight. Birds sing, and when they sing nearby, it is a simple matter to hear and notice them. The challenge is distinguishing the songs, one has to eliminate possibilities in...

I took an evening hike with two dear colleagues. These walks serve several purposes, of which one of my favourites is hearing stories of my colleagues’ lived experiences. I was lucky the trio of us had already exchanged warm words before, so not much more social knitting needed to...

A grandmother and granddaughter pair waited outside the gate to the preschool. It was early and not open yet, although pedestrians marched by a few paces away on their way to the train station. Grandma bowed low, leaning in to the girl’s face, a posture commonly adopted by adults...

The two of us settled into our seats at a HDB mamak-style Indian eatery, and were working through our respective hearty plates of kothu prata, a novel format (to me) of finely chopped prata I learnt recently from an Indian colleague (delight). It was noon, lunchtime, and the sun...