There are certain skills you learn in life that become so deeply ingrained in us that every high-stakes moment is just a performance, a showcase of that earliest, most fundamental lesson.
In my case, that lesson was about the intense scrutiny of performance, particularly when your words were on display. In my early primary school days, I had a stutter that surfaced whenever I tried conversing in a non-mothertongue language like English. My language teacher was my most unrelenting critic. During lessons, he would bring excerpts from the newspaper and ask us to read a few lines each to the class.
If you stuttered, rushed the punctuation, or merely spoke a phrase without the necessary intonation, he wouldn't make any corrections. He would simply interrupt with "Start again. This seemed fun as long as you were not on the hot seat; being in the audience holding back laughter as our colleagues fumbled? immaculate. My turn though? Real bad! To avoid reading the passage repeatedly, I’d first make a silent runthrough, marking all the points I knew I’d stutter and saying the words to myself a couple of times.
Years later, in 2025, when I took this photo; I watched the speaker, an influential CEO about to deliver the keynote at a major industry conference, stand still staring through the enormous windows during his final run-through. He was so meticulous as he whispered to himself his opening lines over and over again, ensuring they came out exactly the way he wanted them to. I saw him mouthing the difficult transitions, and ensuring his tone was pitch-perfect.
At that moment, I was suddenly back in the classroom in my primary school rehearsing my lines and determined to do it right on the first try, hoping I wouldn’t stutter and be forced to read the whole passage in front of the class.
In my language class, being unprepared was catastrophic. To the CEO being unprepared could be a public relation’s nightmare. But that is the way of life, yeah?
In our day to day activities, do we actually take the time to prepare? Or do we just show up and pray that we don't falter, and be ready to read the whole passage when the universe commands us to?
[Shot on EOS R6M2 + 24-105mm f/2.8 L IS USM]
