Tuesday, 10 a.m. It means something different to everyone. For some it is a moment in the office. For others it is simply the hour they get up.
For me it is the same view, differently.
Because when you put yourself inside the similarity — the repetitive behavior, in the exact same environment, over time — the thing turns mundane.
The view I am looking at has been in front of me plenty of times. It is arguably one of the iconic sights that represents the flair of Bangkok at its finest. Tropical greenery running through a decorated space. International-style towers. A high-ceilinged façade. Sunlight so stark it flattens everything underneath it.
A visitor might find this fascinating. I did, the first time.
And now it is just another ordinary sight.
The reason might simply be that there is no excitement, no spark, no freshness in the daily life anymore. Or at least that it is rarely experienced. Whether the explanation is neuroscientific — some shortage of dopamine from the absence of anything new — or just the plain fact that I have been inside the same routine, the same pattern, the same environment for a very long time.
Either way, I have realised something.
I need an escapade.
There is something romantic about starting the engine on impulse. Or booking a flight the moment the thought arrives, in the middle of an afternoon.
My own version was a 4 a.m. drive to the airport, with a nocturnal atmosphere reminiscent of Sonny Crockett in Miami Vice. Another was a coastal escape taken immediately after a client meeting, into a five-star hotel bizarrely close in feeling to the Ocean Club in the Bahamas from Casino Royale.
But the best one is not mine.
A friend of mine could not bear another loop of white-collar work and the drive home. So he started the engine of his 1974 Volkswagen Super Beetle — a car whose steering wheel carries more weight than you could possibly imagine — and drove two hundred and twenty kilometres. He stayed one night. He drove back in the morning.
There was no destination in it. There was only the desire to be somewhere else.
And he came back a different person.
These things do something that ordinary life cannot. I do not know whether there is a proper term for it — the phenomenon of going somewhere you have never been, especially with no itinerary, when the entire sequence of thinking and executing takes less than an hour.
I have come to call it nervous system shock.
Because across the year, the mind gets conditioned. Familiar environments. Predictable routines. Repetitive identities. It begins operating on autopilot rather than through conscious engagement.
Changing the surroundings interrupts the brain’s habitual expectations. The unfamiliar place demands more attention than the familiar one, simply because it has not been catalogued yet. The grass is greener, the light is warmer, the noise is calmer — or it only seems that way, because you are finally looking.
And the freedom to act outside your usual obligations restores some sense of personal agency.
What follows is a temporary liberation from the identities and expectations your everyday surroundings keep reinforcing. You experience yourself differently. You experience the passage of time differently.
Perhaps that is why we return feeling like new people. Not because anything fundamental has changed — but because we have momentarily escaped the psychological machinery that makes a life feel repetitive, and rediscovered that our existence holds far more possibility than the routine would have us believe.
The funny thing is that the ordinary tempo of my own life has begun numbing my senses a little more each day. Which is a clear enough signal. A getaway is needed.
The first winds of the year arrive in Thailand within the next three weeks. That is what I am waiting for — the moment the coldest breeze touches the skin. Likely the only moment of the year it will.
Perhaps somewhere in the north.
Or perhaps, once I am finished with this piece, a quick drive to some random city nearby.
If only it were not a national holiday — when every road fills with metropolitan dwellers attempting precisely the same thing.