http://www.todayonline.com/Hotnews/EDC120809-0000025/Where-do-we-go-from-here
Time changes us, but the times also change the world around us. Suddenly, we find ourselves playing in a bigger league where it seems to take more out of us just to keep up.
We slog our way to the top of the class, or a five-figure salary, only to ask:
Is this what we really want? Is that all there is to life?
At the age of 47, we are young in the scheme of nations - developed in economic terms, perhaps, but still finding ourselves in other ways. So this birthday, we asked several citizens of Singapore to think on the question that Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong posed two months ago: Where do they want this country to be in 20 years?
Who do we, as a nation, wish to be in 2032?
Let's start with a desire we've been hearing a lot of: To move beyond an obsession with material success.
Unable to feel joy at topping the class because she's told one can "always be better", 14-year-old Charis Sim writes that, when she is 34: "I want my children to be able to balance school and play. I want them to have a childhood worth remembering."
Mother of two Crispina Robert wishes that employers would "stop thinking of the cost of a long maternity leave" but find creative solutions, instead, to help people balance work and parenting. Mr Liew Kai Khiun fears the loss of a nation's memories, hoping that in 2032, the "idea that history and heritage has to be sacrificed to roads and wine bars is simply unthinkable".
REACHING FOR THE SKY
But should this be taken as a sign that Singaporeans want to drop out of the global rat race?
Mr Muhammad Nabil, 23, who went from ITE to polytechnic graduate, looks forward to a vibrant, prospering economy "that allows me to chase my career and dreams". Inventor and don Freddy Boey dreams of a nation flying high as a hotbed of innovation and science.
Others want a homeland that will let its citizens reach for the sky. Poet Alvin Pang dreams up a conversation between a son and his Nobel laureate (in literature) mother, in a Singapore that has replaced New York as a mecca for the arts.
The burning topic of foreigners and local talent draws mention from many essayists. Mr Michael Ang envisions the day when a sports-crazy nation births a flood of native talent that makes redundant the recruiting of foreign athletes.
Banker Ray Ferguson and think-tank associate director Chang Li Lin see Singapore continuing to draw and embrace the world's top talent - even as Singaporeans, more exposed to the world, inclusive and confident now in their own skins, become global leaders in thought and diplomacy.
Inclusiveness is perhaps the wish heard loudest among all the essays - that in 20 years, Singaporeans will have learnt to be more accommodating, more compassionate. A society "that no longer seeks to exclude, but includes and involves in spite of discomfort and unfamiliarity", writes undergraduate Pravin Prakash.
In a moving essay, Lien Foundation chairman Laurence Lien speaks of neighbours who care for each other in daily ways; of a society that values every person however disabled, poor or elderly. "Our pledge is no longer aspirational; we are truly living it," he writes of that future day. "Singaporeans are beginning to understand what being a happy society means."
The young, to whom the torch has been passed as a nation contemplates the future. Where will it find us? That is for us all to decide.
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