I HAVE been on my annual leave recently and – I am sure like many of you – I find it hard to get back into gear for the mundane industrial routine again after tasting the cherry of leisure briefly.

Getting back “into gear” is at least the description I use to describe this condition because I use many gears.

If you are a professional athlete, the break in between the seasons, or injury downtime, is a form of leave, although the life of someone in sports vastly differs from the mere mortal lives of the many of us who live more regular lives.

Let us ponder this for a minute: do we rue our lives so much, especially the middle classes who live in urban centres in nuclear family units we spawned on our own?

Maybe we – I use “we” because categorically I fall into this category based on my average income, location, and family unit – do not really rue our lives in the very meaning of the word but we express it with more rigour and vigour because being somewhat articulate is expected of the middle classes, even if we’re really just subconsciously following a templated direction of living?

It is this sort of curiosity – for a loner and self-described hermit – that really makes me feel like engaging with people, be it colleagues, friends or strangers in different social settings and occasions.

From my armchair observations, I diagnose our society as suffering from some form of performative tick that is overlooked but right in front of us daily.

My art is informed by my distance from and participation with society. My life as a folk artist demands me to be anonymous enough to be the observer rather than the observed.

Maybe it is overlooked within my own circles, but not overlooked amongst sociologists or anthropologists (fields that I wished I had pursued if I was told they existed in school, aside from accountants, engineers, doctors etc).

I once told an ex-colleague (who has a background in theatre and film-making) that I am a social actor more than a stage or screen actor and she told me: “We are all performers.”

This is what schooling is for children – if they get it, they will know when to “perform” according to the appropriate social scripts.

The corporate world has already incorporated the word “performance” to denote tasks that serve itself as KPIs, so let us take back the true meaning of this word away from such a conformist sphere.

Every opportunity, no matter how mundane to the adult, is an exploratory experience for a child and as we move on into a world dictated by key words like “convenience” and “commerce”, the more the need to make children aware of the actual nature of things outside of an increasingly transactional society we are becoming.

As a young parent – young in terms of being a newcomer in being a parent, not my age – I confess that having children really forced me to buck up and get my act together, which I am still learning and expect to not stop doing so since children never stop growing, even into adulthood.

Often more dreary chores can be more interesting when I get to bring my kids along (or they coerce me to) and they reignite my own childhood memories of going out with my parents.

This is not being childish as we adults like to say, to hell with that. What’s wrong with being childish if it reconnects ourselves to child-like wonder towards the world around us?

Adulthood is overrated since children go through their playtime, make-believing into adult things (playing doctor, playing home etc.). Is there any avenue for us adults caught in the rat-trap of adult life?

Well, there is: to me sports is such a parallel. We make-believe competing with each other over things that in nature are often a matter of life or death (because nobody ultimately “loses” their lives in sport competitions).

I like solitary sports like jogging or walking (do they count?) and when I take my usual brisk walk, I make-believe I am hobo skipping on to the next town even though in reality I am just making a loop in my neighbourhood. To each their own, I say.

Let’s take some time off to observe our own “performances” – especially those which deserve to be put on “leave” to better ourselves – since the year is still new.

Since we are also welcoming the Chinese New Year, instead of making another round of “resolutions” we can’t keep, let’s think of life as a daily performance because with this paradigm if one show sucked, there’s always a next one to better one’s performance. – January 20, 2023.

* Azmyl Yunor is a touring underground recording artiste, and an academic in media and cultural studies. He has published articles on pop culture, subcultures and Malaysian cultural politics. He adheres to the three-chords-and-the-truth school of songwriting, and Woody Guthrie’s maxim “All you can write is what you see”. He is @azmyl on Twitter.

* This is the opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of The Malaysian Insight. Article may be edited for brevity and clarity.