Alvin Soon

In 2020, the world stopped. One weekday, I drove through Singapore’s central business district and saw something I’d never seen before, its busy streets, now empty. I could have parked in the middle of five lanes and had a picnic.

I couldn’t make sense of what was happening. That’s when I turned to history.

I hated the subject in school. History was boring and seemed irrelevant. I dropped the subject at first chance.

Now reading about past pandemics helped me understand the present one. People panicked, denied, blamed, just like we were doing. They also adapted, cared, rebuilt. History wasn’t irrelevant anymore.

But if human nature was following familiar patterns, events were happening that had never happened before.¹ Who would have guessed a virus would trigger a cryptocurrency bubble? Or that it would tip Singapore into a cashless society? Or a vaccine would be developed in record time?

History, I realised, is a story told by a mad poet. It both rhymes and ruptures.

I’ve always craved certainty. If I could only know what was coming, I’d be ready for anything. But history only looks inevitable because of hindsight. To those living in them, the future was always uncertain.

After COVID-19, I learnt to prepare for range, not precision. We used to keep just enough food in the kitchen. When the lockdown hit, we almost ran out of things to eat. Now we stock more than we need.

I still can’t remember history dates. But when the poet writes another rhyme or surprises us with a rupture, I’ll know to pack a little extra water, have my people with me, and hold the lessons of history closely… if a little loosely.