Alvin Soon

I hated history in school.

It was boring and seemed irrelevant – plus, the teacher made us stand throughout class if we failed our tests. I’m bad at memorising dates, so I stood often! I dropped the subject at the first chance.

Then in 2020, the world stopped. One weekday, I drove through Singapore’s central business district and saw something I’d never seen before: the streets, empty. I could have parked in the middle of the road and had a picnic. I couldn’t understand what was happening.

I turned to history and the present started to make more sense: I read about the Black Death, the Spanish Flu, SARS. People panicked, denied, blamed – just like we were doing. They also adapted, cared, rebuilt. History wasn’t dead and dated anymore – it became a living guide.

But things were also happening that had never happened before¹. Who would have guessed that a virus would trigger a cryptocurrency bubble? Or that companies would migrate to work by video call? Or that a vaccine would be developed faster than anyone thought possible?

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

I’ve always craved certainty. I believed knowledge was armour: if I could only know what was coming, I’d be ready. But past events only look inevitable because of hindsight. To those living in them, the future was always unpredictable.

So now I prepare for range, not precision. One example: 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 – not out of fear, but to be prepared.

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