Thursday has been my happy day. It is the day when my running group is supposed to run an easy/moderate run in the evening. I have learned a few training methods over the years but Coach Rameshon of FlexiFitness is the only person so far who has told me to hold back, go slow, stay easy, don’t run too hard, etc.. He has been holding the Singapore marathon record since 1995, so who am I to argue with him? Most importantly, it works well in my case.

As it turns out, I have a meeting this evening (March 26, 2015) so I will have to give the group running session a miss. Thus I tried to make up for it with an early morning run by myself instead.

As Singapore is in the middle of mourning for the passing of Mr. Lee Kuan Yew, I decided to run over to Parliament House early this morning where Singaporeans are paying their respects to the late Mr. Lee. Numerous people queued up yesterday and it took close to 8 hours to get to the end of the line at one point. As a result, the organizers extended the time to 24 hours to enable more people to have an opportunity to bid farewell to Mr. Lee.

Singapore, being right next to the equator, has about 12 hours of sunlight daily throughout the year, usually from 7am to 7pm.

By the time I was near Parliament House this morning, it was barely past 6am and it was very dark. I saw numerous people rushing to the subway and they were mostly dressed in black or white. The volume of the crowd was almost like the normal daily rush hour … except that it was at 6am. Wasn’t it too early?

Suddenly it dawned on me that those were people who left Parliament House after they had paid respects to the late Mr. Lee Kuan Yew. I had watched numerous old Hong Kong movies when I was growing up and a few of them had stories about Singapore and Hong Kong. It was so surreal that I thought I was in an old black and white movie!

I carried on with my morning jog and went around Parliament House with my iPhone tuned into a HK radio station (a habit of ‘practising’ my Cantonese), while the HK ‘Commercial Radio’ was having its twice hourly news broadcast.

The first item on the HK news was about the latest funeral arrangement of Mr. Lee and how the Singapore government had rearranged the queuing logistics. I thought to myself, “Hey, I am right here at the spot that the radio broadcaster was talking about!”

On my return jog home, I ran past the financial area. There was a big LED display showing the exchange rate with other countries. No doubt the Singapore dollar is strong. It is generally a good sign even though there are some down sides from an export point of view.

I breezed past two hotels that were owned by two Hong Kong families. They were here in Singapore for the same reason – their family wanted to diversify their business empire from textile manufacturing.

As usual, I ran around in the dark with 99.999% confidence that I would not land in dog poo or having someone strange bother me.

I reached home right at the time of sunrise, just in time to walk my two little girls to school with my wife. Their school may not be perfect but it is certainly a great example of fine education. By the way, nothing is perfect, isn’t it? This is very close.

The question is: shall we be perfectionists?