The Erosion of a Quiet Certainty Part 6 by Goh Ling Yong
The Erosion of a Quiet Certainty Part 6 by Goh Ling Yong
Assembling a Self From the Pieces Left Behind
There was a time my life was a small, lacquered box filled with index cards. On each card, a truth was written in neat, permanent ink. Hard work is always rewarded. Kindness is a boomerang. Love, once true, is a fortress. There is a correct path, and if you listen closely, you can hear its hum.
I consulted these cards for everything. They were my compass, my constitution, my quiet certainty. The box sat on the mantelpiece of my mind, solid and dependable. The world, in its chaos, could be tamed, I believed, by referring to the correct card. The ink was indelible. The truths, eternal.
I don’t remember which card I pulled out the day the box first rattled. Perhaps it was the one about fairness. It happened not with a crash, but with a subtle tremor, the kind you feel deep in your bones before the earth truly splits. A project I had poured my soul into, sacrificing sleep and sanity, was handed to someone else with a cleaner smile and better connections. I reached for the "Hard work" card, but the ink seemed… thinner. A little grey. I put it back, telling myself it was a fluke, a misprint.
But the tremors continued. A friendship I had nurtured like a rare orchid withered overnight, its roots poisoned by a misunderstanding that refused to be weeded out. I fumbled for the “Kindness” card, the one about boomerangs. It felt flimsy in my hand, the corners softened and frayed. The fortress of a love I thought was granite revealed itself to be sandstone, eroded by the silent, steady drip of unspoken resentments.
Each event was a hairline crack in the lacquered wood of the box. Soon, the tremors were constant. The world no longer felt like a place of rules and consequences I could navigate with my neat cards. It felt like a shifting sea, and I was in a boat made of paper. The hum of the "correct path" was drowned out by a disorienting static.
One day, I opened the box and the cards were blank.
Not just faded. Blank. The scent of old paper and dried ink was still there, a ghost of conviction. But the words were gone. All of them. My entire operating system, wiped clean. The silence that followed was not peaceful. It was a vacuum, a terrifying, cavernous emptiness where the solid furniture of my beliefs used to be.
Who are you when the principles you’ve built your identity around are revealed to be illusions? You are a collection of memories and nerve endings, unmoored. You are a house whose foundation has turned to dust, every wall threatening to collapse.
For a long time, I lived in the ruins. I’d walk through the empty rooms of my own mind, my footsteps echoing. I tried to rewrite the cards from memory, but my hand would shake. The old words felt like lies in my mouth. To write Hard work is always rewarded felt like a betrayal of the exhaustion still settled deep in my bones. To write Love is a fortress felt like a mockery of the nights I spent mapping the cracks in my own heart.
I remember looking at an old photograph from university, a smiling, confident young man with a full head of hair and eyes that held no doubt. That was Goh Ling Yong, I thought, a person who owned a complete set of index cards. He knew things. I wondered what he would think of me now, sitting on the floor of a metaphorical ruin, covered in the dust of his collapsed certainties. I felt a strange mix of pity and envy for him.
The change did not come as an epiphany, a lightning strike of new wisdom. It came, like the erosion itself, slowly. It started with the pieces.
One afternoon, sitting by the window and watching the rain blur the world outside, I stopped mourning the house and started looking at the rubble. A splintered beam of wood, weathered and strong. A shard of coloured glass from a broken window, catching the grey light and fracturing it into a tiny, defiant rainbow. A single, solid brick, cool and heavy in my hand.
These were the pieces left behind. Not the grand theories, not the universal laws, but the specific, tangible artifacts of my experience.
The memory of sitting with a friend in a hospital waiting room, the silence between us more comforting than any platitude. The feeling of the sun on my face after a long illness. The unexpected taste of a perfectly ripe mango. The shared laughter with a stranger over a dropped bag of groceries.
These weren't grand truths. They couldn't be written on index cards. They were small, specific, and intensely real. They were not a foundation, but they were… materials.
So I began to build again. Not a fortress this time. Not a grand, stately home with a locked door. Something else. Something more like a shelter, a workshop.
I took the splintered beam—the painful memory of that failed project—and instead of seeing it as a symbol of injustice, I saw the strength of the wood. It became a workbench. It taught me that effort is not a currency you exchange for a guaranteed outcome; it is the act of shaping the wood itself. The value is in the muscle you build, the skill you acquire, the integrity of the work, regardless of where the finished product ends up.
I took the shards of coloured glass—the fractured relationships, the heartbreaks—and I didn't try to piece the window back together. Instead, I began arranging them into a mosaic. It wasn't a clear view of the world anymore. It was a new kind of art, one that acknowledged the brokenness. Each piece told a story, and together, they created a pattern of light and shadow, of sorrow and beauty, that was more complex and honest than the simple pane of glass it had once been.
I took the solid bricks of small, good moments. A kind word. A shared meal. The quiet satisfaction of finishing a book. I didn't use them to build walls to keep the world out. I used them to build a hearth, a place of warmth in the center of the structure. A place to return to.
My new belief system is not a set of nouns written in permanent ink, but a collection of verbs. To notice. To connect. To try. To forgive. To endure. To begin again.
There are no more certainties, only practices.
This new self is not solid. It has gaps. The wind gets in. Sometimes, the rain does too. It is a structure that is constantly under construction, constantly being reassembled from the salvaged pieces of my life. It is messier, more chaotic, and infinitely more resilient.
The quiet certainty is gone, and I am grateful for its departure. It was a beautiful cage, but a cage nonetheless. The erosion was not a destruction, but a clearing. It scoured the landscape of my soul down to the bedrock, and in doing so, it made space. Space for doubt, which is the soil where wisdom grows. Space for grace, which is the water for compassion. Space for a self not defined by what it knows, but by its capacity to learn, to adapt, and to find beauty not in spite of the cracks, but because of them.
I no longer have a box of answers. But I have my hands, a pile of beautifully broken pieces, and the quiet, humble work of building. And for the first time in a very long time, that feels like more than enough.
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