Being Old

Once I met a support staff who has opted for earlier retirement during breakfast and we asked about each other. He told me he was fine and mentioned that he left the department because he no longer knew anyone that close as most of the staff is younger. That strikes a chord with what I'm experiencing. I barely know anyone of the younger staff in the department. They are mostly of the age of my students during my first ten years of work in the department. The ones that I could really converse well with, are my own ex-students of theoretical physics, who have joined the department, and a professor whom I know quite well before. That (in addition of being an introvert) makes life at work as pretty lonely.

Each time, I drive to work, I would look at my hands that have developed wrinkles, reminding myself of being old. As I go through the awful traffic jam in the morning (at UPM toll) and in the evening (at Seremban toll), things tend to get a bit unbearable and wondered how much longer I need to go through this.

As I was cleaning my room, getting ready to retire, I found this leaflet of an event that I participated in as a speaker in a forum. 

I saw the names in there, the co-panel members are now all professors and even my former boss at INSPEM chaired the session (I did not really remember this). It was really twenty years ago but I remembered how I was still excited about work, trying to share whatever experience that I had. At the end of the talk, I remembered how Prof. Karen Badri approached me to tell how interesting it was. Today, I guess I'm pretty ignored by people (and I know some administrators, from their body language, avoided me like a plague), but this is probably my choice to shy away from people. After years in administration, some of which are sour, I have indeed preferred isolation as things tend to get meaningless. 

Found another thing as I try to bring home some old books, it was a proceedings of the first conference that I attended after coming back from PhD, after some years in Bintulu.

As a young physicist, I remembered how exciting it was this conference in 1992, held at Awana Genting. Presented a paper there, which extends my PhD work. I remembered how the late Prof. Lay Nam Chang approached me after the talk and told me that my work is related to quantum Hall effect (QHE). That remark indeed led me to propose a research project on QHE, and also the work of my first PhD student, cited by a student of Ted Jacobson.

Today, while research has intensified with more students under my wing, there seems to be less meaningful excitement due to the environment that we are led to work in. Most things today are driven by numbers (whatever they mean) that I hope to touch upon some day.

Back home, seeing my children growing older, I felt I have lost the opportunity to educate my children well. So I started writing my life lessons in our WhatsApp group (partly responding to some problems we are facing) and what I understood from religion, to help them navigate their life. I hope that I can be consistent in this. I do not know how much time I have left.

119 days left until retirement.