I’ve always felt that one’s life is ultimately a collection of singular moments, and that one should always strive to both seek and appreciate those moments to the fullest. With that in mind, I want to share a few of the moments that have occurred in my life in the last two weeks since I returned to Singapore in the hopes that I will in some way capture their meaning and that you too will find them in some way remarkable.

1. My first weekend here, I drove to Putrajaya, Malaysia with my good friend and colleague Cristian Shoemaker, to build contacts for our fertilizer business at the Putrajaya Flower Show. The Putrajaya Flower Show is one of the largest of its kind in the world and attracts over one million visitors. Before we got to the show, I was floored by the development of main, downtown Putrajaya. It was incredible to me that a city I had never heard of would be so massive and so modern. As I contemplated my own ignorance about the world, I marveled at the structures that all looked like they might have just come out of the box.

2. Muslim women walking around the Putrajaya flower show in brightly colored burqa’s, surrounded by enormous kaleidoscopic flower arrangements. For a moment I felt completely transported into an episode of Star Trek, an impossibly bright and beautiful costume world.

3. Two interesting wildlife moments: seeing a family of monkeys cross the road outside of my boss’s condo in Singapore and a monitor lizard look directly into our car outside our factory in Malaysia. He glanced askance and licked the air with his long, forked black tongue and for a moment I felt that maybe I could talk to animals.

4. A man advising me on how to eat Durian, and know if I’ve been given a good one. I had purchased one of the large (and expensive!) fruits at a local open air market and was enjoying it on a bench. The man, a distinguished looking old Chinese fellow, explained that I must separate the pods with my palms by pressing the fruit against the bench, rather than try to pull them apart with my fingers. His method worked like a charm, then he looked sadly at the pale fruit inside. We both knew it should have been a deeper yellow hue, and shared a look that said “don’t let it happen again” and “it won’t.”

5. Seeing an “arrangement” at the Singapore Garden Festival. I put arrangement in quotes, because the display was massive, featuring trees uprooted and planted upside down into the ground,and grass grown over huge slabs of marble jutting out of the earth and odd angles, to convey a sense of a world in chaos. It was one of the most stunning things I had ever seen and made me think perhaps art may play a larger role in this second act of my life.

I have an iPhone now, so new pictures and videos coming.