5 years from today. 2024. I’ll be 45. A day in the life of me, imagined. A writing exercise in daydreaming about the future, as if I was writing it in the present.

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The morning birds call. They are my wake up call now. Living in Ubud means no need for alarm clocks. Nature is our clock now, and we live by the cadance of its seasons. We live by the weather, the blooming of the trees and flowers, the cycles of the moon through the sky, the slow crawl of life through this river valley where we call home.

Home is a beautiful white mansion in the Campuhan valley. A 2-story delight, reminiscent of the old black and white colonial houses back home in Singapore. Airy, simple, and expansive enough for the kids and grandparents.

Blue light shining through the fluttering white curtains, we wake naturally here. Our circadian rhythms in sync in this jungle paradise. It’s lovely to feel so close to Mother Earth. There’s a certain intimacy, like a relationship, and this closeness makes us feel grounded and stable. I wake, and start my morning rituals. Some yoga, then sitting meditation and then breakfast. I let the wife sleep in a bit more, and proceed to grind coffee, cut some organic fruits plucked fresh from a neighbour’s plot, and start to wake the kids for school.

Soon, we send them off to school. But this isn’t any typical school. It’s more of a international program for kids to be world-schooled. Today’s activity, learning about religion, and how it expresses itself in a typical Balinese temple. The kids jaunt through stone and jungle, learning out in the field, not in a stuffy classroom. The teachers are facilitators of their own self-learning, not authoritative figures on a podium. World-schooling looks so interesting that even us parents feel like joining in! Hopefully, there will be world-(re)schooling for us old souls.

Such are our mornings in Ubud, Bali.