The Weight of Yesterday

In the city of my youth, there was a clock tower that everyone ignored. It stood at the intersection of two main streets, a relic of brick and iron that seemed to shrink a little further into the pavement every year. We walked past it to reach the glass-walled offices where we spent our days, never once looking up to check the time. We were too busy measuring our lives in digital pulses and quarterly reports. Yet, there is a strange comfort in the survival of the old. It acts as a tether, a reminder that the ground beneath our feet was once measured by different strides and slower heartbeats. When the new world rises up around the old, it does not necessarily erase it; it merely provides a frame. We are always living in the tension between what we have built to last and what we have built to be efficient. Does the stone remember the hands that laid it, or is it simply waiting for the glass to eventually shatter and fall away?

Siew Bee Lim has captured this quiet dialogue in the image titled Lau Pa Sat. It is a gentle reminder of how we navigate the layers of time in our own backyards. Does the sight of these two worlds meeting make you feel anchored, or adrift?