The packet had been sitting on May's desk for three days.
She had bought it on impulse from the convenience store downstairs — grabbed it from the shelf the way you grab things when your mind is elsewhere, which hers increasingly was. Quaker. Whitebait and Kombu flavour. Savoury oat soup. She wasn't even sure why it appealed to her. Perhaps because it was something she had never tried before. Perhaps because, at this particular moment in her life, trying something entirely new felt like the only thing that made any sense at all.
She was sitting at her desk at 7:43pm on a Wednesday, long after everyone else had gone home, staring at a spreadsheet that had stopped meaning anything to her approximately two years ago. The office was quiet in the specific way that offices are quiet when they are supposed to be empty — the hum of the air conditioning, the distant ping of a lift, the occasional shuffle of the cleaning uncle making his rounds down the corridor.
May had worked in corporate procurement for nearly two decades. She was good at it. Everyone said so. Her manager said so in her annual review every year, using almost exactly the same words each time, which itself said something about the texture of her professional life. She negotiated contracts, managed suppliers, optimized costs, attended meetings about meetings. She had a title that sounded impressive at dinner parties and meant very little to her soul.
She picked up the blue packet and turned it over in her hands.
高纖輕食。 High-fibre light meal. Under 200 calories.
She laughed — a small, private laugh that nobody heard. Here she was, she thought, a woman who had spent twenty years making herself smaller and more efficient in a job that fit her the way a shoe fits when you buy it in the wrong size and simply decide to keep wearing it because returning it feels like too much trouble.
She boiled the kettle.
It had started — or rather, she had started noticing it — about eight months ago. A Sunday evening dread that arrived earlier and earlier each week. By the time it was creeping in on Saturday afternoons, she knew it was no longer just tiredness. She knew it was something structural. Something that required more than a holiday or a spa day or a new notebook from Muji to fix, though she had tried all three.
She was not unhappy with her life. This was the confusing part. She had a comfortable apartment in Toa Payoh, a small but loyal circle of friends, a cat named Biscuit who regarded her with the particular mixture of love and contempt that cats reserve for their favourite people. She cooked on weekends. She read novels on the MRT. She called her mother every Sunday without fail.
But work — work was a room she had been standing in for so long that she had stopped seeing the walls. And lately the walls had begun to close in.
She poured the boiling water into the bowl, opened the packet, and watched the oats bloom and soften in the broth. The smell rose immediately — something savoury and oceanic and gentle. The whitebait and kombu unfolded into the warm liquid like a memory of something coastal, something quiet, something that had nothing to do with procurement targets or quarterly reviews.
She wrapped both hands around the bowl and breathed it in.
The idea had come to her the way most important ideas come — not as a thunderbolt, but as a whisper that gradually grew too loud to ignore.
She wanted to teach.
Not in a grand, life-changing-movie way. Not with a dramatic resignation letter and a gap year in Bali. Just — teach. Adults, specifically. She had been thinking about community education, about the Continuing Education centres, about all the people her age and older who wanted to learn new skills and had nobody to sit with them patiently and show them how. She was good at explaining things. Her colleagues had always said so — May, can you walk me through this? May, can you explain it again? — and she had always obliged, and it had always been the part of her day she enjoyed most.
She had not told anyone this yet. It felt too fragile, like something that might dissolve if exposed to too much air too soon.
She took her first spoonful of the soup.
It was — good. Genuinely, surprisingly good. Savoury and warm with a depth she hadn't expected from a packet on a shelf in a convenience store. The oats had softened to exactly the right consistency, the kombu giving the broth an umami undertow, the whitebait tiny and tender. It tasted like something a grandmother would make, she thought. Something that had been simmered with patience and care.
And something shifted in her chest, very slightly, like a drawer that had been stuck finally easing open.
She thought about kombu.
She had read somewhere — or perhaps her mother had told her, years ago over a pot of soup — that kombu doesn't give up its flavour immediately. You don't boil it hard. You simmer it. You bring it slowly to the edge of heat and hold it there, patient, and the kombu does the rest — releasing layer after layer of depth that it has been holding all along, waiting for the right conditions.
May sat very still in her empty office with her bowl of savoury oat soup and thought about what she had been holding all along. What she had been waiting to release.
She was not a young woman starting out. She was acutely aware of this. The voice in her head — practical, Singaporean, sensible — reminded her regularly of this fact. You have a good salary. Stable. CPF. Don't be silly. The voice sounded a great deal like her aunt, who was a perfectly lovely person and also deeply afraid of change.
But there was another voice. Quieter. Steadier.
You are not finished. You are not even close to finished. You are, if anything, exactly at the moment where the most interesting part begins.
She had read an article recently about people who made significant career changes in their forties and fifties — teachers who became architects, accountants who became therapists, procurement managers who became — well. The article said that these people consistently reported not that the change was easy, but that the difficulty was worth it. That they wished they had done it sooner. That they felt, for the first time in years, like themselves.
She wanted to feel like herself.
She took another spoonful.
The thing about a savoury oat soup, May thought, is that it shouldn't work. When you describe it to someone — instant oats, whitebait, seaweed broth — they look at you with polite skepticism. It sounds like something created by committee. It sounds, frankly, a little strange.
And then you taste it, and it is warm and nourishing and exactly right, and you understand that the things that seem unlikely from the outside are often the things that make the most sense once you're inside them.
She put down her spoon. She opened a new document on her laptop — not the spreadsheet, a blank page — and she began to write. Not a resignation letter. Not yet. Just a list. What she knew how to do. What she loved doing. What she had always been good at that nobody had ever put in her job description or her annual review or her LinkedIn profile.
The list was longer than she expected.
She wrote for forty minutes. Biscuit would be waiting at home, imperious and hungry, and she would have to take the last MRT and she had an early meeting tomorrow that she would attend and be competent in and feel nothing about. But tonight, in this quiet office, with an empty bowl and a blinking cursor and a list of things she had never allowed herself to name out loud before — tonight felt like something.
It felt like the beginning of a simmer.
She rinsed the bowl in the office pantry and dropped the blue packet in the recycling bin. Then she fished it back out again and put it in her bag. She wasn't sure why. Perhaps she wanted to buy another one tomorrow. Perhaps she wanted to keep it as a reminder of the night things began to shift.
On the MRT home, she opened the notes app on her phone and looked at her list again. At Bishan, a woman her age got on and sat across from her — exhausted-looking, still in work clothes, shoes off, eyes closed before the doors had finished closing. May looked at her and felt a rush of recognition so strong it was almost tenderness.
We are not finished, she thought. Not even close.
At Toa Payoh she got off, walked home through the warm night air, and fed Biscuit, who was indeed imperious and hungry and completely indifferent to her revelation. She made a cup of tea and sat at her kitchen table and looked at her list for a long time.
Then she googled the contact details for three continuing education centres in Singapore.
Then she went to bed.
And for the first time in longer than she could clearly remember, she was not dreading tomorrow. She was thinking past it — to the day after, and the day after that, and all the long unfolding days beyond. She was thinking about what it would feel like to stand in front of a room full of people and give them something useful. Something true. Something that had been simmering in her for twenty years, patient and warm, waiting for the right conditions to finally, fully, rise.
Outside, the city hummed. Biscuit settled at her feet.
May slept.
Afterthoughts for You, Dear Reader
On the courage of the quiet pivot
May's story is not about drama. It is about the slow, honest reckoning that happens when a life that looks fine from the outside stops feeling fine from the inside. Many of us know this feeling. The Sunday dread. The sense of wearing the wrong shoe. The competence that has somehow become a cage. Recognizing it is not weakness — it is, in fact, the first and bravest step.
On what kombu taught us
The best things — the deepest flavours, the most meaningful lives — are not rushed. They are simmered. If you are in a season of uncertainty, wondering whether it is too late or too risky or too strange to want something different, consider the kombu. It has been holding that depth all along. So have you.
On the unexpected packet on the shelf
Sometimes the thing that shifts something in us is not a grand gesture or a life coach or a TED talk. Sometimes it is a quiet Wednesday evening, a bowl of something warm and surprisingly good, and enough silence to finally hear yourself think. Pay attention to those moments. They are not small. They are everything.
The lesson to carry with you
It is never too late to simmer into who you were always meant to be.
The most nourishing things — in food, and in life — are rarely the most complicated. They are the ones made with good ingredients, honest intention, and the patience to let things slowly, warmly, become what they are meant to become.
May's story is still being written. So is yours. 🌿
Disclaimer
This is a work of original fiction. May, her cat Biscuit, and all characters and situations in this story are entirely imaginary and are not based on any real person, living or deceased. Any resemblance to actual persons or events is purely coincidental.
The Quaker Whitebait & Kombu Flavour Oat Soup featured in this story is a real product by Quaker Taiwan, referenced purely as a creative and narrative inspiration. This story is not sponsored, endorsed, or affiliated with Quaker, PepsiCo, or any of their associated brands or subsidiaries in any way. No commercial relationship exists between the author and the brand. All opinions and creative interpretations are entirely the author's own.
The themes of midlife career reflection and change explored in this story are intended for general inspirational reading only and do not constitute professional career, financial, or psychological advice. Readers considering significant life or career changes are encouraged to seek guidance from qualified professionals suited to their individual circumstances.
All content in this story — including text and accompanying illustrations — is original creative work. Please do not reproduce or republish without permission.
Thank you for reading with an open heart. 🌿
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