“I can’t remember the last time I concentrated so long at doing one thing,” said Parin Mehta, director, global experiences, operations, Airbnb, his head bent low as he painstakingly wrote on a piece of paper.
“Ya, me too,” I agreed, my head bent equally low over the task at hand.
Parin and I were on a “hand lettering experience in Punggol”. He had invited me to test one of the many experiences on Airbnb in Asia and I decided to pick Singapore, curious to see what I could learn about this place I’ve called home for the last two decades.
He had given me three choices – one was how to make a video activity around Chinatown, one was around food and this one in Punggol piqued my interest.
Stella showing us the finer points of hand lettering.
The Punggol heartland is an unknown to me – I rarely have reason to visit it. Located in the north-east of Singapore, it’s a new and emerging neighbourhood and other than its new malls, its parks and wetlands have gained a good reputation for diversity of nature and birdlife.
Hand lettering is also not something I would ever think of taking up and so it seemed like a good idea to learn a new craft.
We meet Stella, our host, at the mall and she finds us a table at Coffee Bean where we promptly spent the next three hours learning to write with a special marker pen. “Push hard on the down stroke and go light on the up stroke,” she says. “Don’t flick at the end. Finish the stroke on a firm note.”
We write letter after letter, repeatedly, for at least a couple of hours. It’s made harder by the fact that we rarely write these days, even with a normal pen, so it takes some getting used to. But once you get the feel of the marker and the rhythm of the strokes, it feels strangely therapeutic.
It’s for this reason that Stella took it up a year ago. The experience is as much about the hand lettering as it is getting to know your host. On first impression, Stella comes across as shy and soft-spoken but inside beats the heart of a warrior and adventurer. A martial artist in taekwondo, Stella has appeared as a stunt double in a movie.
In between seeking adrenalin rushes through sports, she finds hand lettering therapeutic. She listed her experience on Airbnb about two months ago and receives almost one booking a week. Her groups are small, about four people each.
I can tell that being a host has been as good for Stella as it has been for her customers. It’s brought her out of herself, she’s meeting people she’d never dream of and she’s sharing her passion of her art with appreciative customers.
The experience ends with a project you want to accomplish. We had been asked to bring along a quote or think of something we wanted to create and for those of us who work in a mostly digital world, it feels strangely wonderful to walk away with something hand-made by yourself.
As Stella praised our efforts, we felt like smart little kids who’d just been given a high score by teacher.
Our “graduation” photo: Parin Mehta (right) and Charmaine Ng from Airbnb showing off their homework.
In an age where we are constantly distracted by pings and dings from our smartphone, it felt good to concentrate on one activity for an extended period of time and even though my attention did wander every now and then, I was able to mostly focus on the task at hand.
The day after, I was listening to a radio programme about why boredom is interesting. It says that while the condition is something most of us try to avoid, it is actually good for us and that “mind wandering” can get us into a creative zone.
And apparently, there are five stages of boredom – indifferent boredom, which is a positive feeling when you sit in a class or lecture “when it’s boring but not too bad”; calibrating boredom where we become quite open for new ideas; searching boredom – where we are searching for new input, that’s when we start to look around or look at our smartphones; reactive boredom, when we leave situations; and apathetic boredom which is negative associated with low arousal and depression.
The key is knowing how to deal with the different stages of boredom so you don’t get to level five.
Have I bored you yet?
Note: Parin Mehta, who has gone from looking after Asia to a global role, will be speaking at WiT Singapore on “Qigong, Chap Chye & Walking With Wolves: Airbnb Experiences, A Year On”. Airbnb now offers 20,000 experiences in 500 cities and it aims to be in 1,000 by year end.