The Question That Froze Time
“Dad, can you for once swim with us?”
My son asked this as I stepped toward the pool after a long day of meetings and a short gym session. I had promised myself to complete my 500-metre swim. Discipline keeps me grounded, and my children know that. Yet that one question pierced through the rhythm of routine like sunlight breaking water. It was not about swimming. It was about presence.
I told him, “Let me finish my laps first.” I thought I was teaching commitment. Half an hour later, when I met them in the water, their laughter drowned the world. It was brief but whole. In that small moment, I realised that love measured by time will always feel insufficient. Love measured by attention becomes infinite.
That evening became the metaphor of a larger life tension: the difference between ordinary and memorable love. Ordinary love is consistent, reliable, invisible. Memorable love is vivid, surprising, impossible to forget. One sustains life; the other shapes legacy. Great parents and great leaders learn to live in the intersection of both.
The Stories That Shape Us
A few days later, I offered to drive my parents to Batu Pahat. My aunt had cancer, and it was also the first-year death anniversary of my cousin. My father tried to stop me. “It will be a waste of your time,” he said. I asked him quietly, “Busy for what?”
When it comes to life and death, schedules lose their authority.
The road was long and slow. My mother’s childhood home looked almost the same, but the faces did not. Half of her siblings were gone. The rest had aged in ways I had not noticed. Seeing them felt like seeing time itself, relentless, silent, yet tender. I found myself studying every wrinkle, every familiar smell of the wooden house, every laugh that sounded slightly weaker than before. I wanted to freeze it all. Love, like water, changes form but never disappears.
When we returned home, my mother told me something that her relatives had said:
“You have such a good son. Even though he is busy, he still drives you all the way here.”
That compliment was for her, not me. But that was the point. Presence is sometimes love’s loudest language, especially to those who no longer expect it.
That night, my father invited me for coffee. I had a call scheduled. For once, I chose the coffee. He spoke little, and so did I. Silence became our shared prayer.
In that stillness, I thought of my son again. “Can you for once swim with us?” Maybe presence repeats itself through generations, waiting to be learned anew.
Why We Forget the Everyday Love
Human memory is biased toward what is rare. Psychologists call it the novelty effect: we remember the unusual because it breaks the pattern. A surprise dinner remains vivid for years; the thousand daily meals fade into the background. The ordinary becomes invisible precisely because it is constant.
The same happens in families, workplaces, and nations. We remember crises, not consistency. We celebrate heroes who appear in emergencies, not those who quietly sustain the system that prevents the emergencies in the first place. Yet the quiet ones build the foundations of civilization.
That bias shapes entire cultures, including our own.
In Malaysian life, three kinds of gatherings mark memory: Chinese New Year, weddings, and funerals. All are temporary pauses in the flow of busyness. We spend months apart and meet for a few hours to reaffirm that we still belong. Those hours shape how we remember one another for the rest of the year.
The Harvard Study of Adult Development, which has tracked people for more than seventy-five years, found that the single greatest predictor of happiness and health is the quality of close relationships. Love, not achievement, determines longevity. The same truth applies to organizations. The STARS framework—Self-Awareness, Teachability, Attitude, Relationships, and Significance—reminds us that relationships and significance form the outer orbit of a fulfilled life. You can teach skills, but you can only build culture through connection.
John C. Maxwell calls it the Law of the Picture: people do what people see. A parent who models attention teaches empathy. A leader who listens teaches accountability. Presence multiplies faster than instruction.
Yet many leaders, like many parents, mistake discipline for distance. They show consistency without warmth. They deliver results but forget to create moments. The result is efficient emptiness. In organizations, this emptiness looks like disengagement. In families, it looks like loneliness inside the same room.
The opposite of grateful is forgetful. And the opposite of presence is not absence. It is distraction.
Japan has a phrase, Ichigo Ichie, meaning one time, one meeting. Every encounter happens only once in a lifetime. The same family dinner will never occur again with the same mix of laughter, fatigue, and grace. The same applies to leadership moments. Every meeting, every conversation, is a one-time encounter disguised as routine.
Even the ancient world knew this. Early societies built festivals to mark seasons not because they needed entertainment but because they needed remembrance. Rituals turned passing time into shared meaning. Like a camera capturing light, a ritual exposes the soul of a community to the light of awareness. Without exposure, even light leaves no trace.
Malaysia’s festivals, Hari Raya, Deepavali, Chinese New Year, are our collective photographs. They remind us that joy must be practiced, not postponed.
Redefining Rituals and Leadership
Love and leadership operate on the same principle: both are processes, not events. They require consistency to build trust and creativity to build memory.
We often wait for the world to dictate our rhythms: reunion dinners, birthdays, funerals. But external rituals cannot hold the full weight of relationship. They arrive too late. By the time we gather, the story has already advanced to another chapter.
If we do not define our moments, the calendar will define them for us.
That is why I now choose to rewrite the rituals. In my family, reunion dinners happen more than once a year. Sometimes in June, sometimes in September. The purpose is not tradition; it is intention. We gather to remember, reconnect, and recreate, what I now call the 3R Legacy Practice.
Remember who we are and who came before us.
Reconnect across generations, even when busyness divides.
Recreate meaning through new traditions that keep the family, and the organization, alive.
In leadership, the same principle applies. The best companies and schools do not wait for annual dinners to affirm culture. They build mini-rituals, weekly gratitude rounds, morning huddles, reflective journals, that remind everyone why they exist. At Stellar, our one-to-one conversations, Coffee Mornings, and Lead to Impact reflections serve as modern rituals. They keep our why visible amid the noise of tasks.
Leadership author Jim Collins once said that great organizations preserve their core and stimulate progress. That balance between stability and renewal is what makes love memorable too. Families and teams need both the discipline that repeats and the creativity that surprises.
When Tun Dr Ismail, Malaysia’s second Deputy Prime Minister, returned from exile in the 1940s, he spoke about the need for unity “not through slogans, but through the quiet cooperation of daily life.” His leadership was remembered not for charisma but for constancy. He showed up, listened, and held the country together in fragile times. He proved that presence, not power, builds trust.
Presence is also what separates legendary athletes from talented ones. Lee Chong Wei once said that the hardest part of training was not pain but monotony. Yet he endured it daily because consistency is the only path to mastery. His medals came from ordinary discipline repeated until it became extraordinary memory.
In both leadership and love, momentum is your best friend, until it is not. When momentum replaces mindfulness, we lose the very people we intended to serve. Purposebility teaches that progress without reflection leads to drift. Systems must protect what matters most, not distract from it.
So I ask myself often: what is the cost of efficiency? What am I sacrificing when I choose productivity over presence? Because every time I say yes to distraction, I am saying no to someone who matters.
The Reverse That Redefines It All
The opposite of presence is not absence. It is distraction.
And distraction, left unchecked, becomes identity drift.
When we forget the faces that shaped us, we slowly forget who we are. Love becomes duty. Leadership becomes management. Purpose becomes performance.
Ordinary love turns memorable when it is witnessed. Leadership becomes legacy when it is remembered not for what it built but for what it noticed.
That evening at the pool was just a Tuesday. Yet one day my son may ask his own child, “Can you for once swim with me?” and in that question, a legacy will echo. Because love multiplies quietly across generations through the memory of attention.
Our STARS values end with Significance, not Success. Significance is what remains when titles fade and schedules collapse. It is measured not by how long people work with you, but by how long they remember you with warmth.
In the end, I return to a simple truth: leadership begins at home. The love of the family is from God, and to love Him is to love those He has entrusted to us. Every act of presence is a small act of worship.
So pause. Look around. Reclaim your ordinary moments.
Let every reunion, every cup of coffee, every evening swim become sacred ground.
Because one day, those will be the memories that outlast us all.
That is how ordinary love becomes memorable.
That is how leaders build legacy.
3R Legacy Practice
- Remember – Keep gratitude alive by naming what was once invisible.
- Reconnect – Schedule pauses for real presence, not ceremonial attendance.
- Recreate – Design new rituals that reflect today’s life but preserve yesterday’s love.
When ordinary love is lived this way, legacy stops being a distant dream. It becomes the life we are already living, one mindful moment at a time.
Reverse Insight:
Leaders are remembered not for what they built, but for what they paused to notice.
