Why I do, What I do.

I returned late one night from an extended mediation and my three-year-old was disappointed that I had missed dinner with him.

“Why were you so late daddy?”

“I had to work tonight.”

“What did you do in your work, daddy?”

“I helped two people stop quarrelling.”

He paused for just two seconds, “Why did you stop at two?”

That question became a key motivator for why I started Sage: To help more than two people stop quarrelling.

“If I was going to work at something that required me to forsake precious time with those I love, it had to be something big. Big in meaning.”

It’s not that I had been wasting time before Sage being delinquent. I had spent more than 80% of a 20 year work life in public service. I’ve served the country as a military officer, been in the foreign service, been general counsel for a newly founded state university, helped launch several public hospitals, and served as the first full CEO for the Singapore International Mediation Centre. Of the time not in public service, I had helped to run a family business in food manufacturing and spent several months in a French Catholic monastery.

But, I had continued to feel a deep disquiet. The feeling that I was unfulfilled.

My son’s query to me that night was like the metaphorical light bulb that shed light on the life-long puzzle. It became ridiculously obvious to me then that what I needed to feel alive was to be on the ground. While the intellectual rigour of public policy-making would always have its appeal, it only fuelled the hunger within me to be closer to the people.

A good policy could not give me the satisfaction I felt when I had helped a broken family achieve reconciliation. It could not make me happier than when I had successfully restored the friendship between long-time business partners. It could not energise me the way the smile on a patient or caregiver’s face could when they had achieved the closure they sought to a botched surgery.

“Sage is about living my passion to touch and raise spirits and to bring people closer together.”

Sage is about fulfilling my promise to my own children that if I have to be away from them, it will be for a truly higher purpose. Sage is my contribution to the legacy that I wish my children to inherit when they grow up: a world that is more collaborative, more creative, and kinder than when it was in their parents’ time.

– Aloysius

Representative image, courtesy PublicDomainPictures from Pixabay