Someone needs to speak out in defence of smallness and irrelevance. Especially at this time of the year when resolutions come sauntering out from wherever they’ve hibernated the year away. Reminding us of the ‘bigger, relevant issues’ we just didn’t manage to stick to this year.

So instead of big picture resolutions and issues that should be concentrated on ‘if you want to succeed’— as our First Lady admonished at a recent press conference — here are some smaller, less photo-flashy hopes and wishes that bubble to mind as I was pondering the shiny, imminent new year.

Yes, the big on-going issues count — corruption, injustice, brutality, poverty, ecological disaster — but baby steps towards eradicating them must count too.

global warming malaysia motorcars cars smoke emission When I think of these ‘baby steps’ I think of my friend Alison, an unknown eco-warrior who has ridden her bicycle through petrol fumes for 30 years as people whizz by her in their engorged gas guzzlers and SUVs.

Alison lives small in many respects: she recycles and reuses everything, refuses takeaway styrofoam or plastic and has started a veggie patch on a scrap of ground in the shadow of her city building. She appreciates money and what it can buy, but not too much. People used to laugh, dismissing her actions as time-wasting and irrelevant in our race to grow our wealth, our prestige, our national economy.

It’s true Alison has neither managed to triple her income nor ensconce herself in a mansion in London or Perth — or go shopping on a different continent by private jet — but what she has nurtured over all these years is, I would argue, something precious. It’s her homegrown hope — in the face of almost everyone telling her that her life of ‘living lightly’ on the earth is unrealistically idealistic, if not just plain dumb.

To those ranking lost jobs and purchasing power over the loss of whole species due to human- induced climate or habitat change, Alison quotes that old slogan: ‘No jobs on a dead planet’. I would so much prefer the opposite to be true: ‘No untimely deaths on a job-focussed planet’. That would be nice. Now I have to think of the small, faltering steps that will get me there.

Bamboo ladder to the stars

For Alison, unlike politicians, industrialists and their entourage of spin-meisters, hope isn’t just a word, boomingly useful yet husk-like in meaning; hope is a seedling she has planted and cared for with her innumerable small daily actions. It’s something grown from the rich soil of her time and labour, from which she has taken cuttings to pass on to strangers, neighbours and friends. It’s something alive, that we in turn have to care for, or it withers — and serves us right.

Yes, the big issues are there, and so insurmountable sometimes — ‘things have always been like this, why make a fuss now?’— it seems there’s no hope anything could be different. We all want change immediately, anyway, and lose hope when setbacks show us that things won’t just fast-forward to the happy endings we feel entitled to. Anything we can do as individuals seems so small and irrelevant, it stops us even trying.

When I find myself thinking this way — cursing the truck blowing carbon emissions into my face as I’m toiling up a hill — I think of my friend Alison, who patiently outrides trucks in traffic, shaking her fist penang jerit cycling campaign 071208 burned bicycle at them, even though they could crush her with a tiny swerve of their wheel. Several of our friends, myself included, have been so ‘crushed’. It may take us a while, but we get back onto our bikes. We must. Otherwise the trucks run rampant, and many more are crushed.

I think of my friend Fuie Wah, who made a hole in her ceiling and put up a bamboo ladder to the roof so she and her children could climb up and look at the stars. ‘It’s important,’ she said, ‘for children to see stars.’ She looked so enthusiastic, I couldn’t quip, ‘Why not just watch online or on cable TV?’ Why not take the easier, more ‘normal’ route?

Does growing veggies or breathing carbon in the effort not to release any extra, or looking at stars from a roof constitute ‘baby steps’ to bigger, more relevant issues that ‘can benefit Malaysians, all Malaysians?’ Could asking impertinent, out-of-place questions do so, as the rebuked journalist tried to of our eminent prime minister’s wife?

Call me idealistic, or plain dumb, but I’d like to think so. I’d like to think we can always ask questions, especially small, seemingly irrelevant ones, starting with: ‘Why?’ Why do we have to drive to the gym, instead of being able to walk or cycle and save gym fees? Why are there so few tree-lined pedestrian walkways and cycle paths, while highways proliferate? Why, so often, can’t we see across the highways, let alone up to the stars? Why are we stopped, or made to feel stupid, when asking simple questions?

Realising our human smallness

When I think of ‘baby steps’ I also think of my friend Sally, who questioned her aggressive drunken father in her head, never aloud. Her questions, silently formulated while she stood with hanging head, tears dripping down her cheeks, took twenty years to surface, long after he was dead. Even long gone, his legacy dead-weighted those words inside her, jagged and hurtful still, and only little by little did she manage to speak them out.

I think of all the dead-weighted and silenced shadows that, like Sally’s father’s legacy, we carry around in us, or with us always, vying for attention on the edges of our collective consciousness. NONE Slowing us down as we’re trying to surge on ahead to bigger and better things. We’d rather not see them. They’re messy, and demanding, and won’t stick to our prepared script.

At the dying end of the year, I’m thinking of all those whom we’ve turned into phantoms, because it’s easier not to see or hear them as we party on into a new decade of new beginnings. I’m thinking of the untimely dead or dying, of course — sun bears or polar bears, for example, or young Teoh Beng Hock, so full of promise. They too have been dismissed as ‘small’ matters, irrelevant things.

The thing about looking up at the naked stars in the real-world sky is that its immensity makes us realise our human smallness. I’m awed that Fuie Wah wanted this for her children, on a daily basis, even if her family and neighbours thought her odd.

Such daily actions, like Alison’s dinking her grand-daughter to pre-school on the back of her bike, or Sally letting go of old hurts day by day, asking the questions and telling the stories that she wasn’t allowed to as a child — all these remind us of our place in the larger world. Of our connectedness and our contribution, even in tiny ways. They remind us that we’re not as big as we’d like to be, and we’re not above it all.

So these are my small hopes and wishes for the coming year: Let it be a creative and productive year; let our ideas, small or large, seed our ‘baby steps’, and let these be patiently cared for, nurtured and sprouted, and harvested in the days and months and years to come.

BETH YAHP is author of the prize-winning novel, 'The Crocodile Fury' which won the Victorian Premier’s Prize for First Fiction and the Ethnic Affairs Commission Award in Australia, and has been translated into several languages.