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The One Thing More Powerful Than Fear

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It was on this day, three years ago, that I did something crazy.

I would never say it was an easy decision, nor was it always smooth sailing. Call it what you want—faith, impulsiveness, recklessness—I’m glad I took that step despite what was at stake.

In 2022, I uprooted my entire family from Singapore and relocated to Fukuoka City, Japan.

I quit my day job, shelved Gosh! Kids, and, along with Gladys, carried our six-month-old into a country rampant with coronavirus.

For 365 days, my family volunteered with an international church organisation. Our objective was to build communities for university students, young adults, and families with young children like ours.

Those were strange times. Not only had Gladys and I recently crossed the divide into parenthood, we were also recalibrating the dynamics of our marriage with a new addition to the family. Fukuoka City—the capital of Kyushu and the southern hub of Japan—was, of course, a fantastic city, but while we were able to live there, we were unable to live in the way we always had. We knew enough Japanese to get by (introducing ourselves, asking for directions, ordering food, etc.), but we still struggled with residency papers and other complex matters involving city officials. Paediatric matters were even more frustrating. We tried explaining our son’s vaccination records to the doctor, who, on first impression, seemed to nod in agreement with whatever we were saying but whose body language signalled the opposite. And while we may have looked like most people, we did not share the same beliefs or traditions, disconnecting us from the wider culture.

Life was already tough for us first-time parents. Now, we made our lives tougher by moving abroad.

But whatever the case, our contract with the church was only for a year—that was all the time we were going to be there anyway, so I told myself to bite the bullet and do my best.

Those were indeed strange times. In fact, looking back now, the more appropriate word might be crazy—crazy as to how much we gave up just to be there. Gladys and I had been pretty comfortable at home, living a familiar life. Gosh! Kids was just taking off—we had secured a new studio overlooking the city, and signed fresh contracts with clients. Our soon-to-be first home, under construction since 2018, was on track to completion despite the delays brought about by the pandemic. Our friends and families were close by, and extra hands were always available whenever we needed them.

But some crazy part of us decided that it was better to put all that aside for a roller coaster ride in Japan.

Whenever I’m on the brink of making a tough decision, I try to convince myself that missing out on the opportunity would be far more agonising than trying and failing. The thought of passing up a once-in-a-lifetime experience was enough to make me say yes—even though it meant shelving everything else. I’d always thought of myself as a risk-taker, so by saying yes I am aligned with my beliefs. And yet, Gladys and I were fearful of what laid ahead. We couldn't see if this would work out. What if we came home with more debt? What if we had to start all over again? What if those opportunities we had sacrificed to come here will never find its way into our lives again?

But relocating just felt… right. It felt like something we had to do.

So ahead we went.

And the most insane part? We did it for a group of strangers we had yet to meet—strangers who would later become part of the community we were building.

Throughout 2022, my family and I lived life on the edge—quite literally. We settled into a cosy two-storey beach house off Hakata Bay. Busan, South Korea, was just a three-hour ferry ride away. Public transportation was our main mode of travel, but with the beautiful weather an walk and cycled. Every morning, I would take my son for a stroll along the beach, where we would be greeted by the same elderly man who was always at the same spot to feed the stray cats. We connected intimately nature—tulips, cherry blossoms, crows and hawks! (the city’s signature bird)—and it felt like there was something new to experience each day.

But Gladys and I had to constantly remind ourselves that we weren’t there on vacation.

We had a job to do.

Over the course of the year, we met over three hundred Japanese people. We spent more than two-hundred hours planning and executing community and social events—photography walks, dinner parties, English-language conversational sessions, and Christian mentorship programmes. We brought personal experiences from home and infused them with the local culture, curating activities that were foreign yet enriching. From strangers, we became friends—many of whom we are still in contact with today.

The objective, as I’ve said, was to help people find meaning in their lives.

But in the midst of building a path of purpose for others, my family discovered a greater purpose for ourselves.

One of the things I noticed immediately after relocating was how many distractions I had at home. Away from the comforts and familiarity of home, alone with the most important people in my life, my world became quiet—I could hear my thoughts, I could think, I could live a life without the compulsion to chase what everyone else was chasing or to keep up with socio-cultural expectations. We were forced to slow down and stay put. As a family, we could reconnect, refocus, and recalibrate to what we valued, what we prioritised, and what we wanted our life to look like as a family. A self-actualisation process took place, one that I had never felt before in the thirty years of my existence. We literally spent all our days together, never apart, in a way I don’t think I had ever experienced before.

Through that process, it felt as if the sun began to rise above me. I awoke from slumber and realised that while I had been chasing a certain lifestyle back home, I had unknowingly missed out on so much out there.

And I reckon you might have something like that, too.

Maybe it’s been at the back of your mind for years, and you just haven’t gotten around to it. Maybe you’re waiting for the right conditions—the right time, the right bank balance, the right amount of mental clarity—before taking a step forward.

But while you wait for the sun to rise, the dawn of the morning comes, signalling that it’s time to wake from slumber.

There’s a passage in an all-time favourite of mine, Oh, The Places You’ll Go!, by Dr Seuss, where he writes of the main character, who, on a journey of self-discovery, finds himself in The Waiting Place—a pseudo-place of stagnation, a state where people get stuck in a cycle of waiting rather than actively moving forward. He wrote:

When I read those words, I felt sad. Sad for all the people waiting to live their lives. Waiting because they were scared of acting. It was a mirror held up to reality. A reflection of lives passing by while we wait for the perfect timing.

And I realised I was sad because…he was talking about me.

And I reckon he could be talking about you, too.

How long have you been putting off reconciling that broken relationship?

How long have you been saying it’s time to quit your job and pursue your passions?

How long have you been telling yourself you’re tired of the way things are and that you want real change in your life?

The way forward is to start small. The moment you realise that your actions—no matter how trivial—catalyse more action, you will realise that everything is within reach.

One thing I’ve learnt over the last five years is that we tend to give too much credit to risk. In doing so, we downplay potential upsides in fear of what might go wrong. We fear loss over gain. That’s a terrible mindset! Fulfilment comes when we fight our intuition, keep our fears in check, and have the courage to defy logic—because, as we’ve come to realise, the world doesn’t operate on sound reason. Neither should your approach to it.

For thirty years, I had spent my time in The Waiting Place. But I liberated myself the moment I set foot in Japan, and now, in the deep sea of entrepreneurship, building opportunities for families and children to discover their creative identities and to experience the world as it is.

As Gladys and I wrapped up our community work in the winter of 2022, we let out a sigh of relief. “We did it,” I told Gladys, sipping a cup of hot coffee, staring out at the massive snowstorm glazing the city. “We almost gave up, but we did it.”

Thankfully, most things worked out. Our worries did not come to pass. Our boy had grown to be extroverted and sociable. These “strangers” became friends. Lives were transformed. Our experiences became the key inspiration of our Gosh! Kids Go overseas creative-culture camps because we wanted families to experience what we did. Sure, we had “lost” a couple of valuable things when we made the decision to relocate, but it was paid back with invaluable interest—a new mindset, a new perspective of the world, a renewed sense of purpose and mission. We returned home feeling like we had accomplished something big, not just in our own lives, but in the lives of others.

In those moments, I’d come to realise that no one will rationalise why you had to do certain things.

You do it because you have to.

You do it because deep down, you know it’s the right thing to do.

Sometimes I would picture an alternative scenario where we remained comfortably at home, in The Waiting Place.

But that would make me cringe.

Because there’s one thing more powerful than fear.

It’s regret.

Everyone’s called for greater, for a purpose beyond yourselves and your families, and that’s what Dr. Seuss was talking about on the very next page when he wrote:

The purpose of life is to experience things that we will later look back on with nostalgia, rather than regret.

Written by Mathieu Beth Tan

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