A hundred pieces, a second harvest

I have just crossed my 100th published piece with The Borneo Post.

One-and-a-half years sounds modest on a calendar. On a writing desk, however, it resembles a small plantation: references scattered, drafts stacked like fronds, browser tabs fanning out like canopies, research tables permanently “in crop,” and notebooks bearing the quiet scars of crossings-out and second thoughts.

This is not a victory lap. It is a slow walk back along the field path – dusty in places, unexpectedly green in others – to see how writing, once a side road, became a steady companion in my refirement years. Not retirement. Not retreat. A second harvest.

When Silence Asked to Be Written

I did not begin with an ambition to be a columnist. I began with an unease.

After decades in estates, boardrooms, policy tables and committee rooms, silence arrived – polite but persistent. It asked uncomfortable questions: What remains unsaid? What should not be lost? What can be shared that may help someone else see a little clearer?

The early pieces were tentative. They carried the cadence of someone learning to listen again – this time not to yields or price forecasts, but to memory. Oil palm came naturally: its science, its challenges, its opportunities, its often misunderstood resilience. But life crept in through the margins – family, faith, mentors, missteps, history and grace.

Writing became my way of stitching these worlds together, piece by piece, like assembling a jigsaw whose final image only reveals itself slowly.

How It All Started

New journeys rarely announce themselves with trumpets.

Mine began with a simple reflection: A Tropical Christmas with Ballerina Apple – a memory from my Cambridge days. No technical jargon. No industry critique. Just a story.

By providence, it landed on the desk of The Borneo Post’s chief-editor, Datuk Chiu Nai Wen. His reply was brief but generous: “Heartwarming, easy to read, layered.” Then came the unexpected invitation: Would you like to write your own column?

And just like that, Aspire to Inspire was born. Later came Unveiling the Essence of Oil Palm. Eventually, they converged—because whether I was writing about barn owls, weevils or El Niño, mechanisation or memory lanes, the objective remained the same: to share, to reflect, to inspire.

All my pieces have been pro bono. Not from obligation, but conviction. Print media today navigates difficult terrain. If these words could contribute, even modestly, to the public conversation, that was gift enough. It is my small way of giving back.

From Fields to Keyboards

If someone had told me years ago – while I was trudging through estates, wrestling with budgets, preparing annual reports and press releases, or sitting through marathon committee meetings – that I would one day become a columnist, I would have smiled politely and returned to my spreadsheets. Oil palm, after all, does not grow on Excel sheets.

Yet the instinct remained unchanged: observe carefully, speak plainly, and leave the place better than you found it. My tools changed – from boots and block maps to keyboards and footnotes – but stewardship is stewardship.

People imagine writing as inspiration. In truth, it is passion and discipline. A cursor blinking like a foreman at muster. Paragraphs surviving multiple rewrites because clarity matters more than cleverness. Sentences trimmed not for drama, but for truth. Writing is not typing. It is cultivation.

Family: The Unwritten Footnotes

Behind every published article is a household that absorbs the unpublished hours.

My family has endured deadlines interrupting dinners, ideas surfacing mid-conversation, and stacks of reading material and notebook migrating across the dining table. They offered patience rather than applause, space rather than pressure.

There were evenings when writing stretched into the small hours – until my wife reminded me, gently but firmly, that even second harvests require sleep. In ways no byline can capture, they are co-authors.

Oil Palm and Life (They Refuse to Separate)

Readers sometimes ask whether my columns are about palm oil or about life. The honest answer is: both.

Oil palm is never merely a crop. It is labour and land. Policy and prejudice. Soil and science. It is also metaphor – of cycles, patience, neglect and renewal.

So the columns wandered. From taxation tables to kopitiam memories. From field practices and sustainability debates to policies and personal reflections. Some argued. Others remembered. A few simply wondered aloud. All tried to tell the truth without shouting.

If at times my oil palm pieces grew a little sharper, it was not from hostility but from tough love. Passion without perspective is reckless. Perspective without passion is sterile. After three decades under tropical sun, monsoons and fluorescent boardroom lights, one learns that silence rarely improves outcomes.

Read me not as a troublemaker – but as someone gently sounding a bell before the fire spreads.

Conversations Beyond the Page

Some columns did not end when the paper folded. Shared on LinkedIn and Facebook, they sparked thoughtful exchanges – sometimes differences of opinion, sometimes quiet messages: Your words spoke to me. That, to a writer, is yield.

Along the way, I have also been privileged to write for The Star, The Edge, and several industry and general-interest publications. Somewhere in that journey, I found a creative niche: the slightly mischievous “If I Were…” genre and my TEK Talks column – a planter’s tribute to TED Talks, minus the stage lighting. For that editorial trust across newsrooms, I remain deeply grateful.

Each platform carries its own rhythm and readership. What resonates with industry insiders cannot be parachuted unchanged into the public square. Industry shorthand must be translated into kitchen-table language. Complex issues deserve explanation, not dilution. Technicalities and jargon must be gently dismantled and rebuilt in plain sight so that a student, a homemaker, a policymaker and a planter can all enter the same conversation without a glossary in hand.

Where possible, I add a pinch of wit, a spoonful of humour and the occasional pun – because if we can smile while learning, we are more likely to listen. Life for many is already heavy enough. If a paragraph can lighten the load without lightening the truth, then the writing has done its quiet work.

The Second Harvest

In agriculture, a second harvest is never automatic. It depends on what was planted earlier, how the soil was treated, and whether lessons were learned.

Refirement has taught me the same. These hundred pieces are not a full stop. They are a comma.

If the first harvest was about building estates and institutions, the second is about sharing experience. Planting words instead of seedlings. Trusting that some seeds will take root—in young readers, in policymakers, in quiet professionals who simply needed to know they were not alone in their thoughts.

To The Borneo Post – thank you for the space, the trust, and the steady editorial hand.

To readers from all walks of life – students, planters, homemakers, academics, executives, retirees, friends and faith-companions – thank you for lending me your most precious commodity: time. And to my family – thank you for anchoring the man behind the byline.

As I often whisper to myself, with a planter’s practicality and a writer’s optimism: Aspire to inspire before you expire.

The main crop may have been harvested. But as any seasoned planter knows, there is always fruit left worth gathering – some ripening quietly, some waiting patiently, some discovered only when we walk the field one more time.

If these remaining clusters of words can nourish thought, encourage courage, or bring light where there was doubt, then let them be gathered with gratitude – and offered for the greater glory of God.

The journey, it seems, is not winding down. It is still very much in season.