For over three years, Richard Avis (39) has been carrying a piece of paper with these words written in English, traveling to places like Trondheim in Norway, Drogheda in Ireland, Stockholm in Sweden, Melbourne in Australia, and Makassar in Indonesia to "find people."
He arrived in Singapore from London last Friday and stood on Orchard Road, hoping to find his Singaporean "Time Twin" — someone born on the exact same year, month, and day as him.
As of the press time last night, Avis's efforts to "find people" locally had not yet yielded results. He said, "Singapore has such a diverse community, and I hope to find one here. It would be truly disappointing if I couldn't."
Avis will turn 40 at the end of this year. For him, the question of what it means to be "forty and free of doubts" had already troubled him more than three years ago.
In the summer of 2011, like many unmarried people, he was sharing a house with friends in London and had been in the same job for ten years. "I couldn't help but ask my 36-year-old self: Am I successful? What exactly is success? How are people my age doing?"
A curious idea suddenly popped into Avis's mind: Why not go and find them?
Avis said, "It's like when someone sells you a car and asks you after a while how the driving experience is. We have all spent the same number of days on Earth; some may be more successful than others, but everyone is successful in their own way. I also want to ask everyone: How is your experience?"
For the first two years, Avis only dared to try this idea during his annual leave, and he successfully found people born on the same day in New York and Northern Europe.
But last summer, his parents, both in their seventies, passed away one after another. This caused Avis, who has no siblings, to rethink his life, and he eventually decided to quit his job as a management consultant to focus on this search project.
"My father suffered from dementia for many years, and I fear my mother was also exhausted from taking care of him, and she suddenly had a stroke that year. Dementia makes people forget who they are, and this series of events made me rethink: what exactly is our identity?"
32 Time Twins Found
After quitting his job, Avis set off from London to Australia, Indonesia, and other places, and found several Time Twins through local media.
To date, he has found 17 male and 15 female friends of 16 different nationalities in 13 countries who were born on the same day, including an Indonesian politician whose website profile photo looks overly serious but who is actually humorous and cheerful in person, a Norwegian athlete who won medals at the Olympics when she was young but actually wants people to remember her for other achievements, and many "seemingly ordinary people who each have their own stories."
Avis's original goal was to find 40 people before his 40th birthday, but this unique experience has left him unable to stop. Avis is currently paying for his travel expenses out of his own pocket, but he says that if he can get sponsorship, he hopes to continue and publish a book about this experience. His friend, Stuart Scott, has been recording segments of this journey with a camera.
Avis said, "Everyone has their own story, they just don't have the opportunity to share it with others. I don't want to just interview successful people; every Time Twin has a story for me. Before meeting them, I knew nothing about them, except for their birthday."