What The Image Says:
Top left
- 2026 年
Year 2026 - 农历丙午马
Lunar calendar, Bing Wu Year of the Horse
(丙午 is the traditional Heavenly Stem and Earthly Branch combination for the Horse)
Top centre
- 马到成功
Literally, “Success arrives with the horse.”
Idiomatically, this means swift success or immediate victory. It is a common auspicious phrase. - CHENGGONG
Pinyin transliteration of 成功, meaning success.
Top right
- 马到成功 again, stylised in decorative calligraphy
Same meaning, emphasised for good fortune.
Bottom
- 高级全彩通胜择吉日历
“High-grade full-colour Tong Sheng auspicious date calendar” A 通胜 (Tong Sheng) is a traditional Chinese almanac used to select auspicious dates for activities like weddings, travel, business openings, and so on.
I almost threw this away.
A tear-off 2026 calendar from Sheng Siong. The kind you’re meant to rip cleanly, without thought, just to get to January.
But the front cover stopped me.
Eight horses charging forward through mist and mountains. The Year of the Horse. Ma Dao Cheng Gong, success arriving swiftly. Not subtle. Almost loud. Momentum, motion, intent.
So I didn’t tear it.
I took out my paper knife, trimmed it carefully, and pinned it up instead.
Right in front of me is a board. Not a mood board. Not a productivity system.
It’s a wall that remembers for me.
I started it in 2017. Notes, cards, flyers, badges, sketches, odd fragments of memory. Things I didn’t want to trust entirely to folders or screens. Over time it filled up. Then it layered. New things pinned over old ones, but rarely removed.
At first glance, it looks dense. Almost chaotic. Paper over paper. Lanyards draped across reminders. Nothing centred. Nothing styled for aesthetics.
That’s intentional.
This isn’t decoration. It’s accumulation.
You can read time in it. Older items half-buried. Newer ones sitting on top. Events, people, projects, credentials, small victories, quiet pauses. All sharing the same physical space, the way real life does.
Archivists might call this a working wall. Writers might call it a visual palimpsest. Layers written over time, nothing fully erased. Old traces still visible beneath the new.
The horse image sits calmly in the middle now. Not dominant, but deliberate. A marker rather than a headline.
In Chinese tradition, the horse isn’t just about speed. It’s about endurance. Carrying weight over long distances. Showing up again and again, even when the terrain turns foggy.
The mountains in the background matter too. They don’t move. They just stand there, watching the horses pass. A quiet reminder that motion is temporary, but direction matters.
Around it, the board becomes more personal. Business cards. Family moments. Handwritten notes. Odd talismans. Objects that mattered enough at the time to pin, and still matter enough not to remove.
Below it all, a screen anchors the chaos. Work in motion. Thought becoming output. Analog disorder above, digital clarity below. Past and present negotiating space.
People sometimes ask why I don’t clean this up.
Because life doesn’t arrive neatly stacked.
Some people archive by folders. I archive by proximity. What stays visible long enough usually tells me what matters.
Not everything deserves a drawer. Some things need to remain in your line of sight.
This stays. Not as decoration, but as a marker.
Some things aren’t meant to be discarded just because the calendar says “tear here”. Sometimes, the front cover is the message.