Table Manner

With all due respect to the world class table tennis player Wang Nan, she had wonderful performance in women's singles table tennis Olympic game last night.

Did you say she lost her Olympic gold medal? Did she?

If you ask me, I would rather say Wang did well to win a silver. Yes, she won the silver medal with her signature smiles. She cracked a big smile, occasionally sticking out her tongue, even after losing points. The point is not that she wins or loses; her humorous ability to experience moments of pleasure - even in the face of Olympic final - is at the heart of every one of us who watched the game.

As a Tibetan saying goes, "When you smile at life, half the smile is for your face, the other half for somebody else’s." Indeed, her smile radiates throughout the packed Peking University Gymnasium, all the way across the globe via television broadcast.

Watch

To go into solitude and wilderness, one needs to retire as much from the ticking of the time watch as from the society. To speak truly, few of us can stay away from the society without taking off the watch. The idea as to how I can learn to appreciate the tranquillity of nature was suggested to me during my "solo" session at the Outward Bound course ten years ago. I kept remembering everything, putting a tent up, seeing the most exquisite sunset of my life alone at a deserted island, and how I went through the twenty-four hours without wearing the timepiece on my wrist.

Peace and jollity. After all these ten years, I seldom give myself the luxury of both.

My habits of city life ensure that not a day goes by without wearing my wristwatch. And this watch – an inexpensive but faithful wristwatch – has become so important to me that it is the first thing I put on in the morning as I step out of bed and the last thing I take off before stepping back into bed at night. I nearly ran into trouble when my watch stopped running (after my pulling out its knob by accident) this morning. I don’t know what to make of this but simply admit to myself that modern man can't live without a watch. Can I?

Scrub

I taught my students, who were going to the operating theatre with me last week, the scrub techniques. Rituals abound in the operating theatre, I confess, with all the meticulous and universally-agreed ways of washing our hands (or "surgical scrub"). The conventional ways of surgical scrub have been performed in countless times obsessively throughout our career life and with such conviction that they must be gospel. But are they?

I still remember my clumsiness (and that of my students, too) with the elbow operated taps during the very first time of going to the operating theatre. But then the Journal of Hospital Infection recently ran a story describing better types of taps in the theatre suites. The researchers showed that using leg operated rather than elbow operated taps for scrubbing could save 1400 tonnes of greenhouse gas emission a year. Think of it - it was only a matter of changing the water delivery system that resulted in at least a 50% cut in water use!

If there is any moral from this story, it would probably be the creativity for those of us who have been doing all the mundane jobs (such as scrubbing before an operation). As simple as it seems, the creativity to find a new way of doing a mundane job can be fun. For those of you who get used to two packets of sugar for the morning coffee, think of the way of tearing each packet and putting it one over another into your cup.

Have you ever thought of putting one packet of sugar over the other and opening both of them with just one single tear?

Trash

A friend of mine has made a vow (to his wife) that for every new toy brought into his home, another old one must go.

This is a hard idea to swallow, and it will definitely stick in your throat if you have an addiction, say, to shopping and costuming yourself.

Making an effort to hold back buying new stuff is never easy; chucking your old collections of textbooks and lecture notes, directories, shoes, toys, comic books, jewelry (or fill in whatever worthy of your collection here) is even more difficult. Fear of needing them someday and worth of fortune in the future, habit, and nostalgia... There are thousands of reasons for our penchant to fill our homes to the brim. We keep everything lest we throw the baby out with the bath water. Yet, I learned a lesson during my recent Herculean task of cleaning my home. Over last few weeks, I learned to enjoy the tidying process. As it turned out, there were dozens of computer floppy diskettes that I will never open again, bunches of keys that I am unable to find out what to open with, not to mention load of books that are outdated.

Believe me, you can never imagine how many of your collections should have gone to the trash. We simply amass astonishing amount of stuff without setting aside time to send away those unnecessary and useless stuff. And of course, it would also hold true if you spell the word "stuff" in my previous sentence the other way, replacing the alphabet of u by a.

Scramble

The online puzzle game Scramble has addicted my mind to its fun with alphabets for quite a while. Every now and then I find myself carried away by this remarkable word game, in which we line up the scrambled letters to from a new word.

Although chances are that I am killing time by juggling with the alphabets, there are occasionally good lessons to learn. Trust me, the word game sparkles with amusing examples of life lesson. Think of the word "trust", and drop the letter t – alas, trust without the t is rust.

It may seem odd to most of us, but in reality we get tempted to ride the roughshod over the feelings of other, getting our own way, finding fault, without even considering the treading upon the other people's pride. All these serve no better purpose than rusting the trust.

Building trust is somewhat difficult, but losing it is simply a piece of cake. When the issue of referring sick patients to the intensive care unit was raised in my hospital this week, for instance, a Pandora's box has been opened. For years, referral of patients was made on the basis of mutual trust. If one is to make a new proposal that intensive care unit referral should only be made by senior consultants – but not the frontline medical doctors caring the sick patients – you can imagine the consequence of this move.

Do I smell a rusty box?

Invention

We spoke about the fashionable buzzwords or clichés during lunch meeting the other day. Like so many geeks, I must admit, I hardly come to fall in love with the new thing. That being said, vogue words can be quite fun and that’s how they got to be vogue words.

Nowhere is the classical language in the Anglo-Saxon times more creative than the new clichés that are born every now and then. Well, obviously new words and phrases have to be born. The nub of the problem is birth control. Just as if you print too much money, its value goes down, so if you grant too many fashion words or buzzwords, the fun of them becomes debased.

There are, of course, numerous examples I found myself carried away by the brilliant buzzwords. Think of the scene of birds laying their eggs – as what I did during my recent reading The Selfish Gene. The best buzzword that strikes a chord, indeed, comes from the Japanese who invented the word saku-taku-no-ki.

Saku – the special sound a mother hen makes tapping on an egg with her beak.
Taku – the sound a chick makes tapping from within.
No-ki – the moment the tappings come together.
Saku-taku-no-ki – the very instant a chick pecking on the inside and the mother pecking on the outside reach the same spot. The egg cracks open. A new life is born, in just the way a new cliché comes to life.