Butterfly

Close your eyes. Picture a bumble bee foraging inside a room.

That happened with my daughter visiting the indoor play centre within a stone's throw from my home. We had bought the ticket for that place with an iconic logo of bumble bee some months ago, and yet didn't bring her there until the admission ticket was going to expire. I suspect that my procrastination may have been a hunch that my daughter won't be too excited to be an indoor bee.

After the indoor game, my wife decided to bring little Jasmine headlong to the beach. "Excuuuuuuse me?" I can hear the query already. "Do you really mean going to the beach in the winter?"

"Why not?" My wife's voice was calm as a summer pond.

My two-year-old did feel stuck indoors and, after taking few snacks, metamorphosed from a bored bee into a caterpillar. Yes, she did. She could not stop laughing whilst having pretend play with mum, who also crawled on the sand like a caterpillar. Yeah, yeah. Within a minutes, the two caterpillars turned into two butterflies running around on the beach.

Pure joy.

Behave

A little one near the end of her toddler months is about learning to pick up new skills in her rapidly expanding world. Now, if you ask me, what's about growing up with a little child is that we learn to enjoy the world of freedom, making way for more relaxed interaction. But you can't do that if you're not looking through the kaleidoscope of children.

Take a minute - and maybe a deep breath too - and imagine a kid stomping on sand castle, wearing nappy and her smile. Of course, it's my little Jasmine. Soon after I posted her photo online, I was reminded that she wasn't wearing trousers. Oh please! Shouldn't I dress up my two-year-old in her Sunday best at the beach? I say to myself, "Okay, hmmm, let's remove that picture."

I found out more about how two-year-old should behave when I brought Jasmine to a church wedding ceremony. Even if she kept using an "inside" voice, others around me could hear a toddler babbling to herself. Is this a taboo to interrupt the sermon by toddler words like "happy" and "Simba"? No. It's a sin. Without much ado, I was scolded and taught a lesson by someone behind me. Finally, I left with Jasmine, puzzled by the question if it's the two-year-old or the guy behind who was talking with words inappropriate to the age.

Deadline

It's hard to believe the magic of deadline.

Deadly as the name may sound, it is quite impossible to live without deadlines. To me, this is an absurd state of affairs. How could I have finished so many things like reviewing two journal manuscripts and writing reference letter for my intern before I took my week off? How could there have been so many applications just before the grant submission closes? Did I have to mention the deadline for tax return?

There is now little doubt that, in evolutionay terms, we mastered the skill of procrastination (from the Latin pro, meaning for; and cras, meaning tomorrow) first, before the natural selection of a tool that has become known as deadline.

Although discipline is a linchpin of growing, it remains for most of us to rely on the patrolling of deadline.

Copy

My patient leaned over and stared, her eyes wide open but not at me. She was paying attention to her laboratory test results on the clinic computer screen.

Natural though it seems, the patients' laboratory results in public sector hospital aren't supposed to be released to them. You'd better bring a notebook and a pen if you want a copy of the results. For that matter, the laboratory results sound like PowerPoint slides of a lecturer, who felt that keeping the lecture materials from the students is the way to make students pay attention to his authoritative lecture.

Won't you hate it when you can't concentrate on the lecture while you're busy with copying the slide materials? That happens with the patient who can't get access to the laboratory test reports. It's hard to argue who owns the laboratory results. Harder to fathom are the reasons of denying their free access to a copy of their health information.

I can't think of any.