Year-End Read

Truly Madly Guilty is a good read - not because it's the winning novel of the 2016 Goodreads Choice Awards - but because it's truly good. 

The author Liane Moriarty unfolds her page-turning story about three families joining an embarrassing barbecue, creating tension by what one says and what one doesn't say.

After reading a few novels lately I got to thinking about writers as psychoanalysts (Liane Moriarty certainly is one of them) and the knack they need to show us what's hidden behind people's minds.

A writer knows what's behind people's mind. And a good writer knows the art of bringing that into focus. Liane Moriarty, in other words, won't just say that people are embarrassed. She writes: "Everyone seemed to be deliberately not looking at her, the way people did when you had food in your teeth and they didn't want to tell you, so they kept trying not to see."

Time Off

Three kids having break from school. Two adults, from work. Another one taking a half day leave sandwiched between morning and evening duty. (You knew it was me, didn't you?) How did we make the best out of this normal weekday? The children suggested bike ride.

And they did. It's a beautiful ride, beside and under endless trees, along the coastline of Tolo Harbour with mountain view.

By the time I'd finished work at noon, my daughter and her buddies were drawing and reading next to their bikes. I brought a camera and two story books. What else did we need? Nothing, really. Children simply are magicians who can bring forth a whole treasure trove out of nothing and at their own will. When they came to our home and played, they improvised a rock band, dismantling the bed guard for the guitar, creating their loveliest possible versions of microphone and drum. It's that simple.

"When you love something like reading - or drawing or music or nature," notes Anne Lamott, "it surrounds you with a sense of connection to something great." It makes sense.

Guilt

Watching my daughter grow up is always an enthralling experience, and her getting seven means another big step down the road.

Sevens are delightful to be around, I've been told. That's good news. To give but one example: my seven-year-old girl has a growing interest in homonyms. Making up sentences like "The rock music rocks" is fun and that gives us a sense of what growing up means.

Seven-year-old is mature enough to not just ask about semantics. But everything. This means we can talk about many different topics. After reading Brené Brown's Daring Greatly ourselves, my wife and I explained how to tell the distinction between guilt and shame tonight.

Maybe the two words seems quite close to each other - and honestly, I used to think so - but it is not the case. Guilt is an awareness of what we did wrong. Shame is a corrosive label of who we are.

When a kid tells a lie, she can feel guilty and change. When she is a liar ("That's shame, oh no."), she can't change.

As it turns out, she can grasp the big difference. Wow.

Pig

"A children's story that can only be enjoyed by children is not a good children's story in the slightest."

As trite as the quote by C.S. Lewis has become, it is still true. I enjoy reading children's books with my daughter during breakfast. What did we read this morning? The story Piggybook by Hans Christian Andersen Awards laureate Anthony Browne.

The Piggot family's messy situation in this picture story somewhat reflects my state of mind and, as such, makes the book even more amusing. Mr. Piggot and the two children never share the housework, leaving Mrs. Piggot overloaded with preparing breakfast and dinner, washing dishes, ironing, to say the least of her own job. Working mum like Mrs. Piggot can be incredibly hardworking. Everything seems perfect, until one fine day when the hardworking mum decided to stage a walkout.

Can you imagine what happens to the the lazy bum Mr. Piggot? If not, come to find me (when my wife is sick and cannot take care of my daughter), and you'll know.

Daring

Daring Greatly is another book I've read this month. An inspiring book about difficult emotions like fear and vulnerability.

I found the same formula playing out in my family this week. Fear about surgery. Vulnerable to insecurity. And, oh, question about self-worthiness: me never good enough to have warm pillow talk with my daughter (as what my wife has always been doing perfectly). Me not as eloquent or poised as my six-year-old daughter in expressing love to my wife.

It's good to learn from Brené Brown that vulnerability isn't good or bad. It dawns on me that to feel is to be vulnerable. Vulnerability, in short, is the birthplace of love and courage. I know this is hard to believe, but it's true. It's in fact also what I learn from Lawrence Block, who says it all: "Fear and courage are like lightning and thunder. They both start out at the same time, but the fear travels faster and arrives sooner. If we just wait a moment, the requisite courage will be along shortly."

If you don't believe me, check out the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz.

Fear

"Mommy, what if you die?"

That's the opening sentence of the second last chapter of Some Nerve, a book about everyday courage. The subtitle to Patty Chang Anker's book is Lessons Learned While Becoming Brave.

I heard the same question this week, asked by my six-year-old daughter, on the brink of 7.

To Jasmine, who spent the last six months in fear of some large creature eating her mum's leg on the operation table, the surgery meant a lot.

I'm all for telling kids the facts of life, but it isn't a good time to tell my daughter the hard facts during her hard time. I didn't sleep (well) the night before my wife's surgery. Neither did Jasmine. None of us had gotten much sleep.

I believe with all my heart that life is finite, and it can leave you at any time. And who's to say that we can pass our turn? I was scared, but I realised no matter what, I should help my daughter fend off fear. "We got great hands from good surgeons, we prepared, we prayed," I reassured Jasmine.

To defuse the scary surgery, we promised to bring our daughter to visit mum right after surgery. And we did. Every day. For us, one of the lessons we learned is the most powerful painkiller: a kiss from the beloved daughter. And the best birthday gift for Jasmine is her mum's leaving hospital before her birthday.

Separation

Nothing grips my heart more than hearing my daughter's muffled sobs this morning, when my wife had to leave for hospital because of a major operation. That's her own operation, not her patient's. My daughter has been praying for mum since we told her the bad news six months ago.

The separation seized her in a difficult moment, the longest since she were born.

To be honest, we're afraid too.

We decided to bring up this issue during the teacher-parent conference last month. We told class teacher my daughter's symbolic act of throwing sand at the beach. Off the sand goes, and so does her worry about mum's operation - the way we've been taught to dispose our worries in a sealed envelope and putting through the paper shredder. Her teacher then remembered her teaching the class such skill not long ago. "Wow, she has been paying so much attention to my teaching and is putting it in practice." Her teacher was almost in tears when she recounted that, putting a lump in our throats.

After Work

Four days into the English Week in my daughter's school, I haven't got chance to join the activities until today. So what is it about the English Week that attracts bookworms like me? Partly, it's the book sale with discounts. Partly, it's the character dress up day when students are encouraged to dress like their favorite book characters. I missed this activity for two years because I happened to be on call in my hospital.

At last, I got the chance to read stories to the children today. I didn't sleep much during my night call, and took half day off this afternoon. This is unusual; I don't usually take half day off after overnight call. Yes, I know - we all know - this is my queer habit. Still, I think it's okay to take a rest once in a while. So I schlepped my bag with two picture story books after lunch, and headed to my daughter's school.

I knew I made the right choice when my daughter rated my story telling as entertaining as the other two invited authors, Mathew Cooper and Blair Reeve.

Therapeutic

Decades of research, as well as a recent Time magazine article, has suggested that reading a great novel can be therapeutic.

Come to think of it, stories might give us better insight than a scientific paper, or create a stronger bonding between the reader and the family than any counsellor.

For daddies too busy with work to spend time with children - and I count myself in - the best prescription is Richard Paul Evans' The Christmas Box.

The young man in this fiction has been working hard to build up his career. There is not much time left for his daughter Jenna.

"He's gone a lot" is the way Jenna described her dad.

"Starting a new business takes a lot of work," Jenna's mum explained, "and a lot of time."

Jenna looked up sadly. "Is working better than here?"

"No. No place is better than home."

"Then why does Daddy want to be there instead of here?"

So simple, yet so profound.

Procrastinate

Think about a choice you made recently. Any choice. Which you're 110 percent certain that it's a good choice. That way most people are guaranteed to agree with your choice because the correct choice seems so obvious that we don't have to prove it.

Now, here's the bad news: Most of such choices turn out to be wrong. Although we're confident with our correct decisions, the growing evidence from studies have shown otherwise. That's an inspiring lesson I learn after reading The Small BIG.

Okay, let's think about the gift cards. Those cards for redeeming coffee at a high-quality shop, for example. There are two options with the same cash value: one is valid for three weeks, another is good for two months. What would you choose? The three-week or two-month version?

Hang on a second. What is the odds that you will redeem the card before its expiry day? Put more simply, is there a better feeling to get a gift card that lasts longer? Many would say so, and most of us would bet that we're more likely to redeem that one lasting for two months. That's exactly what the researchers tried to test. It turns out that - no surprise - close to 70 percent of those who evaluated the two-month gift card said that they would use it, compared to about 50 percent who evaluated the card that lasts for three weeks. And no wonder: more flexibility means better terms.

Except that it's wrong.

Five times as many given the good-for-three-weeks-only card visited the shop to claim their coffee than those given the long-expiration date card. When it comes to opportunity cost of longer expiration date, the downside is more excuse to procrastinate. In reality, a closer deadline encourages us to get the job done earlier, rather than later. And much less excuse to procrastinate. To this I keep the habit of borrowing books from library. It is the due day that gives me a better chance to finish the book. The closer the due day, the better. I borrowed two books from the university library last Sunday, The Christmas Box and The Social Animal. The first one is due for return in one week, and the second one isn't due until four months later. Which book do you think I have finished earlier?

Name

I gave a few talks on creating common grounds recently. This idea is not new, and certainly not mine. One of the lessons I learned from preparing the teaching material is what psychologists call the "name letter effect" or "shared-initials effect."

Let me give an example. With my name beginning with the letter K, I would be way more likely to donate to the Hurricane Katrina relief appeal than people whose names didn't begin with the letter K. The same applied to those R-initial donors after the Hurricane Rita, according to the findings by psychology professor Jesse Chandler. All of which is to say that there is overrepresentation of same-initial hurricane relief donors relative to the baseline distribution of initials in the donor population. Other researchers replicated and extended such experimental finding by including a patient's first name in an SMS (short message service) text reminding patient to attend a health appointment. Ahem. Adding the first name, such as John, in the text reminders led to a whopping 57 percent reduction in no-shows compared to reminders without a patient's name.

To put it simply - perhaps too simply - we simply love our own names. The upshot of all this advice is that we should never forget the attention-grabbing power of people's names. I know I should not make too many requests by email or text messages using mobile device; this I know, this I have learned in my lifetime. And then - this is the truth - I have to make online requests when time doesn't allow face-to-face request. One potential solution, I believe, is to write short request like "Please let me know, Gordon, if you'd come across cases for teaching (and perhaps even better without my name KM at the end of this message, unless my name begins with G)."

Break

Laissez-faire term break, too loose? Not always. Our preoccupation with homework has deprived out children of what should have been some of the most nurturing experiences of childhood.

It's my daughter's school term break this week. When I say break, I mean it. A break without homework. Now that autumn is here, we chose to go outdoors. It's not hard to understand why the natural world is a child's favorite classroom. Can you imagine what we did at the last stop of our hike today? My daughter spent nearly an hour watching leaves.

With countless butterflies around, the leaf-eating caterpillars must have left behind lots of "footprints" for us to explore. Finding holes in the foliage gives rise to all sorts of patterns as long as we add a bit of imagination, much in the way that we name the constellation by linking up stars. My daughter studied those leaves the way astronomers viewed the richness of the sky - you can imagine a dolphin leaping out at you if you gaze at them for long enough.

Homework

Over the years as my daughter has grown from an infant to toddler to grade-schooler, I've read quite a collection of books on parenting. These books have given me a thousand suggestions, many of them insightful, and others somewhat run-of-the-mill. Rarely is there a book delving into pages after pages of academic papers, citing meta-analysis with critique. And no wonder: parenting isn't rocket science, after all.

I remember reading somewhere that parenting and plumbing have much in common. It's like stopping a leak in the dark with a duff torch while wearing mittens. You feel around to understand what's happening, make decision, and then after the event spend forever justifying it on the idea of sweet reason trickled over with a spoonful of authority. For that matter, anyone who have been in the dark can justify their authority and make claims nobody can challenge. And whether their claims are real or only in their mind, nobody knows because everything is in the dark.

I was lucky enough to have read The Homework Myth by Alfie Kohn. As we all know, homework assignment can create havoc in the relationship between a child and his parents. And even when the parents feel squeezed by the homework (yes, conflict is inevitable), they still ask for more homework, and not less. All of these have to do with the myth that homework is good for their kids. That certainly does not have to be the case. Kohn hasn't reported, and I haven't found, any evidence that homework gives an iota of academic benefits for young students. Strictly speaking, we don't even have a whiff of research evidence to support or refute whether the assignment of homework fosters good study habits.

The takeaway: There is such a thing as too much homework.

Need I say more?

Joy

Marie Kondo's debut guide book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up has been published in more than 30 countries, teaching us to be happier by letting go of the stuff we don't need. Recently, I've been reading her second one, Spark Joy, and learning to tidy up in a way that will spark joy.

Technically, we aren't told to discover joy simply by discarding things. One line in particular from the secrets cracked me wide open. She said, “If it makes you happy, then the right choice is to keep it confidently." I learn this richest of lessons from Kondo, and for that, I am grateful.

For many years, I've kept a closet chockfull of my patients' faces in my heart. Even though I may not be able to recall their names and details, I try my best to remember their faces.

"Good afternoon, I guess this is the first time I see you" is my standard hello to greet a patient who has been seen by many doctors but new to me. Sometimes I make mistakes. Most of the time, I'm right. That sparks joy. In a sense, though, it is more of pride (of my memory) than joy. What really matters is not mistaking a patient as a complete stranger by the time he returns to see me ten years later. I met one yesterday. Can you guess what? We still recognised each other after a lapse of ten years. The way he told me I haven't grown (too) old is one of the best birthday gifts for me today.

School

Brand name school works, but only if you measure it that way.

That's what Julie Lyncott-Haims, Dean of Freshmen and Undergraduate Advising at Stanford University, teaches us in her book How to Raise an Adult. One of the oft-quoted measures, the U.S. News college rankings, simply reflects how hard a school is to get into - to say nothing of the tuition fee - and what a group of other educators think of it, which is a function of how hard it is to get into.

In her TED talk, Lyncott-Haims reminded the audience to let children develop into their selves, have free play, and to broaden our definition of good school.

I still think my daughter's school is a magical place, but not because of its ranking. Quite the opposite. Long story short: a school my child loves. We visited the Old Tai Po Police Station on the public holiday after Mid-Autumn Festival yesterday. This is the second time my daughter learned about the heritage of this historic building. We were impressed. Before going home, Jasmine asked us to bring her to her school nearby. "Oh, this is a holiday, my dear," we said to her.

My daughter's answer took no time. "I know, mum and dad, and I just to want to say hello to my school."

This brief sentence takes sixteen words, but each one tells me how much she loves her school.

Library

Reading a handwritten message from one's daughter is the closest some of us are ever going to come to knowing what's meant by love, so it’s no wonder I experienced that feeling when I received one from mine.

"Dear mum and dad," Jasmine wrote. "I love you. I miss you so much when you are at work. You guys are the best." Next to my daughter's message is her drawing of what the best dad means: all the good books I borrow for her. What a relief when you find that you've actually provided a delightful springboard to literacy for your child!

I've lost count of the number of story books I've borrowed from the public library, and this was long before my daughter started to choose her favorite ones from her own school library. And long before my daughter learned to read the chapter books of Roald Dahl (who is having his 100th birthday today). Even today, although my daughter is now big enough to pick her own, I find myself enjoying going to the children's library after work, checking out books for her. My pick this evening is Grrrrr! by the award-winning author Rob Biddulph. "Wait a minute, dad," said my daughter, gleefully, pointing at the books she borrowed herself today. A Giraffe and a Half by Shel Silverstein. Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes by Eric Litwin. Wise choice - it's better than her dad's, actually.

Name

Try this. Rewrite the sentence "the flower in the window" as "the geranium in the window."

The name geranium immediately gives us the scene by the window - red petals, green circular leaves, all straining toward sunlight. This is what I've learnt from Natalie Goldberg after reading her classic Writing Down the Bones. Don't say "fruit," Natalie reminds us, and tell what kind of fruit - "It is a pomegranate."

Give things the dignity of names, to paraphrase Natalie Goldberg. And that's pretty wise.

These are words from the heart as much as the head, and as such offer precious insights into the world other than that of writers. About ten years ago I decided I had to remember people's names after reading How to Win Friends and Influence People. While I have trouble with memory as I get old, I subscribe to Dale Carnegie's theory that names are the sweetest and most important sound in any language. In fact, we could offer dozens, indeed hundreds, of examples in which remembering names gains good will.

Okay. Take the example of a busy medical ward. An on-call intern came to my ward last night when one of my patients developed pancreas complication after a procedure to look for stones in his bile ducts. A complication in the pancreas is no joke; it means an injury to the patient's digestive system. If the injury gets free rein, it can literally digest or eat away the pancreas. Many of us, understandably, freaked out after receiving the high enzyme laboratory level. Nine times out of ten, the nurses or doctor would call the intern "Hey, houseman, that's bed 10 with amylase level over 6000." But this wasn't the case. Our nurse called her by name, Katrina, instead of "houseman."

I didn't know how the nurses recalled our intern's name, but I certainly felt the appreciation of Katrina.

Consult Guys

As a practicing physician, I understand the temptation to skip the medical literature. A sick patient comes in and we're so focused on the things that might help him, as what we'd been taught in medical school, that we don't think of looking at anything else. Except those maxims portrayed as the golden rule by our senior.

The sicker the patient, the greater the temptation to skip the reality check. It's a temptation that can sometimes prove wrong. My classmate's dad came in two weeks ago with crushing chest pain. In the middle of the night. I was on call and told myself that was a serious heart attack after looking at those berserk zigzag lines of his electrocardiogram. And a heart rate slower than 40 per minute. This means a blocked blood vessel depriving my patient's heart muscle of oxygen supply. One of the most dreadful consequences of deoxygenated heart muscle is muscle death, if not patient's death.

Quick, I reminded myself, to bring back oxygen to his precarious heart by clot buster medication. And extra oxygen, most of us would say. Why not? President Eisenhower was even placed in an oxygen tank when he had an heart attack more than sixty years ago. We don't use oxygen tank nowadays; my previous textbook Clinical Medicine by Kumar and Clark suggested oxygen at 60% administered by face mask for several hours. This is not a new idea. And neither is it a correct idea. With time, we are learning the harmful effect of (too much) oxygen. This is a recent topic in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine . The title of this video teaching feature is Consult Guys, by which it refers to two old guys (think about the white-haired consultant in authoritative white coats) discussing the updated science of medicine.

The way those two consultants address the questions and debunk those because-I-said-so myths can powerfully remind myself not to let my brain get sclerotic with age, sticking with dogma without doubt. Even my hair isn't getting grey, I am old enough to get a job promotion to be the consult guy. That's why I have to read and keep myself updated.

Gratitude

I was drawn to Gratitude the minute I came across the book at an airport bookstore in New Zealand.

That's a small collection of essays published shortly before the death of Dr. Oliver Sacks. The first time I read his writing was long ago (when my senior neurologist bought me The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat). Nearly twenty years passed, and finally Dr Sacks told his readers the melanoma in his right eye had metastasized and occupied a third of his liver. Then his brain. And everywhere.

The topic of incurable cancer is always complicated. Oliver Sacks dealt with his death in a simple and neat way. The first essay "Mercury" was written days before his eightieth birthday. Mercury was referred to its atomic number in the periodic table - eighty - the exact number of his age by then. Next year, he received a birthday gift of thallium, element 81. Followed by lead (yes, number 82) another year later. I also knew, though, that bismuth's atomic number is 83, that he wished to get bismuth and couldn't.

All he could do was feel grateful for his own path, live his own life, and die his own death. And he did.

Star

Tidying up my higgledy-piggledy desk has given me the athlete's satisfaction of breaking a world record at the Olympic games. Now, if you ask me, what has been going on in my mind is that I secretly wish to receive a pat on the back from my wife.

Which I'll admit can be as natural as a firefighter who expects appreciation after cleaning the tons of wreckage at the World Trade Center (and yes, my desk wasn't that much better).

I'm not alone in nagging the spouse to give me more praise. Ditto for Gretchen Rubin. I'm glad to have read her chapter on giving up gold stars. Upon reflection, Gretchen admits that it would be nice to dole out gold stars although we should not do work for the sake of earning gold stars.

And I wouldn't say my affectionate wife doesn't appreciate my effort if there isn't a gold medal around my neck. Plus, she was too busy. My wife had left for work before my daughter woke up this morning. While we were getting ready for school, I showed Jasmine my clean desk. Without a word my daughter went straight to clean her own desk. Oh well, I couldn't believe it. Who'd have thought that decluttering could bring such joy, such reward? Part of me understood the importance of daddy's setting good example. And part of me wanted to hand a gold star to Gretchen Rubin.

Project

Gretchen Rubin starts with a confession about her closet in her book The Happiness Project. "I've never been very good at folding, so messy, lopsided towers of shirts and sweaters jammed the shelves," says the author of self-help bestseller. "I had to muscle my way into a mass of wool and cotton to pull anything out."

The Happiness Project, for the not-so-happy readers, is a monthly action plan guide to change the life. And to those who feel happy, this book can remind us we aren't as happy as we should be. That means an extra serving of happiness.

Once I'd finished the chapter on closet clutter, I went straight to my messy desk tonight. Next I told myself to follow Gretchen's tips and set aside one bag for throwaways. As I dived in and started weeding, I made a mental note of Gretchen's classification to size up the clutter: nostalgic clutter (relics I clung to from my old days), conservation clutter (instruction manuals I've kept because they're useful - even though they're useless to me), freebie clutter (gifts and giveaways that I didn't use), aspirational clutter (things that I owned but only aspired to use, such as calligraphy guide).

I don't know how much time I'd spent in clearing out my desk (not my drawers, if I'm to be honest), but you can take my word for it that there aren't many projects as happy as removing an eyesore.

I know, because I try.

Joke

Summer is still with us but my daughter's summer holiday is over. Her school starts today.

To get ready for her new school term, Jasmine was excited to prepare her box of sharpened pencils, buy glue sticks and file folders. I didn't do much but thought it's a good idea to borrow The Funniest Back to School Joke Book Ever from the public library.

With a few laugh-out-loud jokes up my sleeves, I can make the trip to school bus station more fun for everyone. Humours and entertainment aside, the book has reminded my daughter at least some school stuff in a not-so-serious way. For mathematics, we learn why six is afraid of seven (because seven ate nine). In terms of English, we find out which part of English boxers are best at (and that's punch-uation). As for science, we are taught the noisiest part of our body - our ear drum.

But, if your kid study in a less laissez faire school than my daughter's, you won't have to follow my example. Your kid probably has a pile of book reports and summer holiday assignments to occupy the summer. My daughter has none. That's good news. How often do we hear that children love summer holiday assignments? Few activities are as nerve-racking as summer homework, which usually ends up in a battlefield - between the kids and their parents. Giving our children homework throughout the year, including summer holiday, is the same as charging our smartphone full all the time: it causes the battery lifespan shorter, not longer.

If you don't believe me, here's a story about a son who complained about it, "Dad, I'm tired of doing homework."

"Now, son, hard work never killed anyone."

"I know," replied his son seriously, "but I don't want to be the first."

Work

What to Expect the First Year is one of the most helpful baby guides. After my friend's giving birth last month, I tried to buy one, but no dice, until I found the third edition on the last day of my New Zealand trip.

I knew I couldn't tell the difference between the second and third editions. I picked up the six-hundred-something-page book, rummaging through the chapters, and reminded myself the days when my daughter didn't sleep through the night. The sleep cycle consists of wake, calm the baby, doze, wake, calm the baby, try a bottle of milk, rinse, wake, another bottle, rinse. Repeat. To get an idea of what this cycle looks like, you may go and ask any bleary-eyed medical intern how a pager behaves like a baby. Wake, tame the pager, doze, wake, calm the patient, try a cup of coffee, another pager alarm, wake, another cup of coffee. Repeat. All parents and new doctors go through this sort of chaotic sleep-wake cycle.

I'm not an expert on parenting, but I've been calling myself a master of pager. During these years of hospital work, I might not be the first to arrive or the last to leave my hospital, but I have a work ethic of keeping the pager with me all the time. Seven days a week. Just imagine a clingy child who wraps his legs around his parent's as tight as a gecko, and you'll know how my pager sticks with me. That said, a pager doesn't work when the owner travels out of town. It's the only time when I don't bring my pager with me. That means a holiday for my pager. A word of caution: holiday doesn't apply to an e-mail box. Well, I used to let it be. Sometimes I came back from holiday to find a flooding mailbox. And by "sometimes" I mean "almost every time." By "flooding" I mean "quota exceeded." Truth be told, such scene change from vacation to a morning swamped with work plus mails-to-be replied makes you go bonkers. Yes, you clinically go mad. I tried this myself. More than once.

This year, I found a simple solution: Make peace with my hospital mailbox and configure my personal smartphone to read the mails. That means 24/7 fingertip access to my workplace mails. I know what you're thinking, but checking the e-mails to leave my in-basket empty (even during my vacation) is obviously more effective than getting mad. That's the philosophy of Pike Place Fish market: There is always a choice about the way you do your work, even if there is not a choice about the work itself.

Let Go

Imagine bringing your children to possibly the world's most scenically diverse island, with stunning lake views and lovely lodgings. Everything is perfect until your kid starts to worry and whisper, "Mum and dad, when will we have to check out?"

Unfortunately, neither kids nor grown-ups are immune to the end-of-the-holiday worries. My daughter just asked me the same question last night.

For those of you who have children and when it's close to the end of summer holiday, this should be pretty familiar. If you don't have kids, well, think about Garfield and his famous Monday blues - and dare I say, yours too.

I'm glad to have read the Search Inside Yourself chapter on letting go near the end of my New Zealand holiday. Wilting flowers do not cause suffering, as Chade-Meng Tan reminds us; it is the unrealistic desire that flowers not wilt that causes suffering.

Let go. Check out. I told myself.

Mindful

Before I'd mastered the skill of mediation, I tried my luck with meditation during my summer family trip to New Zealand. Wow. I wished to learn mindfulness after bringing the book Search Inside Yourself by Google engineer Chade-Meng Tan.

Meng didn't ask for practicing Zen with butt on cushion for one hour a day, legs crossed and chin tucked. Just one breath a day. Breathe in, with focus, and breathe out, mindfully. His analogy is a baby learning to walk. Mine is a beginner learning to ski, as what we did in Queenstown and Arrowtown this time.

One step was all we could manage before falling. Being able to put on a ski and waddle like a penguin is a cool experience. The big secret is to get ourselves to a state where our mind is relaxed and alert at the same time. One step at a time. In focus. Then another, and voilà, we were on our way down the slope.

Meditation is like skiing at the slope, minus the sweating, and the ski boots.

Myth

I went to university campus for a meeting the other day, and happened to find a book Because I Said So!

It's hard to find a better mythbuster of old wives' tales than this book written by Ken Jennings. He quotes us countless old-timey examples of parental wisdom confidently passed down generations - and only found to be lies ("The car won't run unless your seat belts are on!") or dead wrong ("Don't sit on cold surfaces, or they'll freeze your gonads and wind up sterile," as kids are being told in Russia).

That's trivia reading, but serious enough with reality check and meticulous search of scientific evidence (or the lack thereof) behind the century-old lectures ("You need eight glasses of water every day!").

Do we have similar dogmas in medicine, similar to those because-I-said-so bluffs quoted by Ken Jennings? I have a sneaking suspicion that we do.

One of my recent duties is to go over the protocol in our dialysis unit. Yes. A very detailed mandate to guide doctors and nurses how frequent we should order this test and that test, how meticulous we should request annual chest x-ray for our patients. We have been following that piece of advice for twenty years, as precisely as kids are told not to swim within one hour of the last bite of lunch (Sixty minutes and one second: you'll be fine). But why? Why do the patients need chest x-ray when there is no complaint at all? But screen we must. Huh? Even after we'd been convinced to do something, the choice of chest x-ray leaves us befuddled. If CT scan sounds like full-frame digital camera, chest x-ray is a pinhole camera. In plain terms, chest x-ray is a primitive tool that tends to pick up noise rather than signal.

So a simple answer to the question is: Because I said so. The advice seems to simplify things and give our patients a safer window. Except, of course, when it complicates the matter.

Odds

It isn't that common to find someone studying English literature at Harvard and medicine at John Hopkins.

I came to learn about Dr. Kevin B. Jones who did so. His book, entitled What Doctors Cannot Tell You, gives me good chance to think about uncertainties in medicine.

I feel more like a gambler than a physician after hearing his stories about the prognosis estimation made by doctors. I don't mean to criticize our prognostic skill. Doctors make a lot of attempts at defining good and bad prognosis. That's what we learn from population studies and statistics. We don't call that gambling; we have a better term "prognosis." The word prognosis comes from the Greek and means knowing ahead of time.

Consider the example of breathing machine in intensive care unit. When a sick patient is being put on a breathing machine that inflates the lungs through a tube placed into the windpipe, he is depending on the machine for life about as much as a human can. Doctors often judge the chance for such patient to recover and wean from mechanical ventilation. In case of poor prognosis, we will decide on terminal extubation. That means removing the tube from the windpipe in anticipation of death. Many of these exceedingly poor prognostic cases will not survive. Most will not, honestly. We can't be hundred percent sure, though. A large study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, noted 6 out of 166 similar patients surviving to hospital discharge.

Oh no. But that's medicine. We learn medicine from populations of tens and hundreds of thousands (read "epidemiology"). We predict well on populations as large as possible, but we face one patient at a time in real life. We will never be right every single time when we talk about the prognosis of an individual. That's a different story.

Connectedness

When I first read Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters, the daughter I had in mind is a toddler and myself a dad with strong biceps to carry daughter around. I picked up the book again this week. My daughter has grown up a lot since the last read. The fact is, I haven't been any stronger as a dad – and chances are I am simply older.

In part, I believe, this is because men spend most of our time working for someone else, and don't carve out time slots for our kids when we come home. This is what I did this week: I worked overnight in the hospital on Monday and returned home late evening on Tuesday, half asleep after dinner.

The author of Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters, a paediatrician and mother of four children, told a story of her husband who brought their kids to watch the northern lights at 1:30 in the morning. They shivered as brilliant and red corrugated sheets of northern lights streaked through the night. She can't remember what grades their children were in that year, let alone what they faced during the next school day after four-hour sleep, maybe five.

She doesn't remember because it didn't matter. What matters is that all four of their kids remember their father's enthusiasm and connectedness. So what did I learn?

A lot. There's no better ways of being a father than spending time with the child. The key isn't going to extraordinary places. Parent connectedness is as simple as connecting with my daughter - tune in to her, listen to her, and play with her. Oh yes, one-on-one time without looking at my smartphone or answering emails. That dream came true this Thursday when I returned home after work and assembled a big box of Lego bricks with my daughter. We were occupied with our project till midnight.

Cousin

Mention number two to the second-born, and they're quick to grumble.

Oh, look how enthusiastic the parents are with the first child - and then the second. When I polled some parents about the number of snapshots for their first and second children, the most common answer I got was "huge." Huge difference, they said, between the first (volumes) and the second (a few).

I don't have to bother with shortchanging mine, because my daughter is a single child.

That's not to say that a single child is the happiest one on this planet. Happiness also stems from satisfying relationship, from sharing with others, from looking after each other. In fact, to this day I remember the way my daughter answered other children who asked her how many siblings she has. "I don't have brother or sister. But I have a cousin." For that, she says with pride. My daugher and her cousin make good companions. I brought my daughter and her cousin to stay in the hotel at Discovery Bay this week. I've lost count of the number of times we've been there. That in itself isn't important. What counts to me is that every visit brings a lot of pleasure to us. The more they grow up and the more their friendship blossoms, the better I appreciate the words of the writer Marion Garretty: A cousin is a little bit of childhood that can never be lost.

Cousin togetherness is something close, but probably less close than sibling to pose the problem of rivalry. For better or worse - better, I suspect - that's the encouragement that single-child parents need.

Pacemaker

Electrocardiogram is the most common, but not the only, way for doctors and medical students to study the human heart. Those squiggly lines are the graphical display of each heartbeat's electrical activity. Instead of listening to the heart, we can tell its tempo and rhythm by taking a look at those waves, like what most musicians respond to musical notes without listening to the songs.

Not all musical notes are pleasant to recount. And electrocardiogram tracing can sometimes narrate a sad story. Many a time we declare patients dead after examining them, followed by the ritual of printing a flat line of their electrocardiograms. Signed and dated. More or less a picture proof that their hearts stop beating. But then it does not always have to be the case. We can't really come up with a completely flat line when a patient has a pacemaker. I mean, the battery of the pacemaker outlives its owner, firing discharge even after the heart isn't beating. The other day an intern of mine told me he dared not certify a patient dead without a line as flat as a pancake. I stared for a moment in shock. "So, what did you do in the end?" I finally said.

"I cut open the skin and pulled out the pacemaker," he answered. "Then I confirmed my patient's death by a flat electrocardiogram printout."

He really meant it.

I believe that I have heard, for the first time in my years in practice, how a doctor took away a life-sustaining device in order to declare the end of his patient's life.

A week later, I read the book Knocking on Heaven's Door by the American journalist Katy Bulter. That's an achingly beautiful story giving me a new perspective on that life-saving electric device hidden below the collarbone of a patient (when the natural electrical conduction system of the heart has worn out with age). Katy Bulter's dad had one. After his heart had worked for eighty years, the electrical fibres had thinned out and slowed down. The new pacemaker was supposed to save his life. The problem is the law of diminishing returns. With each year over the age of eighty and each downhill step from repeated stroke, Katy's father was never able to complete a full sentence, to put on a shirt without help, or to control his poos.

One day Katy's mother made a bold statement, "Please help me get your father's pacemaker turned off." The family's difficult conversations with the modern medicine never made way to a compromise. Doctors refused to disable the pacemaker, and Katy's dad lived in agony with that life-saving electronic device. For five years. Katy's father died with his lungs slowly filling with fluid, when his pacemaker was still quietly pulsing inside his chest.

Meaning

It's a rainy Saturday morning, and I finished seeing my patients before 10 a.m. After locating the bus route on Google Map, I checked the documents and headed to the bank. I told myself I had to get there within office hours. In many ways, the efforts to squeeze time settling bank account signature issues is even more daunting than the fight to see my patients. I can see patients as long as the wards do not having official opening hours, adding whatever number of hours I wish in an already jam-packed day.

After standing at the bus stop for another 30 minutes, I decided to give up waiting and took a taxi.

No sooner did I get off the taxi than my phone rang. That's a call from my colleague who'd arrived at the bank. "The bank service for our business won't be available on weekend." Which, if you think about it - and I did - could have been sort of frustrating.

Were things really so bad? Not really. I didn't use any curse words. That's bad luck - or, at best, a hiccup. It isn't considered the best use of time. But it isn't the worst, either. I headed back to the hospital, and made good use of the travel time to finish Dr. Paul Kalanithi's memoir When Breath Becomes Air. My somewhat bad luck paled against that of the young neurosurgeon who flipped through the CT scan images of lung cancer, spreading to liver, spine, everywhere - and that was his own film.

A meaningful lesson on a Saturday morning.

Luck

I often tell my daughter to look at things from an opposite side. Just as an "unlucky" adventure in Oliver Jeffers' book What's the Opposite can turn out to be a lucky event. Who knows? How about the female figures hidden in the famous picture of The Beauty and the Hag? Make sense?

A lot can happen when you think you've had bad luck.

My daughter's school field trip was cancelled last Friday after the weather forecast of thunderstorms. I cancelled my leave, too. And that wasn't so bad. I ended up with more time to finish my PowerPoint slides for my lecture next day. My daughter had her usual school day because of the bad weather, and invited her classmate to come over after school. By the time I'd got home, my daughter was in tears. She cried because her friend was throwing up. With high fever. I cleaned up the mess and told the two little girls that it sounded like a bout of viral illness. I figured that out because her classmate's brother had just had similar symptoms three days ago.

It wasn't a day I'd like to have had it been my choice, but it wasn't.

When I heard that my daughter's field trip was rescheduled this Tuesday, I wasn't sure I should take my a whole day off. I felt I should take a half day off, with the busy afternoon clinic session in mind. At about the same time that I first broached the idea of half day off, my thought returned to the viral illness. I counted my finger to estimate the time my daughter would get sick, just in case she caught the germ from her classmate. I caught my breath. "It makes sense to take the whole Tuesday off," I said to myself slowly, "I will take care of her - in case."

Perhaps because of my sixth sense, or perhaps by luck, I made the right prediction. My daughter ran a fever in the middle of her field trip today, when I was with her. Thank God.

Judith Kerr

Imagine your kid has a curious soul with a great deal of spur-of-the-moment ideas - as yours probably are. Many a kid will come up with activities beyond our comfort zone. An example is bringing a frog, a hamster, a goldfish, a dog, a cat and three kittens to your sister's wedding. At first glance it sounds silly, suited only to a weirdo's world. Not so. My daughter and I read about this idea in a children's book the other day.

Let's see how this idea ends up in Judith Kerr's When Willy Went to the Wedding. In this entertaining story, Willy didn't want his pets to miss his sister's wedding. No sooner did he finish the question "Shall I bring my pets to the wedding?" than Willy heard an intimidating "No." And there were not one, not two, but three big "No."

"No," said Willy's father.

"No,' said Willy's mother.

"No," said Willy's grown-up sister.

The best part of this story is how another grown-up - the bride who was going to marry Willy's sister - answered Willy. "Better not, old chap," said the bride. "Your pets might not like it." I love his tone. My daughter and I read the story for the umpteenth time, each time marvelling at the bride's way of saying no. A graceful way of saying no that most grown-ups have forgotten.

Wrong

Teachers are supposed to prepare lectures with meticulous attention to details and rules. Students should be told right from wrong. Well, that's the theory, anyway. Teaching medicine is a different story. It's not that simple. Although we can find protocols and guidelines (and even treat them as the Ten Commandments chiseled in sapphire), many of them don't work in real life.

Impractical rules aside, doctors are more often wrong than right. Well, surprise, surprise. In the lecture hall (or examination hall), our own sense of rightness runs deep, and our students' faith in our rightness is as fixed as the delusion of schizophrenic patients. In short, doctors can be wrong when we think we're right. That's the first lesson I told my summer students who saw patients with me this month.

Why should the students, then, follow me who can't even tell right from wrong? In a sense, that's the blind following the blind. Quite true. Still, it's somewhat better than being blind without realizing one's blindness. My lesson for them is about being wrong: about how doctors can be wrong, and how we cope when we're wrong.

Full disclosure: I just made a mistake after I demonstrated to my students how I diagnosed pericardial effusion in a patient with breast cancer last week. Oh, that's a serious condition when a big sac of fluid encases the heart. As the sac of fluid fills, it hugs the heart harder and harder, like a boa constrictor. The result can be calamitous because the heart can't beat - you can only save your patient's life by sticking a needle and then a catheter to drain out the fluid. I was glad my students were around to see how I did that maneuver.

And everything seemed to be going great until next morning, when I found out that my catheter had been pushed in far too deep.

I'd punctured my patient's heart wall. My heart sank, and so did my patient's.

Trumpet

The British novelist C.S. Lewis once described the value of a book this way: "No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally - and often far more - worth reading at the age of fifty and beyond."

With a single sentence he moves us to another level of reading, and to a new experience of reading.

To learn why a book should be read and reread for everyone who is aging (that's all of us), I've been combining my daughter's story book and my PowerPoint presentation (when I speak to adults, of course). Let me offer an example. The other day, I was invited to speak on the topic of informed consent in an annual signature event of my organization. My first few slides come from Mo Willems' book Listen to My Trumpet! In this wonderful picture book, Mo Willems describes how Piggie invites Gerald (Elephant buddy) to listen to his new trumpet, agog with enthusiasm.

When you go through the story, you get the buzz of excitement. What is the song about? What notes are being played with the new instrument?

But there comes a point (and I think of it as somewhat common in life) when things don't happen the way you were hoping they would happen. The musical notes are utterly incomprehensible to Gerald's ears.

"Bluuurrrk!" (Oh dear, you might ask, what is this song?)

"Gr-ark, qu-ark!
Gr-ark! (How so?)
Blap-zap-Blap-Blonk."

"So? What do you think of my trumpet?" Piggie is eager to ask for opinion by the time he has finished his masterpiece.

"Um … Your trumpet is –"

"Yes?"

"Your trumpet is LOUD," Gerald replies.

"And … ?"

"You, uh, hold your trumpet very well." Well, that's what Gerald can come up with after lots of hum and haw.

"And … !?"

Sometimes we have something important to say, something that we know "deep down in our bones" is true, and yet find it difficult to say. But at what cost? Gerald's discomfort may come from his worry about hurting Piggie. Here's how Gerald discloses his feeling: "So, I will tell you the truth. Your trumpet is loud and shiny and you hold it well - But ... that was not music. Sorry"

Who is more surprised after listening to Gerald's reaction? (Hey, Spoiler Alert!) Not Piggie, of course.

"Gerald," replied Piggie, "You think I am trying to make music? I am trying to speak Elephant! I want to sound like you."

Ohhhhhh. The relevation came suddenly. Elephant doesn't know what Piggie wants him to listen; elephant doesn't know what to tell his friend Piggie; Piggie wants to know something Elephant dare not to tell.

Well, looking at how the two of them misunderstand each other, they're pretty like how doctors and patients interact. Doctors want to inform patients, and yet don't really know what to tell. Replace the character Piggie by patient, and then Elephant by doctor in the relevation, and you'll know what I mean in my lecture.

Try Everything

"Close but not too close" is the motto for our children's development.

This is what I learned after reading Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way for Parents. I bought this book at the Art Gallery of New South Wales last month.

There is hardly a greater gift to us than finding a book with a theme of cultivating a child's creativity. Now that I look back through my way of upbringing my daughter, I realise that I might have intervened too much, inserting my own buried dreams into her path. I wish I could say I follow the wisdom of Julia Cameron. Stated simply, our job is to clear a path for them to discover their own means of self-expression.

As parents, it falls to us to encourage and praise the child's efforts - and not much else. The child does the rest.

What could be better for Jasmine, we thought, than a "creativity corner" in our home? That's what we did. A corner with assorted items for inspiration - toilet-paper rolls, glue, tapes, beads, boxes, yarn ... And so, she makes her (almost) daily pilgrimage to that corner to begin her projects. As I write this, she has just created a smartphone keyboard out of used cardboard, with the confident smile of Steve Jobs on her face. "Objets d'art," I told her.

Book

Robin Sharma, author of The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, once wrote, "Never go anywhere without a book under you arm."

How true. So many of us spend time idling on commute time and standing in line. As a matter of fact, the U.S. News and World Report reported that, over the course of our lifetime, we will spend five years standing in line. I repeat, five years in a lifetime.

Is idling a must? Not necessarily. Is the waiting a waste of time? Probably not. Is it an opportunity to take a break? Who knows? But one thing is certain: I enjoy reading at the same time of waiting in line. I cannot tell you how many books I have finished on the road, and how many of them I wouldn't have been able to cover if I confine my reading habit to that in a study or library.

To this day I keep the habit of carrying a book wherever I go. In the words of John Dryden, "We first make our habits and then our habits make us."

Upstairs

The most acclaimed teaching of Daniel J. Siegel is about mindfulness. I bought his book The Whole-Brain Child in Melbourne nearly half year ago, and read about children's ability to stop and think instead of hurting someone with their words.

In more straightforward lingo: our primitive downstairs brain is less sophisticated than the upstairs brain, but there is nothing wrong with using the downstairs brain and feeling upset. At times, of course, we need the upstairs brain to tame the downstairs tantrum. Upstairs brain is the yang to the downstairs brain's yin. According to Siegel, a well-integrated brain circuit means a timely flipping the lid from downstairs to upstairs brain, even in small children. Tonight, I noticed something magical happening to this flip in my six-year-old child.

Jasmine needed a haircut. The trouble, for novice like my wife, is that what is meant to be a trim can turn into a scream (in front of the mirror). My daughter's new hairstyle didn't quite turn out as she was expecting. Yup, it has a Japanese name “age-otori” - the feeling of looking worse after a haircut. We could see her downstairs brain running amok. "Ah, I'm afraid my classmates won't recognize me when the new school term starts tomorrow."

"Huh?"

"Seriously, mum, I don't want to go to school like this."

Long silence.

I thought my wife couldn't have been more upset. I felt the need to give my daughter's new haircut a compliment, the voice inside telling me to do something - and quick. I took a good look at my daughter's hair. Her face turned white, and through tears of frustration, she said, "I'm so sorry, mum, and I shouldn't be that rude. I'm as much as I hate myself, making you feel bad. Sorry, mum."

All this happened before I could step in. I realized that my daughter had already switched to her upstairs brain. Her reaction is, to my eye, an incredible leap forward, and upstairs.

Birds of a Feather

The headache of finding travel buddies is exemplified by the title of an article published in the Lonely Planet: How to travel with friends (and not want to kill them).

When it comes to travel companions, the surest thing you can say is that they're as difficult to find as kidney donors. Well, you will need good matching to avoid rejection.

In case you're wondering whether full-match travel buddy exists on this planet, the answer is that we just connected one during our Sydney visit. Going on holiday on our own - three of us in a nuclear family - worked well during our first half of the trip, but there's no denying that we love the second part more. It's all about meeting Jasmine's old best friend and her sister. They knew each other in primary school, and then her friend's family moved to Malaysia. In an attempt to meet again, we planned the Sydney trip.

Everything went well. The kids met, chatted about this and that, playing till the cows come home - oh, and did I mention their parents were as tired as dead cows by then? When I say "play," I mean playing wildly. And when I say "playing wildly," I don't mean any wild idea - I mean those wildly crazy ideas like forward roll gymnastics exercise, anywhere and anytime, on the road.

The children preferred to shoehorn three of them into the back seat of our car. They snuggled up at night even it's not the comfiest way to sleep in the same bed. It looked as if they had to grab every minute before it's time to bid farewell. During the week together, there wasn't a single day when I didn't hear their clapping game "A Sailor Went to Sea." Ditto for their heartwarming laughter. And their parents' laughter, too.

The holy grail for travel buddies, I think, is being able to find kids with similar temperaments - and similar parents.

Companion

With ten days of vacation, I wrote few blog entries on the road. I would be remiss if I did not mention the book I brought this trip.

As attractive as the trip to Sydney, The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry has a rich account of an island without too many visitors. Studded with a handful of cottages, Alice Island has not much to offer, not to mention the very infrequent ferry services. Nothing really. Until A. J. Fikry came with the idea "A place is not really a place without a bookstore."

He opened a bookstore on the island. Which means? A story telling us how we love, and why we read.

Year after year, book after book, A. J. Fikry's bookstore transformed the life of many, including an orphan being abandoned on its floor with a stuffed Elmo. Then a cop, who had been considered a slow learner who got mostly C's in English class, turned out to love the genre of crime fiction. It's testimony to the adage that you know everything you need to know about a person from the answer to the question, What is your favorite book?

On my flight back, I finished the last chapter of this remarkable novel and came up with another idea that we know a lot about a child - and her parents - from the answer to the question, What inflight games does she play on the plane?

(Answer for my daughter's choices: Hangman and Sudoku.)

Comics

Superhero is the word that inevitably gets bandied around when it comes to describing comics, and let's face it, that is mostly boy stuff. Compared to that play-in-muddy-puddle Peppa Pig, the characters are way more macho and brutal.

I haven't paid attention to DC Comics before. I discovered much more about Aquaman, Joker and Wonder Woman when I visited the Powerhouse Museum this week.

That's an exhibition from a New York-based artist Nathan Sawaya who had created loads of real-size superhero characters simply out of LEGO bricks. A pure story of elegant creation.

My daughter isn't a big fan of those heroes. Even so, she literally walked me through the exhibition, introducing me the character one by one.

"I'm surprised," I told Jasmine. "I didn't know you'd known so much. I have never heard about Green Lantern."

She must have learned them from her classmates, and becomes more knowledgeable than her dad. It's as if she took me out to a school field trip.

Who says that Batman or Superman is the province of boys only? Gender inequality is soooo last millennium.

Simplicity

Think of the last letter you wrote. Not an email you typed on your laptop. Not a text you sent. Not a tweet. Something you wrote by hand. Or a postcard you wrote with a fountain pen.

Now that we can send instant message by tapping on the smartphone, I have to concede that writing letter and buying postal stamp are much of a history. While it can't match electronic communication in terms of speed and convenience, writing letter nevertheless lays claim to an undisputed art.

Living frictionlessly, cautioned by the philosopher Oliver Burkeman, can often mean living thoughtlessly. Example: apps that will automatically wish your friends a happy birthday.

In fact, writing postcard on the road has been one of my favourite pastimes. To see Jasmine following my example as she writes holiday postcard is pure delight. During our Sydney trip, she was also delivering a handwritten letter from one of her classmates to a buddy who has moved to another country. Such is the beauty of writing and delivering letter. These are the moments when I think of the balance between the new and old.

Lest I begin to sound like an ancient curmudgeon, however, let me say that I taught my daughter how to make PowerPoint slides just before our Sydney trip. She loves it, too. And yet the next generation should not be deprived of the pleasure of simplicity, at least once in a while.

Sydney vacation

It's hard to complete the must-see itinerary of Sydney, a vibrant city that offers magnificent harbour, beaches, architectural as well as cultural highlights. Even more so with a kid. (Do anyone of you know a kid who will stick to a tightly arranged itinerary?)

That doesn't seem to matter for our family. We used to be parents who try not to overbook and overschedule. We learn this richest of lessons from our daughter who always looks the liveliest when she is given ample breaks and spontaneity.

It's no wonder that we slept in today, our second day of Sydney trip. Lazing on the road is part of the kid's birthright and one that's freely available to anyone of us. We ended up visiting the Art Gallery of New South Wales (which has free entrance, too). With so many entertaining works on display and the gallery's excellent café, we stayed there till the closing hour.

I count that one of the richest travel activities.

Ceremony

All of us see the world not as it is, but through our own glasses.

We won't pay equal attention to everything in our visual field. You notice this, but not that, and vice versa for your friend. A mother of twins may notice numerous double strollers; a man will find more Lamborghini around.

It was our medical student graduates' photo day yesterday. Our Vice Chancellor joined this event, as what he used to do before. This time, it turns out, is pretty different as his daughter is one of the classmates who graduate. It seems impossible for our professor to view the ceremony in the same way as what a proud daddy does.

I have been joining this event for many years, too. There hasn't been any big change, I've to say. The roast pigs have been cut more or less the same way. Champagne bottles are popped as usual. I tried to change this time. I didn't wear suit or gown. I dressed like a student and brought my own camera. I had chosen to take photographs for my students. Shrug off the professor-that-should-look-like feel and then I found ample reason to experience the joy of a medical student who is turning into a doctor. It was hard to say which of us was the more excited.

Love

Kind words are like honey, I was taught. This is absolutely, 100 percent true.

When my daughter handed us a card with her drawing of "the best dad and best mum ever" this week, I found myself with a complete loss for words. On the back of her handmade card, Jasmine wrote, "Dear mum and dad, I love you so much. I miss you when you are at work. Love, Jasmine."

Consider for a moment what Mark Twain once said, "I can live for two months on a good compliment." If that's true, I could practically live till two hundred years old, with my love tank regularly kept full by my cutie-pie.

Hallelujah.

Friendship

Boom Snot Twitty This Way That Way.

This is one of the books I brought when my daughter's class went on the field trip to the Hong Kong Botanical and Zoological Gardens today.

Both Jasmine and I enjoyed the tale about three friends, Boom, Snot and Twitty, each of them having their own thinking as to what's the perfect spot to spend the day. Boom wants to jump and splash. Twitty loves to hike. Snot prefers picnic. That's an immeasurably entertaining story of how authentic friendship blossoms even with different views.

As is usually the case with school field trip, I carry story books and my daughter's backpack is for lunch box (for mine, too). Then not only will her backpack be less heavy than mine, hers will be even lighter on the way back.

In fact, my daughter's lunch box got empty earlier than I'd expected. Far so much earlier. We had prepared spring rolls for lunch this time. It never ceases to amaze me how tasty spring rolls can be. And her classmates too. As my daughter opened her lunch box, she beamed. "Yummy spring rolls. Anyone wants to try?" she exclaimed, pride written all over her face. It's great; everyone said so.

And then - this is the truth - her lunch box was nearly empty within a minute. There was only one spring roll left for herself, and none for me.

Whoops.

In case you're wondering whether my daughter would end up being hungry after a morsel of spring roll only, here's the answer: No. Her friends shared theirs in return.

Diversity

Legend goes that South Korea is at crossroads between traditional symbol such as royal palaces and recent hits like K-pop. As a tourist, you can expect very diverse recommendations on what to pick, betwixt and between. There's an old Korean saying: If you have a horse, send it to Jeju Island; if you have a son, send him to Seoul.

We were exploring Seoul last week, but have neither son nor horse. We were weaving our holiday into one that delights girls as young as six, and up to twelve. To get the best mix for them, my wife picked the Seoul National Science Museum. Families seeking fun for children of varying ages must try this museum. Inside? A toilet bowl at the virus exhibition. Lesson about how high viruses can catapult after flushing toilet uncovered.

If the kids aren't awed by these miniature living things with nucleic acid covered by a protective protein coat, they will be fascinated by the high-tech holographic projection in another hall. If your kids are dinosaur fans, this is a perfect place to say hello to Edmontosaurus and learn how to tell apart a real fossil from a replica.

But then, getting kids to look at (and even touch) the exhibits with meagre English subtitles can't last forever. Sometimes, your kids might just want to have outdoor play. Oh, what a good suggestion. For that, the playground outside the museum is just as much fun. Jasmine simply loves to run and frolic there after an educational afternoon walk.

Dad

Anyone can be a father, but it takes someone special to be a dad.

I can't recall who came up with such meaningful words, but I know it's my wife who gives me good chance to be Jasmine's special dad.

This Sunday, my wife lent me her bike so that we could roam on our own. There were only two of us, and not a lot of traffic on the bicycle trail (because that's the Lunar New Year's Eve). That way we were guaranteed a great time. Rapt with joy, my daughter started to feel a readiness with the slope and learned to shift gears when going upslope. And pressing on when downslope, instead of alighting.

If I need any more reason to thank my wife, there is her arranging the ski lesson for us this week in Korea. No, I'm not her coach this time, but I went through the steps with her. Snapping into skis, picking oneself up after fall, braking. Yep, this meant a lot to my six-year-old daughter who'd been rather nervous with the new sports game. There is never a greater moment than being there with the child when she's in need and fear.

Thursday

We have seen buckets of evidence for having family dinner, and that children who eat dinner with families are less likely to drink, smoke, do drugs. We all know it. It's about coming together as a family. That's also what I learned from Bruce Feiler after reading The Secrets of Happy Families.

There's just one little thing. Few things are easier than citing the research, and few things are harder than walking the talk.

I worked till late this evening. By the time I was home, my daughter had finished dinner. Too late.

Soon enough, I was happy for real. I was late, but we weren't done yet. It's Thursday and I was just in time to see my six-year-old daughter washing dishes. Jasmine has been learning to do chores. Not every day, but every Thursday. You can't overestimate the satisfaction a kid gets by sticking to a self-directed goal of washing dishes after dinner every Thursday. The most satisfying moments came when I saw my daughter beaming after her "chores." It's that simple.

Ice Cream

At just 7:30 this morning, my daughter's alarm clock rang and she woke up, missing mummy a lot.

"Hey, I told you, mom has an operation this morning. Dear, let me help you." "Mommmmmmmmmmm, I want mummy."

I glanced at the clock on the wall, the steady sweep of the second hand ticking off precious time, getting closer and closer to the school bus time. My goal was to get my daughter ready before the school bus departed. I knew I couldn't. I was harried; my daughter was weeping; we were overwhelmed. I felt time slipping away.

Before all the tension boiled over, I decided to read a story book together with Jasmine while she had her cereal breakfast. My pick was Should I Share My Ice Cream? by the Caldecott Honor winner Mo Willems. That's a story about Elephant Gerald who bought an ice cream and then had a big decision to make: Should he share his ice cream with his best friend Piggie? An agonizingly difficult choice. Gerald wanted to gobble up his ice cream, but then wondered: Is it right not to share with his best friend?

"Hmmm ... Maybe Piggie does not like this flavour! Piggie is not here. She does not know I have ice cream." The answer, we believed, is difficult.

"Hurry up, Gerald, make up you mind," Jasmine said instinctively as she turned the pages, with a palpable sense of suspense. The ice cream was melting in Gerald's hand. So absorbed was Jasmine in reading the ice cream story that, by the time we reached the last page of the storybook, she hadn't had time to finish her cereals.

Of course, I shouldn't tell you the story ending here. Not so lightly. Which reminds me of another real ice cream story few days ago. We were buying ice cream for dessert after dinner last Sunday. At first Jasmine wanted to pick vanilla flavour. Then, she hesitated and ran to my wife, "Mum, do you want to share my ice cream? And if so, I will choose chocolate flavour, your favourite." Isn't it even sweeter than having ice cream itself? My wife counts it among her most-treasured moments as a mom. As it turns out, this is the closest to the ending of our storybook Should I Share My Ice Cream?

Daisy

After finishing a book on empathy by the psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen tonight, I switched topic and read Double Daisy with my daughter. That's a hilarious chapter book for intermediate readers.

Now that Jasmine has turned six, I don't really have to read the book for her. Not because I'm less willing to read but because she's more willing to read. In other words, I simply sit next to her when she reads aloud. What an amazing habit to bestow on our children.

To be extra clear, I didn't simply sit next to my daughter when she read the Daisy book by Kes Gray. I listened. The more I've learned about Daisy and her best friend Gabby, the deeper I was drawn to the story. Their conversation reminds me to view the world from another angle - through the eyes of children. Once, Daisy had trouble with getting cheese out of the triangle and then squeezed it all over her fingers. Her mum said, "Cheese triangles are really easy to open when you know how." (I admit I would have said the same thing.)

"That's the trouble with grown-ups," Daisy said. "They know everything. At least they think they do."

Now I know I don't.

Comfort

My dialysis patient was dying. The fluid drained from his abdomen was red, and his lips blue. We were discussing the ways to keep him comfortable during the morning round. "Should we stop escalating the antibiotics?" I asked.

Absolutely.

Every team member agreed and I leaned forward to write down the decision. I glanced at the consultant next to me and didn't have to wait long to find out he frowned at my handwriting. So, did I write too much? Probably yes, a small voice inside me told me, but it's impossible to know for sure.

To test the water, I quoted the recent New England Journal of Medicine review article on comfort care for patients dying in the hospital, "I recalled a recent piece of article supporting explicit orders to promote comfort and prevent unnecessary intervention, rather than simply writing an order "comfort care." It isn't easy for our interns to second-guess what we have in mind, say, in case our patient's blood pressure plummets tonight. What do you think?"

My consultant replied, "Not really, because they have to learn. Not just to follow." "But surely," I had to politely disagree, "the very fact that interns need the chance to learn doesn't mean we should write a vague term. Learning is a matter for the interns and ultimately the residents. Unnecessary suffering is a matter for the patients, in this case a dying patient. The two things should be kept rigorously separate."

We didn't have the right answer to the question, but I dared not to argue too much. To my mind, there is no right or wrong answer. I'm not arguing that once the team decision has been made and stated, there is no need to think and rethink, as if this is a gospel. But my argument is that at the very least a decision should be clearly spelled out for others to follow and, if necessarily, revised.

Boast

We've all been in a situation like that - growing old and looking back with some pride in how worse we've had been.

It is, without question, one of my favorite ways to talk to my juniors: "When I was your age ..." In so many ways, life is better now than it was then.

To tell others how we drew blood from each and every patient in a medical ward without phlebotomists' assistance can feel like we've been hundred times tougher than the newer generation of doctors. Think of the ooh and aah - it says way more about our accomplishment than any feather in our caps.

And once in a while, it's okay - even helpful - to let people admire our toughness. But if we brag endlessly about our past experience and suffering, that only ups our chances of eliciting hatred, but not admiration. This is an important lesson I recently learned from reading Marshall Goldsmith's book Mojo.

So please remind me next time I flaunt my brilliance in the face of adversity: how poor we were, how tough we were, and blah blah blah.

Mantra

Medicine is not only about science, it's sometimes about dogmas handed down from generation to generation. Sometimes, these universally accepted dogmas are more often wrong than right.

That's what I taught the two medical students joining me last week for apprenticeship program. The greater the ignorance, to paraphrase Sir William Osler, the greater the dogmatism.

Our conversation started when a senior consultant taught us the rules and dogmas of using diuretic in patients who have weakening of the heart's pumping capabilities. Seemingly, we're inculcated to use continuous infusion of diuretic in case of acute heart failure. I listened and was tempted to say that it doesn't really matter with either intermittent boluses of diuretic (one dose at a time) or continuous infusion. But, of course, I didn't say it openly. Instead I passed my phone sheepishly to my students after opening a page of the New England Journal of Medicine to prove my point. They nodded.

Few days later, we brought a patient to have emergency endoscopy at night because he was bleeding from an ulcer in the stomach. Our conversation, again, was about how to give the stomach remedy called proton pump inhibitor. I pointed to studies that said giving the drug as intermittent bolus is as good as continuous infusion. Hold on, I reminded my students, to take a look at what the doctors did in reality.

The truth is, our patient was receiving continuous infusion of proton pump inhibitor, a practice that is more expensive and inconvenient - but simply in accordance to the dogma.

Campers

We went camping with three other families at the beginning of this year. It's hard to imagine anything more exciting than bringing kids to sleep in the open air, under nothing more than a tent.

Real phobias aside (say, in case my daughter says no to the smelly loo, yuck), family camping will just give us the right mix of fun and imagination. No matter whether it's the first time or the third time, everyone feels nervous and excited at the same time.

As I learned from the parent guide, there are few essentials for the successful camp-out: friends (the more the better), a tent (the bigger the better), sleeping bags and, of course, the permit for children to build the tent together (like banging the tent stake into the ground).

While we were out, we could think of 101 ideas for a fun day without screen time. There are plenty of other things we can do without iPhone. Musical chairs, frisbee, racing, studying shy Mimosa pudica, digging sand - the list is endless. Things don't have to work out the way classic camping definition suggests, such as building a campfire to roast marshmallows. The truth is, boiling water to make hot chocolate and adding marshmallows were impressive enough for our kids. And if these activities don't make it worth sleeping rough, nothing will.