Slow

"I would slow down with inner peace," a friend of mine reflected after receiving his first speeding ticket. As he carried on the conversation I found myself feeling more connected with his story.

On my way to hospital this morning, I was reading the news about a possible coronavirus outbreak after healthcare workers carried out resuscitation of a patient. After what seemed like a run-of-the-mill lifesaving treatment, the staff found out that the patient tested positive for the coronavirus and they were not fully donned with personal protective equipment - something we knew was a true no-no. On the other hand, it was not the first time we take safety shortcuts when we're in a hurry for something.

When I related the news to other doctors by text messaging, I was entering the isolation ward. That's an area with negative pressure system. Thus I had to enter an additional door at the ward entrance, installed to create a buffer zone to stabilize the negative pressure inside the ward. As usual, I took my staff card to activate the access control. This should have taken me only a fraction of a second to open the automatic swing door. But not this time. Before I'd even thought about a defective door, I gritted my teeth to wait, and wait. Standstill.

The truth was that the hospital administrators had recently adjusted the automatic door hold-up time. In the end I had to wait longer and slow down. My face reddened. "Having a time-out is harder than I'd ever imagined."

I wish I could say that, after all the stories, I was fine with a slower pace, but that would be lying.

Library

One reason I've been borrowing books the way a hoarder does is that I decide to keep a good trove of reading materials. Tough anti-pandemic measures loom for the city. Who know? The public libraries can be shut down anytime.

With more than a dozen library books - fiction and non-fiction - on hand, I don't feel all that needy. And it's pretty much guaranteed I can pick the one that fits my day. I dived into the novel The Midnight Library by Matt Haig today. That's about a depressed 35-year-old Nora who is on the point of taking her own life. And my daughter told me a Hong Kong student jumped from height yesterday. Alas, that wasn't her school but her teachers decided to have a morning meeting to help students go through the saddening news.

As I read about Nora's story, I got carried away with the plot that there is a library between life and death. Nora was fascinated, too. She found herself in the Midnight Library before she decided to die. There were aisles and aisles of shelves, with books everywhere - definitely more than my trove. The bookshelves go on for ever in that library, as it turns out.

"Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived," the librarian told Nora. "To see how things would be different if you had made other choices."

The way Matt Haig narrates the infinite number of ways to pick our book, our life, and our decision, turns out to be the best antidote to the shocking news story.