Nostalgia

If you find the new normal hard to live with, you aren't the only one.

Over three hundred years ago, a medical doctor came up with a new disease's name "nostalgia." In his dissertation, the term described the sickness of Swiss soldiers when they were in the lowlands of Italy, yearning for the alpine vistas of home. Oh, how they had oodles and oodles of symptoms like indigestion, high fever, melancholy, fainting, seeing ghosts and hearing voices. And even death.

Things soon start to look like another "nostalgia" pandemic this year. The cause of symptoms turns out to be homebound sickness rather than home sickness. Otherwise, the two are similar. Very similar.

People want to start the day the way we have been having. Not any more. Every morning, we wake up, discover the world has been changed, and can no longer go back to the old habits.

No more trips to Louvre Museum (and hey, even the Hong Kong Museum of Art is temporarily closed). No more Japan autumn foliage tours. Nope. We have no control over the travel restriction. What we can do is to keep our mind (and eyes) open. So that's why I and my wife take a half day off this afternoon to find the red leaves of sweet gum (Liquidambar formosana), a striking example of native deciduous species.