Apples

After a month, I have almost finished Liane Moriarty's novel Apples Never Fall.

The first chapter of the novel starts in a far corner of a café where four siblings leaned over a round table, their foreheads almost touched. At the last few chapters, the tables and chairs were piled up on top of each other gathering dust in the corner; they were only doing takeaway coffees. No more table service.

Well, that's exactly what we'd found our life turns out to be recently. This is a month we have gone through something so chaotic, so unexpected and volatile, so entirely out of our control and out of our imagination, it is like a splash of icy water on a snowy day. Ukrainian residents are facing nightly air strikes. Disease outbreaks are spreading like wildfire in our local nursing homes. Round-the-clock crisis happens in hospitals with shortage of beds and shortage of mortuary spaces. I think we might have come close to the World War III.

For the first time ever, it occurred to us that the healthcare system probably would collapse and fall like a tower of Jenga. I don't know if apples would ever fall, but I shall pray that ours won't fall.

Toll

The pandemic kills in many ways.

We know the virus kills when it messes up our lungs. We know the virus kills when our body's immune cells can't stop setting fire on the fighting cascade. One of the yet-to-be-told stories about the untold toll is the pandemic's effects on the uninfected persons.

More often, it's a difficult trade-off between tackling pandemic and keeping others healthy. A back-and-forth between the two. Back and forth, back and forth: the sweet spot isn't easy to define. What are those stories of untold toll about? Running out of sleep after unbearable working hours. Running out of drugs like hydroxychloroquine after the misguided use to treat coronavirus disease. Running out of teaching opportunities for medical students, or even kindergarten students.

Or simply running out of friends or hugging.

Think about loneliness and social isolation. Social distancing is often the magic word for anti-pandemic measures. On the flip side, we can be truly alone (subjectively) and isolated (objectively). All that is bad news, and more so for a centenarian who can go downhill quickly, because loneliness messes with our stress response. Cortisol, the stress hormone, jumps higher after our connection with others are being cut off. Worse still, the risk of death goes up. And yes, you read that correctly: increased risk of death. It isn't a question of objective or subjective social isolation. It doesn't matter, according to a meta-analysis. Objective social isolation may raise the risk of death by 29 percent, and reported loneliness ups it by 26 percent.

That means we need friends. Don't let the coronavirus steal yours.

Present

If we choose to live our lives like a monk, it means we tell our monkey mind to be present to the moment. A seemingly simple mantra but easier said than done.

Jay Shetty - the oracle of mindfulness, the award-winning storyteller, the author of inspiring Think Like A Monk- once wrote that we're almost always somewhere else. Instead of thinking about what mattered in the past or what the future might hold, we are taught to "be here now." After all, the past is unchangeable, and the future is unknowable.

His teaching is life-changing, that much is clear. I was working late at hospital tonight and could not finish admitting patients until midnight. I decided to run back home. Little did I know, when I was planning my run after work, it was a blustery and rainy night. Fat raindrops dotted my short-sleeved tee, mingled with the moisture on my face, soon after I started my run. Regardless of the weather, I told my monkey mind to go ahead and be present, as I felt the cold air against my skin, my breath traveling through my body. I willed myself not to take short cut by train, even though the monkey mind wanted to.

And that's a good exercise to practice tuning in to my mind.