Exercise

How many of us have dreamt of living better longer? I know I have.

Today, voluminous research has shown that mortality is an inevitable companion of aging and chipping away one disease at a time is futile, like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. The good news, though, is that exercise is the most potent pro-longevity "drug". I was introduced to this strategy by Peter Attia in his eye-opening book Outlive. In short, medicine's biggest failing is in attempting to treat all the conditions at the wrong end of the timescale - after they are entrenched - rather than before they take root.

The beauty of maintaining health by exercise is to make us functionally younger. If anything, we exercise to live longer with good function and without chronic disease, and with a briefer period of morbidity at the end of our lives. The upside of training to improve our VO₂ max during physical exertion is huge. One study found that boosting elderly subjects' VO₂ max by about 25 percent was equivalent to subtracting twelve years from their age.

What better drug can give us such payoff? 

True

For years, we love reading crime stories or psychological thrillers.

Unsettling as they're, these fictions give us irresistible pleasure from the adrenaline swooshing through the bloodstream, not to mention the Hitchcockesque entertainment of decoding mystery.

It would be easy, and oh so helpful, for authors to stick to the theme of telling lies. My daughter finished One of Us is Lying not long ago. I just read None of This is True.  

All these books are destined to end with a maze twisted by the somewhat sickening knots of truths and untruths. All of which is to say, deception is an endless trick to make stories riveting. A bit frightening, perhaps. 

Luckily, we have more truths than lies in our real life. For me, at least.

Ando

I doubt many outside the field of architecture have heard of Tadao Ando. Few inside the field, somehow, know that he was born in poverty, had been raised by his grandmother and was a boxer, before he started teaching himself architecture. I learrned his story from Adam Grant's book Hidden Potential.  

As the only architect ever to win all four of the field's most prestigious prizes, his success has come with an asterisk. Without means to go to college, Ando borrowed architecture books from friends and taught himself enough to earn an architecture license. 

By the time he has become the master of light and concrete, he has identified his goal. "What some other people think of my work is not my prime mover," he says. "It's my desire to satisfy me, and to challenge myself."

That's contrary to what most of us have in mind. One could take the view – and I would bet that many do – that it's important to meet other people's expectation. Like Ando, Adam Grant reminds us it's better to disappoint others than to disappoint ourselves. It's more about living up to our own standards.

To visualise what we're facing, Adam Grant makes use of a soccer pitch diagram to depict the size of people we try to please. For that matter, the penalty area inside the whole pitch are somewhat representing the percentage of people we can actually please. And then, an even smaller square – the goal area – refers to the proportion of people (including yourself, of course) we should focus on pleasing. 

That reminds me of my pacing during my run after work. I seldom join running competition. I run myself. My pace, interestingly, goes up after seeing guys riding bike next to me. That's extrinsic goal to drive me. To beat the odds. And, most importantly, to beat myself.  

Seals

Ed Yong is the author of two New York Times bestsellers and won the Pulitzer Prize for covering the coronavirus pandemic. 

I’d just read his chapter about seals, sea lions and walruses – collectively known as pinnipeds – before our family visit of the Ocean Park yesterrday. Ed Yong gives me even more knowledge of marine animals. 

As I watched the whiskers protruding from the harbor seals’ snout, I remember how the seals are making meticulous efforts to keep the whiskers warm, even when diving in freezing water. That’s to stop the tissues from stiffening and allows free movement of the whiskers. In case you are wondering (I was), their whiskers are key sensory organs. The sensitivity of harbor seals’ whiskers was discovered by a scientist team in 2001 when two harbor seals, Henry and Nick, could follow the underwater path of a mini-submarine. Henry and Nick were able to clung to the trail even when their eyes were blind-folded and their ears were plugged by headphones. It wasn’t until their whiskers were covered by a stocking that they lost the sub. 

Look closer at the harbor seals’ whiskers, Ed Yong can see the magic design of anatomy: they are slightly flattened and angled so that the bladed edge always cuts into the water. Armed with an undulating surface, the whiskers can dramatically reduce the vortices left by the whiskers themselves. That means the seals are able to tone down the signals from their own bodies and enhance those left by their prey. 

How clever.

Death

There is no one way to approach final moments with a loved one.

Ask Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and you will learn authentic language on dying. Listen to the renowned physician BJ Miller's TED Talk, and you might find out what really matters at the end of life. If you're bookworm, go and find the ones by Sherwin Bernard Nuland or Atul Gawande.

But it was only when I came across a little graphic poetry collection by Wendy MacNaughton today that I began to have deep learning on the way to say goodbye at bedside. 

The pencil drawings and painting protrayals of patients at a six-bed hospice facility, accompanied by poems for reflection, from her boook How to Say Goodbye are the best visual storytelling for those of us who live and die.

Love

Falling in love is euphoric. Going to the wedding ceremony and you’ll see – and hear – for yourself. There’re wonderful sparks of marital bliss. But then, according to long-range studies by the American psychologist Dr. Dorothy Tennov, the average life span of a romantic obsession is two years. 

Dr. Tennov didn’t include me in the study but I am sure my memory of our wedding is evaporating. So much so that I answered the wrong year of my marriage recently. That has nothing to do with Alzheimer's disease. If anything, it's a clarion call for me to fill my "love tank". At a recent marriage seminar or couple course, I learned that running our marriage on an empty love tank may cost us even more than trying to drive our car without petrol.

After the first lesson on five emotional love languages, I decided to borrow Gary Chapman's bestselling The 5 Love Languages Men's Edition from the public library. That's the magic to speak the love language of spouse. In other words, we can't express love in English, when our spouse understands only Chinese. The secret is to find out the love language our spouse speaks: words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service, or physical touch. 

That's not a long book (who has time for those, these days), but the messages are important for all couples. The issue for me, however, is that I have completely forgotten that I did read this book in 2016. My goodness, that's indeed why we need to check the love tank level every now and then.

I will, I promise.

Dishonesty

I read Mitch Albom's first book Tuesdays with Morrie in 1997. Every reader of the book is touched, and I am no different. I have never missed any book of Mitch Albom after that.

The great thing about reading Mitch Albom's books is that every book read is a life added to my own. So I have already outlived cats (which are said to have nine lives) before I came to read his newest book The Little Liar. Some may quote George Martin, "the American Tolkien": "A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one."

As I sunk deeper into the story of Holocaust from The Little Liar, mourning of one Jewish after another dying at the hands of the Nazis made my stomach turn, snatching the breath from me. I lost count of the lives I have lived. I lost count of the lies told by a little liar Nico Krispis who grew up in Salonkia, or modern day Thessaloniki, Greece. Nico never told a lie before the age of 11.

"Never be the ones to tell lies, Nico," his grandfather taught him when he was only five years old, at the majestic Mount Olympus. "God is always watching. It's easy to be nice when you get something in return. It's harder when nobody knows the good you are doing except yourself."

Nico's grandfather taught him that lesson about doing something for someone that can never be repaid. Like cleaning the graves of the dead. Soon Nico was dipping rags in the water and wiping the facades of strangers' tombstones, after wiping that of his great-grandfather and great-grandmother.

Nico kept his promise of honesty. Not until the invasion of his home by the Nazis. Nico escaped - but he never told the truth again. He made one forged document after another, using lactic acid to erase stamp and made false identity cards, passports, and food ration certificates. The lies of Nico simply went on. And on. 

The Holocaust novel about Nico taught me a life lesson of deceits and truths.  

Animal

If you want to know more about humans and great apes, you should grab the book The Third Chimpanzee by the American scientist author Jared Diamond.

Why do men have the longest penises? Chimps the largest testes? And orangutans (or gorillas) the shortest phallus and smallest testes?

What prevents us from having six sequential sets of teeth like an elephant, rather than just baby teeth and adult teeth? After all, with four more natural sets, we wouldn't need fillings, crowns, and dentures as we get older.

After getting my curiosity on animals hooked, I went on to borrow another book by a British-American science writer Ed Yong: An Immense World. The Pulitzer-winning writer covered insects, primates, bats, birds and dolphins. He told stories about the great sensory gifts of different animals. 

Animal senses are simply amazing. Ed Yong has a wonderful word for this sensory bubble - Umwelt. That's a word borrowed from German, and first used by a German zoologist in 1909 to mean an animal's sensory environment. Every creature has its own Umwelt. Every species has its Umwelt that another cannot sense. The Umwelt, as a matter of fact, can be even peculiar to an animal's embryos. 

On an evening of 1991, after suffering from the clouds of mosquitoes at Costa Rica's Corcovado National Park, a scientist checked on the red-eyed tree frogs' embryos every 15 minutes. Those eggs were encased in jelly and stuck to leaves overhanging the pond water. In the dark, nocturnal cat-eyed snake came to grab an omelette dinner made of the tasty tree frog eggs. But it's not that simple. The frog embyros' sensory bubble, or Umwelt, extends beyond the actual jelly bubble. The embryos are highly capable of detecting the vibration from the attacking snake's bite. The shaking triggers the sensitive hair cells, which send signals to their brains, setting off a cascade of enzyme release and disintegration of the eggs. Within seconds, tadpoles are tumbling down too quickly to count, and the snake, still chewing its first mouthful, is left with a smear of empty jelly.