Camera

A sentence is more than its meaning; there can be both logic and lyric within the sentence. For that matter, a memory can be neither false nor true; our memory isn't fixed like a carbon copy inside our hippocampus. 

As I learned from the neuroscientist and psychologist Charan Ranganath, a memory is constructed from the past (when a story is being compressed in our archives) and the present (when we reboot our brain to pull up what we think had happened, or assemble those bits and pieces into what should have happened).

Over our lifetime, we have taken thousands of photographs – and maybe over 600,000 now that we have smartphones. Autobiographical memory, or recollection of personal life events, isn't necessarily made stronger by taking more pictures. This has been shown previously by cognitive psychologist that taking more photographs on a museum tour can actually impair our memory. The more pictures we take (to outsource or delegate memory to an external device), the fewer details about the objects and the objects' locations in the museum we can remember.     

Maybe the reason my memory is so bad is that I have too many moments left on my camera rolls. 

Money

If there’s something about the tradition of travel that is not worth keeping, currency exchange for cash is at the top of my list. 

Think about all the hassle of foreign exchange, and that of keeping the leftover cash every time you return from a foreign country. Traveler’s cheque is even more outmoded than the abacus. 

Mobile payment is really the way to go. I like the way of getting around in Macau with contactless smartcard. I had not visited Taiwan for quite some time, and returned there this week to attend a medical conference. The leftover coins and banknotes from the previous trips could have gathered dust. A better option, if not the best, would be bringing the Taiwan Easycard, which has no expiry date for the stored value. Get one and pay for the metro, city buses, plus bike rental and spending money at most convenience stores and supermarkets. 

Simple and neat.

Grief

Grief is the most commanding of human emotions. How can it not? 

In a matter of hours, seven out of the eight blocks at a subsidised home-ownership residential complex, which were undergoing renovation, were destroyed in Tai Po. More than one hundred people, including a firefighter, were confirmed dead. Many were missing. 

I have been thinking a lot about a quote that is probably attributed to Julian Barnes: "Grief is vertical while mourning is horizontal." Grief makes your stomach turn, snatches the breath from you, cuts off the blood supply to the brain; mourning blows you in a new direction.

There are no fixed "right" or "wrong" ways to grieve. But it is not just telling people to "get over it" or "move on." I just finished a short novel One True Loves by Taylor Jenkins Reid. That is a story of Emma who was left a widow after her husband's helicopter went down somewhere over the Pacific. All passengers were supposed to be killed in the fatal crash. What could be found were a propeller of the helicopter on the shore of an island, and her husband's backpack. And the body of the pilot.  

Emma wore the grief like a shell. She found herself wearing it for a long time and then one day she realised she had outgrown it. So she put it down and walked away, only coming back to visit every once in a while. Somehow, this wasn't what she expected. The shell turned out to be heavier than she expected. Too heavy to be easily put down. 

Burnt

A lot of things happened to us this week. I guess nobody lives an entire life without a crisis. And yet, in a matter of few hours, we had to face the most harrowing and disheartening nightmare we believe we have ever heard.

In the morning, I was riding bike with my wife near Tai Po, from Ma Liu Shui Waterfront to Tai Mei Tuk. That traffic-free bike path is a favourite route of my daughter. And our family, too. The Tolo Harbour Cycling Track is mostly flat terrain. The only steep climb happens to be near a fire station at Ting Kok Road. The tough ride upslope forced us to slow down and spend more time looking at the fire station. Little did I know then that I was going to hear, a few hours later, the hugely devastating story of a firefighter who was killed in an inferno ravaging Tai Po.

A fire broke out that afternoon in an apartment complex, home to around 4,600 residents in Tai Po. Smoldering smoke particles became flames that became explosive tornadoes that became canonical blaze. Everyone is in shock, and I am no different. I got a knot in my stomach, which started the size of a penny and grew with the mounting death toll announced in the news.

The number of fire victims is expected to rise, with many people still missing. 

May God pitch his tent of mercy over the scorched place in Tai Po, and get us out the "burn unit", back into the sunshine again. 

Listening

It's so easy – too easy, perhaps – to lose the art of listening. 

A pause, I suggest, for all of us. A step back, and think about the all-too-common mistake of not listening. To help me become more aware of my listening habits, I picked up a book The Lost Art of Listening, written by an experienced therapist Michael P. Nichols. 

One good lesson for me is the mistake of "Me Too." Think about your friend telling a story of hardship such as "I hardly slept at all last night." Most of us won't devote ourselves to receptive listening. Instead, we might be tempted to cut in and say, "Me too! I was up and down all night." Or else, we might interrupt and say, "That reminds me of the time ..." 

What is the translation of telling our own stories? 

"I can top that." 

That means we aren't showing genuine interest in our friend's experience. Doing so is not going to validate our friend's feeling; we're validating ourselves.

Nature

Do we search in order to have? 

Sometimes, we search in order to find. 

There is a world of difference between the two, as Jarod Anderson learned to find his path. He is a poet and writer who had been shattered by depression. At one time, his depression led him to contemplate suicide several times an hour. 

He described himself as “a burden to his partner” with neither plan nor hope in his memoir Something in the Woods Loves You. Anderson would not bother when he moved into a 275-square-foot basement apartment with a shower smaller than most refrigerators. He didn’t even talk to the landlord when there was no hot water for five months. 

His healing came a long way, and eventually after paying attention to nature. When he met wild creatures like squirrels, red-tailed hawks, bats, opossums, he saw the light at each turn. Watching great blue herons in Ohio has become a source of wonder. Climbing out of his car and smelling the citrus tang of leaf rot and muddy water, Anderson had invited nature back to his life. That’s a path he knew he won’t be measured by bank statements or resumes. 

Connection with plants and animals allows Anderson to live with less pain and more meaning. As any lover of nature can attest, encounters with nature can do wonders for our well-being.

Cemetery

"The cemetery is a place of gentle quiet. At night, I can hear the whistle of distant trains. It's a lovely place." This is what Jarod Anderson mentioned in his memoir. 

Many famous poets and writers, as what Jarod Anderson did, lived close to cemetery. Examples include Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne. 

Maybe the cemeteries are unwelcome four-letter word or taboo in our society, but I'd suggest it's time we rethink how unique and peaceful the cemetery can be. Before we become comfortable with cemetery, we have to make peace with death. All lives end. We learn from Mitch Albom's Tuesdays with Morrie that "once you learn how to die, you learn how to live."

In case you haven't visited a cemetery for quite some time, find time to go. Take a moment to walk around. More than twenty years ago, I had to fly to Edinburgh for a professional examination. Unfortunately, I couldn't beat the jet lag to study when I arrived the day before examination. The wait for examination, alone in a foreign country, felt like forever. To outfox the anxiety and attain true inner freedom, I decided to take a walk around a cemetery close to my B&B. Thankfully, it worked.

I visited a cemetery this morning too, before another professional examination (as an examiner this time). The cemetery, with fine examples of baroque ecclesiastical art and a doll-sized mint-green church, is truly a source of peace.