Trail Run

I didn't begin running seriously until my late forties, and have hit the roads and pavement since then.

I'd never heard of trail running before. With not an iota of idea about the hardship of trail run, I joined one few years ago. That afternoon, I brought nothing – not even a water bottle. It had never crossed my mind to wear special shoes. Ask any experienced trail runner, and they'll tell you I'm an idiot.

I suppose, looking back on it now, I was simply lucky to have finished the trail run without getting injury circumnavigating the terrain.

Not anymore. Fast-forward to this weekend. I managed to join my second trail run, this time with a new pair of shoes. When race day arrived, I was nervous but felt ready to enjoy the experience as much as possible. This is the first time I brought along water in a running vest. I didn't know how to use the bite valve, and ended up opening the lid to drink. I didn't prepare too much but tried to soak up the experience after taking off from the start line. Pretty soon, I came to realise that I didn't descend fast enough when the stair spacing is too narrow for me to place the whole foot on the step. My cadence, on the other hand, can be high to go downhill with rugged landscape. I fetched bananas twice for replenishment, my face aglow in the sunlight and my heart rate quickening above 170 beats per minute.

If you're new to trail running and wondering whether you can do it, let me reassure you even an idiot like me can do that. Call me an idiot if you want, but it's okay to make rookie errors. What brings me the most joy is being able to explore the nature and my body. There's nothing better than a trail run to just forget about life for a few hours and enjoy the fresh air and scenery.

Universe

The more I thought about time, space and universe, the more fascinated I became by what I have learned from Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson. They wrote a witty and entertaining book Frequently Asked Questions about the Universe. 

Will time ever stop? Why can’t we teleport? Do we live in a computer simulation? 

Yes, I know, that might seem like an outrageous question. Then again, maybe it doesn’t. 

As we can see, simulation is no joke. People start to imagine a future in which everyone is running a simulation of a universe in their home computers. The idea that the world isn’t real and that there could be simulated people inside of them running more simulations might be technically feasible. That’s a simulation inside a simulation. Why not? The more simulations being run, statistically speaking, the more likely that the so-called universe is a big video game. 

We don’t currently know whether the world we live in is real, and we might never know.

Inheritance

If you're looking for a contemporary vision of medication abuse, go to read the novel My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. 

Central to the idea of "relaxation" is a young New York woman's numbing herself to near-coma with a remarkably huge repository of dangerous drugs. Risperidal, Ambien, Valium, Ativan, chewable melatonin, trazodone, Nembutal, Benadryl, NyQuil, Xanax, Lunesta, and her list goes on and on.

The tragedy of this miserable woman goes all the way back to her baby days when her mother, a bedroom drunk, crushed Valium into her milk bottle to "console" her for colic and crying. 

You might wonder how a zombie poisoned by that many psychotropic medications could have survived. Well, she could barely arouse the enthusiasm to stand up straight. She took a shower once a week at most. She didn't do much in her waking hours besides watching movies. That woman didn't have to work as she had all her bills on automatic payment plans. She didn't have to worry about property taxes on her apartment, because rent money from the tenants in her dead parents' old house upstate showed up in her checking account by direct deposit every month. 

In short, she survived by inheriting the fortune from her parents. Or, should we say, she inherited the misfortune from her mother who mixed alcohol with sedatives?

Fix

Nearly 30 years ago, I had no idea about patient safety as a junior medical intern, much less keep my patients safe. 

The vivid real-life stories from Amy Edmondson's Right Kind of Wrong reminded me of the internship experience. She mentioned the near-fatal mistake of complex failure in a ten-year-old boy, whose face turned blue after surgery. The boy was given a morphine overdose – several times more than was appropriate. 

Alas, that story was exactly what I had encountered in a surgical unit where a domestic maid was found unarousable after an appendicitis operation. Within minutes of being paged by the nurse, I rushed to check on the patient and found a near-empty bag of morphine. I ordered a dose of antidote, which worked like true love's kiss for Aurora. That fixed the problem and my patient woke up. End of the story. 

Except that it's not.

Looking back, I was so naive to take a quick fix without reporting the incident. I dared not speak up. And that's it. 

As a matter of fact, we tend to take short cut in the working environment, even for simple process failure like running out of clean linens. The so-called "first-order problem-solving", as you can imagine, is simply walking to another unit and taking linens from their supply. Problem solved. Minimal time and effort.

It is time for me to quit the first-order problem-solving habit. We better think about what Amy Edmondson dubbed "second-order problem-solving." That could simply mean reporting the shortage of linens and taking the initiative to work around the linen ordering system.

Legend

In his 2018 book Through My Father's Eyes, the son of Billy Graham recounts his personal relationship with his father, an iconic American evangelist.

In 2007, the Billy Graham Library (ahead of his death at the age of 99) was dedicated in the presence of former American president Jimmy Carter (who recently died at the age of 100).

Carter also followed Jesus and taught Sunday school classes before, during, and after his time in the White House. 

Both are legendary.

Humor

For those of you who like the witty hashtag on Twitter (or X, or whatever you call that), you should have heard of Jimmy Fallon who likes to tweet movie or song title, add one word to change the meaning and tag it to ask for more suggestions. Those humor habits with social media users could have started with Jaz-Z who hashtagged #mylaugh years ago.

If you're anything like me (bad news: you are), you might be less obsessed with hashtag and more old-fashioned. A nerd like me would have prefered  The New Yorker magazine caption contest, which comes up with a blank cartoon for anyone to create funny captions. That would be good exercise to rewire our brain to stress less and laugh more. I learned this kind of writing during my high school days, when a newspaper posted a blank cartoon every week and invited submission of short fiction on that cartoon. To me, back then, the comic story crafting meant a conscious desire to be funny, to make people laugh, and to reward myself with pocket money. 

Another prime example of humor habit, as I recently learned from Paul Osincup, is game called Guess the Punchline. The goal isn't to build six-pack abs (which will be used only when you laugh too much), but to exercise your humor muscle. All you need to do is pause a video after a comedian like Jimmy Fallon made a setup, and guess the possible punchlines. Here's an example of the setup: According to most studies, people's No.1 fear is public speaking. Number two is death.

What's the punchline?

"This means, to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you're better off in the casket than doing the eulogy."

Seven

Ten years ago, I read the book Made to Stick, enthralled. This week, I read another book of Chip Heath: Making Number Counts. This is even more entertaining. 

The best secret to take away from this book is nobody really understands numbers. We can recognize 1, 2, and 3 at a glance, or 5 if we’re lucky. But after that, we can’t picture the numbers past 5, and would much prefer to know that the 2020 Australian wildfires affecting “half the size of Japan” and not “186,000 square kilometers.” 

To use an example of communicating with patient about platelet count, we might say, “A normal platelet count ranges from 150,000 to 450,000 platelets per microliter of blood. Your recent blood work showed that your platelet count is 40,000. That’s way too low.” 

It’s hard, right? After all, our patients don’t need to know exactly how many platelets are in a microliter. They only need meaningful landmarks. 

A better way of mapping the landscape would be: “Normal scores for platelet counts are expressed in thousands, and they range between 150 to 450. At 50, we won’t let you travel. At 10, you’re at risk for spontaneous bleeding. You’re at 40.” 

That’s neat and simple. Nothing more and nothing less.

Speaking of which, there’s one more lesson about converting abstract numbers into concrete objects in this book. It’s the example of understanding electricity consumption. To help people grasp the idea of carbon fluorescent light-bulbs, we can’t simply state that carbon fluorescent light-bulbs cost seven time more than traditional incandescent bulbs. We have to emphasize that they use only a quarter of electricity. Another focus would be the ease of replacement, because carbon fluorescent light-bulbs are expected to last for 7 years; that’s way better than replacing bulbs every year, particularly for those hard-to-get-to sockets. Now, how can we craft an easier-to-understand concept about 7 years? 

“Replace your lights with carbon fluorescent light-bulbs when your child is learning how to walk. The next time you’d have to replace the bulb, your child would be in second grade, learning about oxygen. The next time, they’d be taking driver’s ed.”