Untamed

Shortly after the worldwide demolition tour of the coronavirus, a growing panic became palpable everywhere. The resulting repercussion appeared in tweets, hashtags, news feed, and various platforms. And then the pent-up frustration are written in novels: Lucy by the Sea, Tom Lake, Wish You Were Here, and now Dream Count.  

The last one was written by a Nigerian author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. As the book opens, a family Zoom call tells the story of how the long lines of people waiting to buy toilet paper in supermarkets, how the police are guarding toilet-paper lines, and why a spoon is needed for ATM. When it comes to coronavirus deaths, there's no such thing as too-much-caution – and it turns out the worry is the coronavirus can pass through gloves. To get around the fear, a sppon is used to press the passcode and then being thrown away. 

A spoon can be thrown away, but the panic can't be. Each new symptom – from face rashes to foot sores, from hoarse morning throat to an itch in the toe – can cause restlessness and endless Google search. 

Those frightening news are enough to give us a gray hair overnight. 

Calendar

The British countryside is known for its sweeping expanses and ever-changing seasons. Intrigued by the micro-seasonal changes, an ecologist, a book coach, a lecturer in human environmental geography, and a historian came together to write a book on their journey through a year, divided into 72 seasons. 

Their book, Nature's Calendar, is like a series of commas along a long road. The comma works like a speed bump to slow down our pace, to help us develop habits of observing the mind-blowing natural world. Be they animals or plants, be they a fan of tiny leaf-tips of daffodils in spring or mistletoe in winter, all can be delightful to look at. 

The day after I read Nature's Calendar, I received a much-loved gift of local mountain-themed calendar. The calendar collates twelve drawings of iconic peaks, each with its unique character and habitat. If Nature's Calendar is made up road signs by commas, this local calendar is a series of twelve periods. A well-placed period points to hiking enthusiasts where the pause should be, and when the next ascent should start.  

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.