Memories

A few days ago, I finished The Paper Palace, an irresistible read with heavy theme. In this gripping novel, Miranda Cowley Heller describes a 50-year-old mother who grows up with dysfunctional family dynamic, sexual assault, and an unspeakable story of murder.

Consider this quote from the story: "We drag our past behind us like a weight, still shackled, but far enough back that we never have to see, never have to openly acknowledge who we once were." This quote comes from the traumatised mother who returns to the summer camp, nicknamed the Paper Palace, where her family has spent every summer for generations. She returns to a cemetery with lawns dotted with the grey teeth of the dead. That cemetery is where her stepbrother had been buried. Back she comes, as ever, to a hidden and painful memory of sexual assault (by him) and murder (of him).

The problem with recovered memories of pain and aches is that no one can decide what it is for. It comes into being as we try to move forward. The need for a forgotten memory is a matter of debate, but the need for soothing the pain of memory is a matter of fact. This morning, I attended a church funeral. That is the second time I visited the historic St Andrew's Church. More than three years ago, one of my patients died of metastatic lung cancer two years after the diagnosis, which was unfortunately delayed. I was there and paid respect to her. This time, another patient of mine died of the same diagnosis, which I made immediately after seeing her less than two years ago. 

Sadly, the disease came too early this time.

Dad

If there were a pie chart that divided up my time over one week, the exploded spice that emphasizes the best moment would be watching movie with my wife.

We watched the British drama film The Thing with Feathers this Friday, before I read the original novella Grief Is the Thing with Feathers during weekend. That's a story of a newly widowed father of two boys. A heavy story of grief. 

Regardless of how you feel about the author Max Porter's writing, he does certainly know how to evoke the fear and embarrassment of fathers like me. Once upon a time, the father, before he lost his wife in the book, had to bring his children to go sledging in the park when his wife fell sick with flu. Both sons whinged because their toes were aching. The father felt embarrassed to be exposed as wholly reliant on his wife. He didn't know where their hats were. He couldn't get their mittens. He forgot to ask his sons put on Wellington boots.  

My goodness, the story sounds familiar. Let me be clear. I'm no better. I remember years ago receiving an email from my daughter's primary school teacher reminding the daddy to properly dress a kid when the temperature was lower than 10 degrees. There are few gaffes more embarrassing than a dad's oversight that leads to a kid being "detained" in classroom when other classmates are playing outdoor during recess.

Uh-oh.

Learning

If you told me cheating is not easy during online examination, I most certainly would not have believed you. This is simply impossible to prevent cheating, after the move to virtual class and examination in front of a computer screen.

In the old days, we assessed students' grades according to midterm and final examination results, all of which were administered in persons. After months of lockdown three years ago, educators and students are getting used to online class. 

Should we or should we not allow students to take examination in front of a computer with a webcam and remote monitoring by a proctor? Well, if we trust that error-driven learning has powerful effect on memory, it really doesn't matter. As long as we actively learn by doing rather than passively learn by memorizing, we have made what we learned stick. In other words, even an open-book quiz online can give us opportunity to learn from our mistakes. The point of the quiz is to let us get close to the right answer, or get feedback for a wrong answer. 

That is the key to turbocharge our hippocampus, and retain much more information.

Iron

Armed with encyclopaedic knowledge on genetics and what appears to be a magnetic attraction to storytelling, Sharon Moalem has written a book called Survival of the Sickest, in which he muses on such intriguing questions as the battery life of Apple products.

As always, a mind clear enough to think of the theory of relativity – like Albert Einstein – would be able to explain the theory to anyone. Sharon Moalem has managed to explain evolutionary advantages of "sick" genes in a way layperson can understand.

We might not comprehend the reason of programmed aging, for example. But it isn't that difficult to figure out why we wouldn't buy an extended warranty on an iPod if we were only going to keep it for a week. That's how Sharon Moalem makes use of simple scientific writing and drawing analogy.

One of my favourite chapters, "Ironing it Out", eloquently unravels the mystery of Sharon Moalem's grandfather who loved to donate blood. How does blood donation make one feel good emotionally and physically? And that's not all. How did off-the-charts excess iron levels nearly kill an ultramarathon runner at the Sahara Desert? How did iron boosting or iron-supplemented food kill the anaemic Maori babies who were lacking iron? 

Whatever the evolutionary reason, it is clear that every gene – like haemochromatosis mutation – has flip sides like that of Janus.  

Frog

Few things symbolise tough task as much as swallowing an ugly animal. Isn't it gross to think that the first thing you do each morning is to eat a live frog?

That's exactly what Brian Tracy, a consultant on personal effectiveness, taught us to do. His first rule of frog eating is this: If you have to eat two frogs, eat the ugliest one first. That means tackling the hardest and most important task, a discipline we all wish to master when we open the page of a new diary or journal on the first day of January. 

Procrastination being one of the deadly sins, anyone might suppose eating frog demands mighty efforts. It pains me to say that I am also inclined to procrastinate on the top 10 or 20 percent of items or frogs that are most important, and busy myself instead with the least important 80 percent, the "trivial many" that makes little difference to results.  

As I read the book Eat That Frog, I started to think of the best way to deal with this animal. Procrastination to eat the frog can't be tackled without new angle to look at it. If we want to look at the ugly frog differently, we might have to borrow the Disney theme from Tiana. Or else, from the Chinese tradition of frog eating which dates back to the Ming dynasty. The popularity of frog delicacy means we can often change our perception of whatever considered ugly. Even when US President Ronald Reagan visited China in 1984, deep-fried frog's legs were on the menu at the national feast. 

In short, re-invent the frog with new meaning and make use of cognitive reframing. Then you can eat the frog. Bit by bit. Bite by bite. 

Let Them

There is never enough time to read every book we wish. 

Choosing books is easy and it is hard. It is easy because we're literally swamped with book choice, as much as light and air. And it is hard because we have limited time and energy. We will never get far enough ahead to be able to finish all books. 

To get around the never-ending choices, I make a wish to come across ten good books each year. And at least one life-changing book every few years. The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins turns out to be one of mine this year. The key lesson from this book, which I had waited for few months until my turn to borrow near the end of the year, is the mindset of freeing ourselves from the burden of obsessing over what other people think, say, or do. 

Instead of reacting to other people's behaviour, we are taught to Let Them. It's not what happens to you, according to Greek philosopher Epictetus, but how you react to it that matters. To reset our stress response, in other words, we say Let Them, and put ourselves in pause. Then say Let Me and take a breath. The focus is to own our reactions, take our power back, and not to allow other people's behaviour to bother us. 

There's so much we can control: our values, our attitude, our desires, our personal responsibility, and our choice of books, of course.  

Conservation

On my way flying to Australia, I was watching the BBC documentary about Asia. Sir David Attenborough told us the staggering amount of conservation efforts required to save wild Asian animals such as sun bear in Borneo and the Javan green magpie. I didn't know where the conservation would end, but I had no trouble guessing where it should begin. There are plenty of examples from the newsletters I received from Greenpeace.

But (I hear you saying) can't we please learn some lessons from Australia where conservation is an issue of nationwide policy? The number of government and non-governmental organisations working on conservation and environmental restoration in Australia is probably greater than that of three Michelin-starred restaurants in Hong Kong. 

Notable examples of the coordinated conservation movement in Australia include victories in protecting Fraser Island, Kakadu, and Tasmania. The battle to save the Great Barrier Reef is ongoing. No matter: I witnessed the efforts to save the endangered Australian sea lions on my visit to Seal Bay Conservation Park in Kangaroo Island today. The Australian sea lions remain being listed as "vulnerable" in South Australia, but there is no better place for them to survive.