Uncertainty

Why are millennials called the "new lost generation"? One reason is the need to navigate a uniquely volatile era of radical uncertainty. They include three major economic recessions including the Great Depression, once-in-a-lifetime global pandemic – you name it.

A look back at older generation, on the other hand, seems to give us déjà vu and a long history of recurrent uncertainty. I recently borrowed a beautiful book Air-Borne, in which Carl Zimmer chronicles a gripping account of airborne infection. History simply repeats itself. Scientists were often completely wrong, until human suffering has been turned into final discovery that many threats are indeed caused by airborne contagious diseases. Measles, tuberculosis, SARS-CoV – you name it.

Zimmer's superb writing is filled with stories of the United States Presidents. John F. Kennedy launched mass immunisation campaign in 1965 to include measles. Even Charles Schulz helped rally children and their parents, dedicating a week of his Peanuts comic strip to the story of Linus getting vaccinated.

"Who ever worries about measles? What's a little 'rosela' among friends?" Linus asked his sister for the reason of getting a measles shot.

"Your stupidity is appalling!" Lucy snapped.

"Most stupidity is," Linus acknowledged with reluctance.

Physics

Teaching physics to someone who doesn't know mathematics, according to the Nobel Prize winner Richard P. Feynman, is like explaining music to someone who is deaf.

Unlike Feynman, I have forgotten most of what I'd learnt about the laws of thermodynamics, SUVAT equations, or African drums. Well, I don't really know whether I've ever understood any one of them at all. 

We all know that physicists are one of the cleverest humans. Think about Feynman who gathered with physicists from other universities in the early seventies. Somehow they got the idea that the physicists needed more culture. To bring some culture to their conversations and lectures, Feynman thought about Mayan mathematics. He deciphered the bars and dots after getting a copy of the oldest Maya books, the Dresden Codex. 

Feynman figured out the bars and dots always carried at twenty the first time, then at eighteen the second time (making cycles of 360). He noticed certain numbers appear more often: the number 584 was particularly prominent. This 584 was divided into periods of 236, 90, 250, and 8. It didn't take him long to find that 583.92 days is the period of Venus as it appears from the earth. Then the 236, 90, 250, 8 became apparent to Feynman: it must be the phases that Venus goes through. Out of the table that had periods of 11,959 days, he further worked out the meaning of the funny number: the number to predict lunar eclipses. 

Geez.

Healing

Life decisions are hard. 

Book decisions are easier. 

Browsing staff picks or front table near the entrance of a bookstore is often what I do. A new release showcased in many bookstores is Why We Suffer and How We Heal, written by a psychiatrist Suzan Song. 

One reason that we should all learn to bounce back from grief or depression is that there are so many stumbling blocks in life. And, if I can add this to-be-read list, this book would be at the very top. 

Does this mean we should focus on self-help books? Not necessarily. Many a time a fiction can give us a kernel of wisdom, or insight. I just finished a fiction about depression and healing: Before I Let Go by Kennedy Ryan. That's a beautifully told story about a couple who have gone through their divorce in the wake of devastating losses, including their baby, who was stillborn. 

Following their story, like reading updates in their Instagram, tells me how to open up the old wounds and heal the wounds. 

Healing

Recently, I read about the way to navigate life's twists. As Susan David wrote in her book Emotional Agility, life's beauty is inseparable from its fragility. 

We're young, until we're not.

We're healthy, until we're not.

We're with those we love, until we're not.

Simply by going over these sentences, I could feel my heart seize. I bet yours did too. Changes are no fun.

The way we grow old (or get sick, for that matter) is often not within our circle of influence. What matters is to focus our energy on what we can control. 

That's what we can decide and have our say. 

Dad

One year ago, my dad suffered from a broken back after an accidental fall. Think about our vertebrae like a stack of rectangular sardine tins. These cans are durable and valued for their long shelf life. Yes, they're perfectly fine until we hit the age of 40, when the cans begin to lose up to 5 percent of density each decade. It turns out the sardine gets stolen with time, and the cans get less strength.  

Imagine stepping on an empty can as hard as you can and you will have a rough sense of how a collapsed or flattened vertebra looks like. 

Another trick to keep the cans steady and sturdy is tying the stack with cord or string. If you stop and think about the string for a moment, it is pretty like the core muscles that stabilise our spine. But there's a good chance that our muscle mass drops with age, starting around age 30.

Not all gone, but enough to give my dad a breath-deprived and panicked feeling. He walks discreetly, taking small steps as if to move across an ice-covered driveway. When he had another fall at home last weekend, he couldn't stand up for nearly an hour. He lied under the bathroom sink, breath growing short and head spinning. A knot of anxiety and terror burgeoned in his head, and panic strangled my dad so tightly he could barely breathe. The kind of terror that made him lose the train of thought and all his marbles. 

"Relax," I managed to get home and help my dad, scanning the scene for blood stain and his body for open wound. I tucked my body under his, slinking my arms around his waist. He felt frailer, smaller than when we last hugged, like time is stealing not only years, but pounds from his trunk and spine. Somehow he looked weak but heavier than what I wish to move.

"How ya been, dad?"

My dad didn't move an inch. My sister, a godsend, arrived half an hour later. 

"Can I go over with you, my steps of bringing dad back on his feet, step by step?" I feigned composure. "First, bring me the blood pressure machine. Next, get both of us two pieces of chocolate." 

Moving our dad from the floor to his wheelchair took us another half hour. My sister and I exchanged looks. She gave me a worried look, and I drew a deep breath, steadying my heartbeat. It's not that my backache made my heart race. I simply worried about another fall and downward spiral. The situation is somehow like watching a Jenga game with collapsible sardine cans stacking one over another. One wrong move and the cans will topple and all fall down.

In the end, I took dad to the hospital that night to check out. Soon after entering hospital, it seemed like his body was starting to fall apart. He got more and more confused. None is more daunting than calming a delirious elderly who has been restrained in an unfamiliar environment. He yelled like a hailstorm, thumping on the hospital bed. 

You don't need a PhD to work out the solution. I tried my best to convince his doctor to send him home. Trust me, going home works like magic. 

Home sweet home. His smile at home soldered into my memory. It's the one I'll never forget. 

Colour

Books about migrant workers and racism are nothing new, but what Amanda Peters has told us in her debut novel The Berry Pickers is colourful. 

The Indigenous Mi'kmaq people, native to Canada's region near Nova Scotia, are primarily having skin colour from light to deep brown. The novel casts light on a Mikmaq family who arrives to Maine every midsummer. Together with a caravan of dark-skinned workers, they work hard picking berries till sunset for white landowners. This family work harder than most workers. They never pretend to have picked more than they had, when other lazier ones try to stuff the bottom of the crates with green leaves and stems.

The family can roll up the passenger-side windows on the truck to keep blackflies out, but they can't stop the bites of blackflies in the field. The white folks claim that Mi'kmaq people make such good berry pickers because something sour in their blood keeps the blackflies away. But everyone knows that isn't true. 

Blackflies don't discriminate. Men do.

Freedom

Worthy is written by the American entrepeneur Jamie Kern Lima who aims to build self-worth in girls and women. 

You don't rise to what you believe is possible, you fall to what you believe you're worthy of.

The sentence summarises Jamie's answer to the question if you were smart enough, or if you were enough. A lot of us could get lost in our setbacks. Jamie Kern Lima had her setbacks too. She wrote this book after she had been rescued from hardship and low self-worth. 

Jamie Kern Lima grew up with an alcoholic father. Her parents divorced when she was six. She then was alone a lot because her mom and stepdad both worked long hours. Eventually, she was handcuffed for riding a freshly stolen car, and ushered into a juvenile detention centre. Between moving schools and homes, she was voted "Biggest Procrasinator" in high school yearbook. She made efforts to unlearn the limiting beliefs that she was unworthy of love. Surprisingly, it has a happy ending. She became the first in her family to graduate college. She graduated at Washington State University with a 4.0 GPA. No one knew then that their valedictorian had worked in a strip club.

Jamie's story struck a chord in the hearts of us who couldn't put words to our knowing that one can break free of destiny. I happened to have watched the movie Tokyo Taxi with my wife this week. I dare say the movie is in tune with that of Jamie Kern Lima's. The central figure in this movie is a woman who first lost her father during the 1945 firebombing of Tokyo, and then lost her first husband who repatriated to North Korea. If all that wasn't enough, her second husband was an abusive rascal who gave her hearbreak and anguish. Her way to break generational cycles of abuse is a forceful argument that we're worthy of love. 

As Jamie Kern Lima tells us, where you come from doesn't have to determine where you're going. And that your past can only hold you back if you live there.