Ownership

Ten years ago, the idea of ownership meant purchasing and owning a physical item. Today, we are moving to temporary ownership. That means ownership-on-demand to minimise overloading our storage lockers.

It's not just the wish to spark joy and free our space; we are rethinking what we mean to own something. 

Our family are perfectly fine with Airbnb holidaymaking at a lower cost. We didn't go as far as joining the market of Turo car-sharing, but I keep enjoying the cutthroat price of bike-sharing monthly subscription fee. In fact, I witnessed similar examples of riding-on-demand elsewhere recently: Meituan bike sharing in China, grab-and-unlock E-Scooter Share Scheme in Perth. Their service - 24 hours a day 7 days per week and scooter location by downloading an app - is even better than ours because each electric scooter comes with a helmet, which you should put back on the lock after finishing the ride.

Suddenly, we stop buying things, and begin subscribing to services. When we think more about it, it's the service that matters, not the thing. 

 

TripIt

We've got limited time only for the Western Australia trip this season. We based ourselves on Rottnest Island, and then headed south to Busselton and Nannup. 

A short trip.

But that doesn't mean we missed the fun. A shorter trip, in fact, can be even happier than we would have thought. 

I learned this from a psychology professor Jeroen Nawijn, who published in the journal Applied Research in Quality of Life, after his tracking the happiness of over 1500 Dutch participants. As expected, those with upcoming holidays are happier than non-vacationers. What most of us do not know is that the days before the start of the trip registered the peak level of happiness - higher than when the participants were actually on holiday.

Perhaps nowhere is the joy greater than that of anticipation, which is even more powerful than the experience itself.

A deeper look at this study might lead us to think twice before striving for a long holiday. That means we should have more short trips and more frequent breaks. The more trips planned, the more there is to look forward to. 

Thrombolites

After our Rottnest Island adventure, we headed south to Busselton. During our way, we came across Yalgorup National Park and met the earliest living organisms on earth. No, I don’t mean Jurassic Park. That’s not distant or early enough. We’re talking here about thrombolites of Lake Clifton.

At first glance, the muddy or rocklike humps look a bit lackadaisical. If you dig out their history, they are the only known form of life on this planet somewhere 650 million years ago. At that time, there was no oxygen in the atmosphere. Next came colonies of prokaryotic cyanobacteria which were able to carry out photosynthesis. That was the key to jack up the oxygen content in the primeval earth’s atmosphere. Thrombolites, as it turns out, are fossil record of these earliest living organisms on earth.

Now that our oceanic oxygen levels had fallen by 2% in 50 years, thrombolites remind us what we badly need.

Quokka

My wife and I first heard about an Australian island populated by a beaver-like cousin of kangaroo called quokkas more than six years ago. Quokka's fur coat is the colour of hazelnut, ears as cute as Mickey but smaller, smile much happier than Cheshire Cat's.

At that time, we only knew Rottnest Island is a Class A reserve dedicated for renewable energy: the best way to navigate is by foot or bikes because vehicles aren't permitted except for work purposes.

This island has been on our bucket list since then.

Blue waters and white sands. Wildlife and bird sightings. Hiking choices, or adventure on two wheels. This island has all the hallmarks of our family's top picks.

For one reason or another, we didn't have chance to visit Rottnest Island until the lifting of tight restriction governing Western Australians inside a "hard border".

We made it to Rottnest Island this week. To thoroughly experience this holiday haven with oodles of natural beauty, our family chose to stay for three days instead of a day trip. 

It's a real pleasure.

Climate

I don't have to read the reccent TIMECO2 series of Time magazine to realise the climate change.

Look around and I know it's everywhere. Consider, for a moment, how many of you would have thought about going to the beach during winter previously? Now that we have global warming, I can easily arrange a birthday beach party this year even it's December.

The record-breaking heatwaves give us less pleasant temperature round the year. During our family hike today, I reminded myself to bring ice pack to keep our beverages cool. We met far more blue tiger butterflies than we could count at Tai Po Kau. Sounds unusual? Not really: blue tigers often gather here at the end of autumn. Butterfly population, still, is one of the indicators of climate change. Environmental groups have apparently recorded a sharp increase in the local butterflies since 2019, in tandem with the rise in our city's temperature.

No wonder this has been a hot topic in Time magazine.

Sometime

We've been told for decades now, by the geniuses at Seasame Street during their Season 36, that foods should not be labeled as good or bad. They describe food as being "anytime foods" or "sometime foods."

In this way, we steer clear of value judgments when it comes to food. Specifically, we don't want to focus overzealously on dieting and calories counting.

Such is the way of buying snacks for our daughter's birthday party. We let our daughter celebrate with her best friends close to fine sands and waters; we went to Clear Water Bay Second Beach this year. Our family didn't shy away from "sometime foods" like Pringles and chocolates. They are the best choice for sometime like birthday, aren't they?

Tom Lake

During my conference trip to Guangzhou, I was reading the novel Tom Lake by Ann Patchett, who wrote the entire book on a treadmill desk during the pandemic. She literally walked the whole book: a novel set partly in a lake in New Hampshire, and about a family stuck on an cherry orchard with no idea how much longer they would have to stay amid the virus. My conference hotel at Huangpu District happens to be right next to a pleasant water reservoir. That’s an idyllic location to read Tom Lake.

For some reason, I found something similar to the plot in another novel I had just finished. That’s Station Eleven, a novel recommended in my daughter’s school weekly bulletin. In both novels, I read about actors’ tragic death onstage. One had heart attack during performance, and another died after vomiting blood from drinking too much vodka and whiskey. 

The more I thought about the two novels, the more similarity I could find. Ann Patchett told a story of lockdown, during which a going-to-be-couple were happy to get perfect excuse not to invite anyone for their wedding. The story of Station Eleven, written before the coronavirus pandemic, happened to be about an unprecedented flu outbreak. You might have wondered how an author could write a story so close to how we encountered the coronavirus. 

“Listen. Even if I could book you on a flight out of Malaysia, are you seriously telling me you’d want to spend twelve hours breathing recirculated air with two hundred other people in an airplane cabin at this point?” How familiar such extract from Station Eleven seems now, almost like a prophecy that comes true.

Guangzhou

Nearly four years ago I attended the International Congress of Chinese Nephrologists in Nanjing. Within one month of that conference, international travel has come to a standstill because of the global pandemic. 

When I returned to the same conference in Guangzhou this week, there have certainly been swift changes. High speed train. Digital currency. Artificial intelligence. 

As happens with any new changes, my initial reaction is uncertainty. Little did I know how I could get my digital wallet. And yes, I can’t think of the way to navigate my digital world without Google Search. It is no surprise, then, my WhatsApp works as rarely as we win the lottery. I know for myself that websites from New Yorker and The New York Times are blocked by the firewall, too. 

Maybe I’m not supposed to talk about it. I shouldn’t have complained.