Pleaser

If I had to sum up, in one sentence, the key message in The High 5 Habit written by Mel Robbins, it would be something like as follows (call it the first law for an adult).

There is only one person's opinion that matters: your own.

If you're growing up in a community with social code – and who isn't? – it's hard to get out of the habit of looking around for approval. There is nothing stopping me from pleasing other people. Many of us, especially those Enneagram Type 2s, struggle to say "no". We tend to betray our own needs for the fear of other people being upset with us. 

Mel Robbins is one of the people pleasers. Driven by a hobby of buying antique pool table, her father gave her a painstakingly restored Brunswick pool table as a wedding gift. The gorgeous table took up half of her playroom. Mel's family rarely used it to play pool, leaving the pool table sitting like an elephant in the room, covered in Legos. For many years Mel wanted the space back but ended up walking around the pool table to get from one end of the room to the other. 

She couldn't move the pool table because it seemed like a slap in the face to her parents who had given it to her with so much love. She was compromising her own needs of having an office. Mel was too scared to disappoint her dad, and twisted herself in knots. Which, in a way, she had. 

This story has a positive ending. It took Mel Robbins 45 years to learn the lesson that as scared as you are to disappoint someone that you love, it's always worth it to be honest about what you need. One fine day, she picked up the phone and told her dad that she was going to hire professional pool table movers to dismantle his gift. With love and care. And courage.

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.