Run Lah

Every time I arrive at a new destination with opportunity to run, I let out a whoop of jubilation. Something in the air is so immediately liberating, so full of the promise of runner's high.

Listed as one of Malaysia's priority sites for ecotourism, Fraser's Hill is formed by seven rolling hills with undulating terrain, with almost 92 percent of land covered with virgin forest. The steep trails look challenging for running, but the cooling fresh air provides just perfect getaway from the hot and humid temperatures of the lowland.

The place is a haven for nature lovers, and I have yet to meet someone who runs and does not love nature. But isn't it true that stunning vistas could sometimes distract runners? I had to remind myself not be to distracted by an abundance of vegetation types and the myriad colourful birds during my the whole way through.

If you were to ask a zoologist why we run, he might answer we run because we are animals, and that's what animals evolved to do. Sometimes to run from predators. To escape. If there is a predator for me during Fraser's Hill run, that would be the tiny leech with two suckers lurking in the forest. Keeping leeches off isn't easy, no matter how fast you run. Yikes, I got one bite during the run, but it's pretty harmless. I wore that bloodletting wound as a badge of honour, after a quick Google search. "Why don't I enjoy the run to the fullest?" I minced.

Bird's Eye

I woke up at a place called Fraser’s Hill - a classic, colonial-era, high-altitude bird-spotting destination, somewhere on the Selangor-Pahang border in Malaysia.

Within a split second, we had devoured our English-style breakfast, before we joined an incredibly eagle-eyed naturalist, Mr. Durai, named one of Malaysia's top birding guides by Lonely Planet.

To say that our guide Durai was a bird expert would be the most banal of understatements. He practically spotted the crimson colour of an oriole's belly with naked eyes, which we couldn't even tell with the Swarovski binoculars.

We looked up and stared, awestruck.

Jungle

Buzz.

My heart pounded with each passing of the mosquito buzz sound.

It was our two-hour walk through the jungle at the Forest Research Institute Malaysia, spending time to get to know numerous species of trees. A forested enclave about 45-minute drive from Kuala Lumpur. As soon as we started our hike, we heard the buzz sounds, first from cicadas and then the mosquitoes.

Argh, mosquitoes! My daughter wasn't wearing long-sleeves or full-length pants. Suicidal attire, I whispered to myself. "The bite won't last forever and we shall be fine," I waved off the mosquitoes and calmed my daughter, my heart fluttering in my chest.

But after all was said and done, nothing in the world could keep us from admiring, appraising and yes, embracing the leafy forest. We marched on, grateful that we could muster a smile because of an entertaining guide with impeccable knowledge on the trees. It's amazing to see my daughter completing the trek despite the mosquito bites.

Travelling strengthens our courage muscle, as the globe trotter Ashley Garver once wrote, while at the same time softening our ego. A matter of letting go.

Sleep Debt

After a hectic week of hospital duty, meetings and appointments, I experienced a brief repose, granting myself a few days of vacation and family time.

Looking back on the week, I yawned and reminded myself the story of Monday coffee.

Every Monday, there is an offer of buy-one-get-one-free-coffee at my hospital’s convenience shop. I seldom miss this opportunity. I did that too last Monday. And then it hit me with a jolt: the sudden realization on Monday night that I had only savored one cup. Oh, I simply forgot the second cup once I was being distracted.

"C'mon. How can my day be so topsy-turvy?" I winced, then making the mental note to finish the left-over coffee the next day. Umm … do I have to tell you I simply forgot my coffee on Tuesday?

All right, I think this is how we reclaim our energy - overdraft first and pay back later.

Integration

We've been living in a world of rules. Mostly a black-and-white binary paradigm. It's very common for us to fall into a stereotype - either you're tough or you're tender.

It sounds pretty uncomfortable to let people hear me swear (and I did) when I'm supposed to be a kind-hearted person. At the end of the day, we might end up pretending to fit with the stereotype. Oh, man. That means I can only swear when nobody is within earshot.

That's why I feel much relieved after reading Brené Brown's work. I've had the opportunity to learn from this four-time New York Times bestselling author who has spent two decades studying vulnerability. She shows us the courage to show up and be vulnerable. True belonging, according to Brené Brown, doesn't require you to change who you are; it requires you to be who you are. What's perhaps the most important example to live by is the act of bringing together a threesome - strong back, soft front, wild heart.

I believe I should learn to integrate all these three. Who shouldn't?

Factfulness

I remember teaching from Hans Rosling, professor of international health, about how we score worse than chimpanzees in answering global trends. Not terrible enough? Gosh, that's worse than random. In spite of the hard fact that people living in extreme poverty has halved over the last 20 years, more than 90 percent of online polls perceived that the extreme poverty rate has either doubled or remained more or less the same.

In short, we don't see how things are getting better.

What exactly, then, leads us astray in getting a correct worldview? Our negativity instinct. That's an instinct to notice the bad more than the good.

It turns out that I'm not immune to such instinct. I assure you, because I had made the same mistake yesterday, that humans are more likely to notice the dips than the overall improvement. I was reminiscing the "good old days" with my nurse friend. Little did I know that we were quite tempted to glorify our early experience: our instinct to feel that we were much more competent than our colleagues nowadays. This perception, luckily, too often is an illusion.

Shakespeare

It's hard for me to relive the experience of the Globe Theatre, and it's easy to see why. That was an open-air theatre in which William Shakespeare drew huge audiences four hundred years ago.

And I did, pretty much recently, turning page after page of the novel How to Stop Time, following the footsteps of its narrator Tom Hazard who had hardly aged a day. He wasn't allowed to join Facebook because "there isn't the option of putting 1581 for your birthday." Tom brought me (and his lute) back to the noisy stinky theatre when Elizabethans didn't bath very often. I ended up learning a bit of British history.

Yet none of that matters until I joined my daughter's school field trip this morning. That's a workshop to learn the Shakespearean society through language and sonnets.

I liked it.

And I just thought, really, honestly, how remarkably the instructor turned every sentence into teachable moment. The way children learned idioms coined by Shakespeare. The way children made rhythmic sentences out of pentameter pattern. The way my daughter rushed to read Romeo and Juliet after school.

Thy life's a miracle.