MacLehose Trail

Which trail should we go during weekend? 

It's the question on everyone's lips now that gyms and cinemas are closed, and it's the question no one knows the answer.

Escaping the city and getting away from the claustrophobic confines of crowded places need both brainwork and legwork. That's how we picked the destination of Tai Mo Shan this Sunday. That means a long stretch of hike to Hong Kong's tallest mountain standing at 957m.

Heading west from Tai Po, our family had walked for six hours, across the ridgetop path after Lead Mine Pass all the way to the summit. We joked about the cow dung sprinkled around the jumbled boulders, and at the same time realized the heaps of boulders on the slope suggested violent eruption once Tai Mo Shan was a volcano in the Jurassic period. All of them, prehistoric or more recent "footprint" from feral cattle, gave us a good day away from modern city.

Repose

Of all New Year celebration customs and traditions, none is more extraordinary than those of Bali people. Nyepi Day, as how their New Year is called, means total silence. And total silence means "no fire", "no travel", "no activity" and "no entertainment".

On that special Neypi Day, no one drives or goes to work. Everyone is off duty, and even ATMs are no different - but of course, no one needs money because there's nothing to buy. Or, as the Dutch call it, niksen, meaning "doing nothing" or "being idle".

The creepy experience of shutting down everything including airport is clearly going to give us uneasy fear, and it pains me to say this, but fear mounts if such "niksen mode" isn't an one-off event on the New Year. Having a Neypi Day once a year is fine, but we don't need that many months of silence.

May we wish for an audacious new year ahead.

Nostalgia

If you find the new normal hard to live with, you aren't the only one.

Over three hundred years ago, a medical doctor came up with a new disease's name "nostalgia." In his dissertation, the term described the sickness of Swiss soldiers when they were in the lowlands of Italy, yearning for the alpine vistas of home. Oh, how they had oodles and oodles of symptoms like indigestion, high fever, melancholy, fainting, seeing ghosts and hearing voices. And even death.

Things soon start to look like another "nostalgia" pandemic this year. The cause of symptoms turns out to be homebound sickness rather than home sickness. Otherwise, the two are similar. Very similar.

People want to start the day the way we have been having. Not any more. Every morning, we wake up, discover the world has been changed, and can no longer go back to the old habits.

No more trips to Louvre Museum (and hey, even the Hong Kong Museum of Art is temporarily closed). No more Japan autumn foliage tours. Nope. We have no control over the travel restriction. What we can do is to keep our mind (and eyes) open. So that's why I and my wife take a half day off this afternoon to find the red leaves of sweet gum (Liquidambar formosana), a striking example of native deciduous species.

NOEA

It's not always easy to eat alone, but it's always what we're advised to do. I just felt uneasy after reading the "do's and don'ts" for dining at workplace, as if we're entering a whole new season of cold isolation. The dining table around us grow quieter and emptier each passing day.

This reminds me of Lili Rachel Smith, a young woman born with Apert syndrome leading to her horribly deformed face after premature fusion of the skull bones. She grew up in San Francisco where she attended middle school. Although she wasn't bullied, she felt invisible within ever-shrinking walls. Lunchtime means oblivion. Uncertain what to do after eating alone, she'd retreat to a toilet and call her mom. The more she stayed isolated, the more terrible sense it made.

After her tragic death at age fifteen, her mom founded a nonprofit organization to combat social isolation in schools. One of their best known student-led initiatives was No One Eats Alone (NOEA) Day. Ooooh ... can't you just see the inspiring message? It's that simple: Make sure no one sits alone at lunch.

That's not to say that I object to the latest decision to ban dine-in service at 6pm. There is of course a great deal of scientific evidence, including one model using mobile-phone data to map people's movement on the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2, proving that restaurants are hotspots for the disease. As published in Nature, the model demonstrated that capping restaurant venue occupancy at 30% would reduce new infection by more than 80%. Much as I love science, to the point of worship, I must confess that I also cringe at the idea of an al desko lunch. 

No. No. NOEA.

Eleven

The decision to have a child is momentous, according to educator Elizabeth Stone. "It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body," she says.

That's the best decision we have had more than ten years ago. My daughter turns eleven tomorrow.

If, like me, you have taken on the lifetime responsibility of loving children, you will agree wholeheartedly with the beautiful quote about parenthood.

There's plenty of smiling moments with bringing up a child. I’m still amazed - and grateful - to find the sweet memory's time capsule: how a kid grows up, what a kid has changed, and when we find ourselves changed as well. And really, the journey is far more fun than I could have imagined. Those were the days when I bought stickers to keep my toddler occupied and fascinated. Fast-forward to now, when, interestingly, she returns me bunches of stickers - creative ones via WhatsApp!

Slow

"I would slow down with inner peace," a friend of mine reflected after receiving his first speeding ticket. As he carried on the conversation I found myself feeling more connected with his story.

On my way to hospital this morning, I was reading the news about a possible coronavirus outbreak after healthcare workers carried out resuscitation of a patient. After what seemed like a run-of-the-mill lifesaving treatment, the staff found out that the patient tested positive for the coronavirus and they were not fully donned with personal protective equipment - something we knew was a true no-no. On the other hand, it was not the first time we take safety shortcuts when we're in a hurry for something.

When I related the news to other doctors by text messaging, I was entering the isolation ward. That's an area with negative pressure system. Thus I had to enter an additional door at the ward entrance, installed to create a buffer zone to stabilize the negative pressure inside the ward. As usual, I took my staff card to activate the access control. This should have taken me only a fraction of a second to open the automatic swing door. But not this time. Before I'd even thought about a defective door, I gritted my teeth to wait, and wait. Standstill.

The truth was that the hospital administrators had recently adjusted the automatic door hold-up time. In the end I had to wait longer and slow down. My face reddened. "Having a time-out is harder than I'd ever imagined."

I wish I could say that, after all the stories, I was fine with a slower pace, but that would be lying.

Library

One reason I've been borrowing books the way a hoarder does is that I decide to keep a good trove of reading materials. Tough anti-pandemic measures loom for the city. Who know? The public libraries can be shut down anytime.

With more than a dozen library books - fiction and non-fiction - on hand, I don't feel all that needy. And it's pretty much guaranteed I can pick the one that fits my day. I dived into the novel The Midnight Library by Matt Haig today. That's about a depressed 35-year-old Nora who is on the point of taking her own life. And my daughter told me a Hong Kong student jumped from height yesterday. Alas, that wasn't her school but her teachers decided to have a morning meeting to help students go through the saddening news.

As I read about Nora's story, I got carried away with the plot that there is a library between life and death. Nora was fascinated, too. She found herself in the Midnight Library before she decided to die. There were aisles and aisles of shelves, with books everywhere - definitely more than my trove. The bookshelves go on for ever in that library, as it turns out.

"Every book provides a chance to try another life you could have lived," the librarian told Nora. "To see how things would be different if you had made other choices."

The way Matt Haig narrates the infinite number of ways to pick our book, our life, and our decision, turns out to be the best antidote to the shocking news story.