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.

Animal

For reasons that have more to do with curiosity than industrious style, I often strive to attend every lecture during international conferences. I acknowledge that the excuse of skipping lecture is even lamer now that video replay is mostly allowed in virtual conference.

To my delight, I found a few lessons on comparative kidney physiology in the American Society of Nephrology conference this year. They take me to arena of kidney knowledge in animals other than humans. Yes, it's even more interesting after visiting the Ocean Park with my daughter last week. My late-night listening to scientific explanation for a giraffe to develop a thicker straitjacket-like layer covering its kidneys - at least three times thicker than that of a cow's kidney outside lining - is as entertaining as reading books of Bill Bryson. Answer - to shield kidneys from a high blood pressure because this tall animal needs a phenomenally high blood pressure to drive blood up to the brain.

In another lecture, I learned about the way dolphins develop tricks to conserve body water: how they have lengthier intestine to absorb water (twenty times of body length - no exaggeration - and that's five times more than ours), how they reduce their breathing rate (two to five times per minute) to minimize respiratory water loss, and how they strive to have a much thicker kidney medulla, the inner-most region of the kidney to concentrate their urine.

What a wonderful animal kingdom.

Crowd

Try to catch a ferry to Hong Kong UNESCO Global Tung Ping Chau while domestic travel is a new reality here - a raucous experience to say the least.

Our family planned the trip during this weekend. It was only when I was heading to the ferry pier this morning, and I saw that the queue was ten times longer than that of fans outside Apple stores for the newest iPhone, that I had realized even an overloaded Titanic won't be able to accommodate the crowd.

It's far easier to change route and turn inland, finding a circuit for the pleasure of countryside hiking. At first, we aimed to get out of the city, but as time went on, it was obvious that it's even trickier to get away from the crowd. And more so for the noise-making crowd, those incessantly peevish people who talk more than walk.

It’s very hard not to go up to one of them and say, sotto voce out of the side of the mouth, “I think it is a huge pity to have that many noisy eruption in the wild." 

Virtual

Like it or not, international medical conference is now going virtual everywhere.

That includes the American Society of Nephrology meeting. If you had asked me one year ago how I felt about visiting the United States again (almost a decade since I last attended the conference), I would have had an answer ready: I look forward to that.

Overseas conference is like an airplane mode, allowing us to unplug for few days without access to hospital pager, devoid of many other distractions. We spent three to four days in a conference venue, exploring one lecture hall after another, meeting people, getting the most out of a tight conference schedule.

Virtual conference is different, I know. You don't need me to tell you that. A positive note to this new format, it must be said, is getting rid of the travel time, hotel accommodation, jet lag, not to mention those morass of guilt in leaving family behind.

I don't know how to work out live streams of the lectures, but I do know one interesting fact that my conference falls on my daughter's term break. With a lag of twelve hours between ours and Eastern Daylight Time zone, it would be a perfect split between family time and study time.

Let me try.

Nature

Nature is a perfect playground.

Now that travel is considered unsafe, our family holiday is mostly built on the raw beauty of countryside. That might not necessarily be an once-in-a-lifetime adventure, but the terrains of the New Territories boasts surprisingly diverse array of natural scenery.

We picked a rugged and treacherous mountain trail hidden among the foliage near Pak Tam Chung this Sunday. The hike was challenging, with both figuratively and literally hands-on moments for our family. As we wound our way down the trail, I was grateful.

Of course, I am blessed with a sublime view. And it is. But I am most thankful for raising a daughter who has learned to be fascinated by hiking in the nature.

Steps

In his book Last Child in the Woods, Richard Louv created the shorthand description "nature-deficit disorder" to highlight the human alienation from nature. The term reminds me of a research paper published in the medical journal Lancet. Seventy-eight 3-year-olds were monitored by small electronic accelerometers clipped to their waistbands for a week. The finding of only twenty minutes of moderate physical activity a day is clearly demonstrating our divorce from the wildness.

Put simply, we are spending more and more time in couch, car seats, and even baby seats.

I happened to be promoting an exercise program The Billion Steps Challenge when I was reading the book of Richard Louv. The target of the program is to align organ transplant recipients and the extended community to stay active and collectively walk one billion steps in ten weeks.

Think about what it feels like to have a billion steps by all participants around the world. Pretty ambitious, right? The key is to remember every step counts. Everyone counts.