Magical bandage

All of us are now and then wronged in major ways.

It hurts, it stresses, it distracts, it hurts more, it presses

It hurts more than a wound in our skin

When we feel being wronged,

hatred, feelings of revenge put salt in the emotional wound

It hurts more. 

And yet our God has given a wonderful healing bandage

A bandage we often refuse to use, for far too long.
it is the magical bandage of forgiveness and loving anyhow.

life

Oh my God,

Sometimes the most important of life's questions are playing in my head.
If i would be soon to die, would I feel I have lived a full life?
Would I feel I have lived and achieved my highest potential?
Would I feel satisfied with what I have done in my life
or would feel more regrets for things done or not done?

I surely have tried to be good at many times
but did I really succeed in doing as much as I could?

Did I give in to my tempers and laziness too often?

Reflecting on this, I remember the story of a man on his deathbed saying to his son who had renounced all wealth : my only regret is that i have not lived more like a saint...

When I reflect on questions like this, I feel I can offer a lot still to the world.
I still have a deluge of love and creativity flowing through my veins
I hope our Creator gives me the strength and opportunities to
achieve my next few big ambitions in the near future.... :)

Water

I have a body weight that I feel is way too high for me.
I am currently at 88 Kg for a length of 183 cm.

I do exercise but not enough and after exercise I feel extra hungry.

I just got this idea to try to lose some weight:
Any time between 10 and 2 minutes before a main meal,
I will drink between 0.5L to 1L of water
Then I will eat normally.

I expect a few effects.
1. My stomach will feel full much earlier and I may end up eating less.
2. The water will dilute my food and allow a faster passage through my gut, less time for full absorption of all calories
3. The water will be absorbed or at least part of it and help circulate all good things in my body to reach even the most remote corners of my body. This will make me feel good, less tired, more keen on exercise

I expect a lot more effects but If even part of the three above are coming true,
I WILL LOSE SOME WEIGHT.

Who wants to try the water diet together with me?
I will report on my progress in a week. :)

Not good

What happened yesterday in Brussels is bad, very bad.

Wicked people.
It is easy to be drown up by emotions related to the event and reply with equally wicked comments. Stupid politicians like Trump and Cruz could not refrain themselves from doing so.😠 They respond exactly in ways the perpetetrors want them to respond.

Let us all be at least a little bit cleverer than Trump and Cruz. These two seem to be so infantile.

Ghandi. Dr M L King Jr. I think we can get inspired by these guys to respond in a much more proper way...😐

Not bad

Today, I went to Bukit Keluang,
a beach near a rocky hill,
a wonderful pearl of nature.

I went there with a team from the UK that had come to Malaysia as a charity to do cardiac surgery on children who need it most. Their efforts have saved the life of multiple children.

I am in full admiration of their efforts and thought:
After all the world is not too bad
There is so much charity going on
So much kindness.
So much love
So much selfless sacrifice

The world is NOT BAD

Purpose

When we travel, we first choose the destination.
Then we carefully plan the best way to get there.

To compare our life to a travel is a bit of an oversimplification
Life is so much more complex and so much more multifaceted.

Yet many of us give not half the thoughts about our destinations
and our journey of life compared to how we plan our holiday traveling.

Our life is indeed so multifaceted:
We have a physical life (body) with needs and purposes to be fulfilled.
Then we have a mind that hungers for knowledge and development.
We have an emotional life with hearts, yearning to love and be loved.
We do have also souls, appreciating moments of quiet and blissful happiness.

If in any of these areas of our life, we have no destination in front of our eyes,
we may become just aimless wanderers as a traveler who sets out on the road
without knowing where he is going, taking randomly turns on winding roads,
perhaps hitting the very same place where he departed after a long long travel,
or even a place worse than the place where he left long time ago.

Sleep

I am currently traveling in Europe
Weather is cold
And my nose seems to have caught a cold.

I really think the best medicine if we do not feel well is rest and sleep.
Last night I felt not well at all.
I went to bed really early and slept through the night.
A good long rest works curative for many diseases.
That is at least what I believe.

The solution?

What is your problem?
I am quite sure that every person walking on this earth has a few problems.
What is your blessing?
I am quite sure that every person walking on this earth has a few blessings

Quite often we give soooo much attention to our problems
that we do not have a lot of attention left for our blessings.
That makes it soooo easy to forget our blessings

For sure we pay attention to our problems because we want to solve them
We have to pay attention to them.
But if we fail to pay attention to our blessing, our mind may get soooo blurred
that we do not find the solution.

A small suggestion:
Keep paying attention to problems
But try to balance it by paying
an equal amount of time attention to our blessings

The solutions of our problems
lie often in our blessings.

Daily blessings

Just arrived in Europe yesterday.
No longer used to the cold weather.

While living in Malaysia  we take the wonderful weather often for granted.
Sometimes forget to be grateful for our daily blessings.

Today, I want to say Thanks for
the safe trip we enjoyed.
the love and friendship we met
the fantastic communication with home
the wonderful sleep
the food
and so much more....

I pray today for love and peace
for compassion and sympathy
for beauty and softness
for health and safety
but most of of all,
let me be an instrument
in our Creator's hands
to create some of the above for many others too...

Stinking

(inspired by Vishen Lakhiani)

If you try to smell the person sitting next to you on the bus,
you may very likely not smell anything or a specific brand of perfume

None of us would go out without taking a shower
to prevent anyone smelling our body
We use perfume and so on.

We really take care of our body

How about a stinking personality
When we are doing ward rounds,
so many times people  (including sometimes :( myself)  display a stinking personality
scolding nurses, scolding junior doctors in front of patients.

Are we not worried about people smelling our personality?
Let us take some care of that in the morning too.
A short time for reflection, for some gratitude and some good intentions
may make a world of difference.

A shower for our body
A shower for our soul :)

A bit of gardening

A little bit of gardening
A little bit of picking up litter
A little bit of planting
A little bit of pulling weeds

Can make a huge difference in quite short time
not only in the way your garden looks
but also in your own feeling and state of mind

Just a little connection to nature
can do wonders for anyone.

Enthusiasm

I had this class on medical ethics today with our final year students who are almost at the end of their pediatric posting. The concept is of the class is quite simple. I ask them beforehand to reflect on the 10 or so weeks they have already spent in pediatrics postings and pick up one moment or few moments when they encountered something not quite right, not quite ethical happening in the pediatric wards.

The students share the moments and then we have a bit of a discussion about it. It is often interesting and quite fun to talk about their experiences and hear their own thoughts on how to improve it or avoid the problems.

Today I got more than just that. At a certain moment in the class there were two girls who got so excited. They were thinking at the same moment of the same woman they had seen in the clinic. It was a teacher who had only a very limited number of days she could take of from her teaching days and she had to come quite often to the clinic. To be able to do that she went to "buy" an MC (Medical certificate) from a private clinic. The doctor seeing her child had refused to give her MC and just had produced a standard time slip which was not accepted by the school principle.

Buying an MC is quite problematic from an ethical point of view (both for patient and doctor) but why not the pediatrician writes a letter to the principle explaining the need of regular follow up and the need for the teacher to have her leave to do other things. I have written letters to support parents in many ways and do not recall a single time when the employers refused to cooperate with the requests made.

I truly enjoyed today's session and the enthusiasm and excitement of these students was making the whole session so special, I think. If we can get people excited, enthusiastic about ethics, I think this is something nice to achieve. If this happens, you feel it as a gift of God, a gift of the students, and a little bit also a gift from yourself.

A mile

A mile
An extra mile
To walk the extra mile

Can make
a huge difference
in our life
in the life of others

People who walk the extra mile
tend to be supremely successful
successful in generating wealth
successful in generating love
and kindness and happiness
and peace and satisfaction