Eric Tian

Tonight at boxing I sparred with a guy much smaller than me. He was slim and was no taller than 160cm – it felt like I was going against a child.

The round started and I landed a cross to the body.

“Sorry,” I said, feeling bad. He grinned sheepishly.

Out of nowhere, he unleashed a combo on my ribs that I could barely see. As I tried to counterpunch in desperation, he was already out of striking range. Frustrated, I began trying harder and harder to hit him, but he would effortlessly dodge my punches and hit me while I was vulnerable. When the round ended, he was barely sweating, while I was physically and mentally drained. My one punch at the start was the only punch I had landed.

After class, I approached him.

“You’re pretty amazing,” I said. “Must be hard being shorter than everyone else.”

He stared at me for a while and laughed.

“I think my size works to my advantage, actually.” He waved at the other people. “I’ve always been the smallest guy in class, and have had to adapt to keep up. So I think my speed is actually because of my size, not in spite of it. If I get hit, it’s over. So I’m much more cautious than other boxers.”

In David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell wrote, “Giants are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to give them strength are often the sources of great weakness.” While true, he could have also added the converse: “Underdogs are not what we think they are. The same qualities that appear to limit them are often sources of great strength.” That the Davids in the world don’t succeed in spite of their disadvantages, but because of them.

As we left, the small boxer revealed he was competing in a competition next month.

“Good luck,” I said.

“Thanks,” he replied. “But I think I’ll be okay. People always underestimate the small guys.”

When I first read Stephen King’s On Writing, I was surprised to learn that he only writes in the morning, eats lunch, then spends all afternoon reading. A serious writer, I imagined, would spend most of their day writing, only stopping for sleep or food. But Stephen King realised that when he was exposed to other books and ideas, his own writing got better as well. His writing improved because of his reading, not despite of it. His inputs determined his outputs.

It makes sense in other domains, doesn’t it? Hard exercise grows muscles; deep conversations drive insights; quality sleep promotes rejuvenation. The stimulus drives the results. But for whatever reason, the idea of reading as an equally necessary input for thinking and writing seems a bit odd. Maybe that’s the product of a society that rarely reads.

Yet in my experience, the lesson holds true. Whenever I’m in writers block, a useful antidote is to stop writing altogether and just read until something interesting appears. The new input usually leads my subconscious towards some output which I can then work with. This is ultimately why I read and journal and take notes – to capture ideas to build upon later.

I like what the writer Ted Gioia said on the Conversations with Tyler podcast:

“I think the most important skill anyone can develop is time management skills. How you use your day. But there is one principle I want to stress because this is very important to me. When people ask me for advice — and once again, this cuts across all fields — but this is the advice I give:

In your life, you will be evaluated on your output. Your boss will evaluate you on your output. If you’re a writer like me, the audience will evaluate you on your output.

But your input is just as important. If you don’t have good input, you cannot maintain good output.

The problem is no one manages your input. The boss never cares about your input. The boss doesn’t care about what books you read. Your boss doesn’t ask you what newspapers you read. The boss doesn’t ask you what movies you saw or what TV shows or what ideas you consume.

But I know for a fact I could not do what I do if I was not zealous in managing high-quality inputs into my mind every day of my life. That’s why I spend maybe two hours a day writing. I’m a writer. I spend two hours a day writing, but I spend three to four hours a day reading and two to three hours a day listening to music.

People think that that’s creating a problem in my schedule, but in fact, I say, “No, no, this is the reason why I’m able to do this. Because I have constant good-quality input.” That is the only reason why I can maintain the output.”

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While googling around, I came across this blog post I wrote on this topic from over three years ago! I forgot this existed and the writing is almost unrecognisable. Fun throwback.

My Dear,
It has been six weeks since you left.
How are you finding heaven?

They say the hardest task in life is
to live only once,
Yet when I replay your songs and laughter,
Your story still remains, in a way
Continuing to live,
Just not you.

I may regret saying this,
But when you left,
Your suffering didn’t disappear, no it
was carried by the world.
That night, you carried a bomb into a room
With us all inside
And burst a hole to the heavens.
Eighty of us attended your funeral, injured and limping.
If you knew, would you still have done it?
Would the weight of that burden paralyse you?
I’m sorry for asking.

Your song will continue to be heard,
But through the voices of others.
How the world misses your voice.

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Related: Ode To a Life

There once was a man who believed he was Jesus Christ. He simply woke up one day and declared that he was the Messiah, here to save mankind. To his wife’s horror, he preached to cashiers at the shop, gave away his life’s savings to strangers, and declared he could heal people through his touch. It was not long until he was brought into the psych ward.

There, his delusions persisted. Every day, he would rise and hurriedly tell the other patients about his message. He wrote bible verses over the walls, wore his bedsheet as a robe, and would preach sermons in front of the television. His sermons were initially to nobody but himself, but gradually, people began to listen. His enigmatic nature rubbed off on people, it seemed. Those who heard him seemed to be affected by the message, for they would tell others to come and listen, and within a week, his sermons had a routine attendance.

It did not matter that the sermons were incoherent, nor were they even from the Bible. His messages brought followers, and they soon began to quote him and practice his messages of self-sacrifice and worship. They began to eat together and share stories about themselves in details that one would only tell a close friend. One night, a nurse reported that in the common room there were eight patients sitting together, quiet in meditation, with the man in the middle. It was one of the calmest shifts she had ever had.

But gradually, the medications took their effect and the delusions faded. The man, less sure in his identity, began to preach less, and the daily sermons soon became a thing of history. Each day, the man would reject his previous identity more emphatically, to the nods and approval of his psychiatrists. He began to fear those who knew him as Jesus Christ, and spent his days locked in his bedroom.

The day he was discharged, the doctors and nurses were overjoyed. He had made a full recovery and his wife welcomed him with open arms.

But back in the ward, the patients he had preached to still gathered in front of the television each morning. They ate together and tried recreating his teachings, but soon disassembled without any guidance. His writings on the wall remained for many years, the only evidence that there was a man who believed he was Jesus. And so, the ward returned to a previous time, filled with people a shell of their selves, waiting again to feel delight.

This week was a week of missed opportunities.

Missed the deadline for an abstract submission. Missed the deadline for a short story submission. Procrastinated on an overseas clinical elective and got rejected – it was a first-come-first-serve basis.

While I wish there was some valid excuse for these failings – some cataclysmic event or medical tragedy – the truth is that the fault was all mine. The deadlines were clear and I had lots of time to prepare. There were even people reminding me to submit them on time. But I procrastinated, thought I could do it all in the last moment, as I had done for so many other things, and paid the price.

One of my deepest early regrets is not spending more time with my dad when I could. I thought, despite medical warnings, that he would live forever; that seeing him at hospital wasn’t as important as homework or playing computer games. There would always be time later. I think in some gentle way he encouraged that illusion; he never sat me down and told me that our window of time together was rapidly shrinking. I think he didn’t want to hurt me.

The day he died and the illusion shattered, I cried for a long time. There were so many opportunities to hug him, tell him I loved him, to ask about his life. The saddest windows close when the people you love slip away.

You would think his death would be a lesson to wake up and not let life idly pass me by. But I guess I’m a slow learner.

Paul Graham writes in Life is Short:

“The usual way to avoid being taken by surprise by something is to be consciously aware of it. Back when life was more precarious, people used to be aware of death to a degree that would now seem a bit morbid. I’m not sure why, but it doesn’t seem the right answer to be constantly reminding oneself of the grim reaper hovering at everyone’s shoulder. Perhaps a better solution is to look at the problem from the other end. Cultivate a habit of impatience about the things you most want to do. Don’t wait before climbing that mountain or writing that book or visiting your mother. You don’t need to be constantly reminding yourself why you shouldn’t wait. Just don’t wait.”

Highlights from a blog post by Morgan Housel:

“The purpose of life is to experience things for which you will later experience nostalgia.” – FedSpeak

“Write your obituary, then work backwards to live it.” – Buffett

“The happiness of most people is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things.” – Ernest Dimnet

“Injuries done to us by others tend to be acute; the self-inflicted ones tend to be chronic.” – Nassim Taleb

“People might refuse to believe something even if it can help them live a little longer, if believing it will make them live a lot sadder.” – Cass Sunstein

From Rick Rubin’s The Creative Act: A Way of Being:

“If you have an imperfect version of a work you really love, you may find that when it finally seems perfect, you don’t love it in the same way. This is a sign the imperfect version was actually the one. The work is not about perfection.

One thing I learned through having spellcheck is that I regularly make up words. I’ll type a word and then the computer will tell me it doesn’t exist. Since it sounds like what I’m aiming to say, I sometimes decide to use it anyway. I know what it means, and perhaps the reader will understand the meaning better than if I used an actual word.

The imperfections you’re tempted to fix might prove to be what make the work great. And sometimes not. We rarely know what makes a piece great. No one can know. The most plausible reasons are theories at best. Why is beyond our comprehension.”

Is that what art is? To be touched thinking what we feel is ours when, in the end, it was someone else, in longing, who finds us?

– Ocean Vuong, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous

Last week, on the drive home from hospital, I found myself irritated by the sound of music. Lyrics and melodies that previously lifted my soul were now boring, even burdensome, and after cycling through my favourite tracks, I opted to drive in silence, monotonously steering the wheel. In the lift up to my apartment was a dog, and as I stared, it seemed like the most uninteresting dog in the world.

When I got home, my housemate remarked that today was a nice day.

“What?” I asked.

“It’s a nice day today,” he repeated.

I looked out at the window and saw, to my surprise, that he was right. There was a gentle golden hue in the sky, remnants of the sun that had just set. Three silver clouds floated in the air, and in the distance two birds flew side by side, flapping their wings in sync, as if dancing. The sight sparked in me a lost sense of wonder, and I realised that for the day, and perhaps even the week, I had a deficiency in awe. Awe deficient disorder, I thought. ADD.

There is already an ADD out there: attention deficit disorder, now better known as ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). This is a neurological condition typically characterised by inattention and/or hyperactivity. People with ADHD often appear distracted, forgetful, fidgety, and report having racing, uncontrollable thoughts. It is quite common, too, with 6-7% of Australians affected. But beside a few psychology and spirituality blog posts, this new ADD – awe deficient disorder – doesn’t exist.

But while staring out the window, I wondered if the ADD I was experiencing was something that needed a term for itself. Upon reflection, my previous experiences with burnout had similar warning signs as today, and had all led down dark paths. And with 70.9% of Australian healthcare workers experiencing moderate to severe burnout*, I could not be alone in this experience.

In psychiatry, this ADD has another term: anhedonia, the loss in one’s ability to experience happiness. Anhedonia is one of two symptoms that one must have to be diagnosed with major depressive disorder, the other being depressed mood.

But where anhedonia (loss of happiness) differs from loss of awe, is that happiness fails to encompass the experiences in life that are stunning beyond words. For instance, happy songs are rarely great songs. Happy songs are things like elevator music. Truly great songs span the whole of the human experience and are rarely happy. There is a depth of awe, and even horror in them, that makes us shiver. If we lose our ability to wonder, we lose these grand moments as well, and I think that is something worth being concerned about.

I would love to see a future that diagnoses awe deficient disorder as quickly as pneumonia or a heart attack. Because though one might appear fine on the outside, there is a yearning for wonder from deep within that must be met.

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*This survey was done during COVID-19, but similar follow up studies report similar figures.

When I find the opportunity to chat with a stranger for an extended period of time, one question I like to ask is, “what book has influenced you the most?” Most people don’t read much and say something generic, or provide TV and music recommendations instead. But occasionally, I meet an avid reader, and when they deliberate and recommend a book, and I see that this book has truly touched them, I’ll buy it and give it a go. Bonus points if I’ve never heard of it before.

I’ve read three books this year from recommendations like these: two from patients, one from a colleague. One was a lovely short non-fiction piece called The Listening Book by W.A. Mathieu, which helped spark my experiment in open-earedness. Another was a collection of short stories by sci-fi author Ted Chiang called Stories of Your Life and Others, of which my favourite is the Tower of Babylon, a dystopian take on the Biblical story of Babel. The last was a fiction piece called The Meursault Investigation by Kamel Dauod. This is a sequel to The Stranger by Albert Camus, written from the perspective of the victim’s brother. I reread The Stranger followed by The Meursault Investigation and the dyad provides a wonderfully nuanced picture of the absurdist philosophy.

All these texts were fine by themselves, but were elevated by the fact of their reverence by people I barely knew. In reading these books, I felt connected to these fellows on a level unattainable by conversation. A favourite book is a very personal thing, I think, and when someone else receives this offering as a recommendation, your souls gently overlap. As your world expands with reading these books, the people tied to them become part of your world also.

One of the greatest gifts of reading is the ability to enter different worlds. Not only the author’s world, but fellow readers’ worlds as well.