Eric Tian

Today I asked a patient, only minutes before they went into the operating theatre, how they were feeling. I was met with a smile.

“Whatever happens, good or bad, it will be awesome.”

Star Trek actor William Shatner on his voyage into space:

“I discovered that the beauty isn’t out there, it’s down here, with all of us. Leaving that behind made my connection to our tiny planet even more profound.”

The longer my days are filled with work, study and responsibilities, the more I realise the importance of art.

Our lives can be difficult, draining and soul-crushingly mundane, and our world might seem a little less exciting. But this is where art, whose responsibility is to create feeling, provides its greatest role.

Art, in the form of books, music, movies and paintings and more, is a reminder of the beauty that exists around us, a beauty that is breathtaking, that drags us out of our little bubble, into new universes of possibility. The further we get bogged down in our little tasks, the more crucial it is an antidote to apathy.

From Where The Crawdads Sing by Deila Owens:

After only minutes, he said, “See, you can already write a word.”

“What d’ya mean?”

“C-a-b. You can write the word cab.“

“What’s cab?” she asked. He knew not to laugh.

“Don’t worry if you don’t know it. Let’s keep going. Soon you’ll write a word you know.”

Later he said, “You’ll have to work lots more on the alphabet. It’ll take a little while to get it, but you can already read a bit. I’ll show you.” He didn’t have a grammar reader, so her first book was his dad’s copy of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. He pointed to the opening sentence and asked her to read it back to him. The first word was There and she had to go back to the alphabet and practice the sound of each letter, but he was patient, explaining the special sound of th, and when she finally said it, she threw her arms up and laughed. Beaming, he watched her.

Slowly, she unraveled each word of the sentence: “There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot.”

“Oh,” she said. “Oh.”

“You can read, Kya. There will never be a time again when you can’t read.”

“It ain’t just that.” She spoke almost in a whisper. “I wadn’t aware that words could hold so much. I didn’t know a sentence could be so full.”

He smiled. “That’s a very good sentence. Not all words hold that much.”

From The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows:

Watashiato

n. curiosity about the impact you’ve had on the lives of the people you know, wondering which of your harmless actions or long-forgotten words might have altered the plot of their stories in ways you’ll never get to see.

One of the most beautiful and terrifying things about medicine is how much you can affect a person’s life. When medicine is done right, it can be a wonderfully healing and inspiring experience. Illnesses cured, health restored, hope recovered. When medicine is done wrong – and there are so so many ways where it can go wrong – the result can be catastrophic.

It is a cause of much anxiety and hope.

The brilliance of stars would be invisible without the vast darkness of space behind them.

Do not wash away the difficult moments in life. They provide the contrast needed to appreciate the beautiful ones.

The teacher’s role is to gradually make themselves unnecessary.

A math teacher doesn’t do the student’s homework for them and call it a day because that’s useless. The student has not learnt anything. The teacher teaches the student how to do math, how to think like someone who’s good at math. The student at that moment perhaps might only want their homework to be done, but the teacher knows that the best way to support their long term growth is to impart the tools of learning and reasoning, not transcribing and memorising.

The teacher should be able to lay down a path to the student and say, If you follow down this road you will surpass me someday, and do so in a way where the student truly believes it is possible and is excited by it.

My most satisfying moments as a tutor are when I reach the end of a teaching block and look at the student I have been working with and realise that they have become powerful, independent learners, and that I finally have nothing left to teach them. Then I know my job is complete.

Tonight I was playing volleyball in the weekly social league and I pulled off a nice spike. It was one of those moments where time slows down a little and when you see the ball leave the setter’s hands you sigh a little at how perfect it is, and then you take your first step and it is a good, solid step, then you take your second step and it is also good, and then you bend your legs and explode up with both feet and you get up high, higher than usual, and suddenly your eyes are above the net and you see the whole court, with the opposing players, and right when the ball comes within firing range you engage your arms, shoulders and core and then wham, the ball flies down over the blockers and hits the floor with a resounding bang.

After I landed this spike time sped up again and I yelled Let’s gooooo, and my teammates yelled this too and we all came together to celebrate. But just as we went back to our positions one of my more experienced teammates came up to me, put his hands on my shoulders and whispered, Do it again.

I shuddered a little at this, partly because of his intensity but also because I knew he was right and I wasn’t sure if I could do it again, for a part of me knew it was a fluke and I didn’t want to have to do it again and risk being found out as a fraud. But then I remembered that a volleyball game has 25 points and there were many points to go, that in order to win we had to continuously perform at a high level, not just for one or two points, that while celebration for a nice point is well deserved, it must come with recognition that there are more hard points coming.

Anyone can hit a good spike once in a while. The difference between the average and the great comes from who can continuously do it, point after point, game after game.

There are a lot of things I’m quite happy to suck at. I’m awful at swimming, I can’t sing, dance nor play the guitar, my ability to code is mediocre at best and despite my best efforts, I suck at drawing. Could I improve with dedicated practice? Almost certainly. But sucking at these things don’t keep me up at night because they don’t matter a whole lot to me. All skills are on a bell curve and for some, I’m happy to settle for average.

But in other fields, like writing, speaking or medicine, the game changes. These skills have great significance to me and developing excellence is not merely a hobby but a necessity. Writing and speaking are the most powerful tools for communication we have and through these I believe we can change the world. Developing these skills is thus a prerequisite for meaningful action. Medical excellence is a moral requirement for improving the field of medicine, and waging war against disease is a battle I am happy to fight.

There exist areas in our lives that demand excellence, where doing a good job is not just a fleeting interest but a moral requirement. Some areas we willingly choose to bear the burden of, some we are simply given by circumstance. Whatever they are, it is our duty – perhaps even our fate – to do them well.

From Charlotte’s Web:

“Why did you do all this for me? ” he asked. “I don’t deserve it. I’ve never done anything for you.”

“You have been my friend,” replied Charlotte. “That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what’s a life, anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die. A spider’s life can’t help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that.”