Eric Tian

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.

Last week I sat in a cafe reading my newsletters. One writer was sharing photos from his recent trip to Paris. It looked stunning – the cafes were practically oozing with literary spirit, fashion was everywhere on the streets, baguettes and croissants were abundant yet cheap. It seemed like a beautiful and inspiring place to be.

A noise behind me broke my reverie. A little girl, no older than five, was trying to pronounce a word from the menu, and people around her were amused at her inaccuracies.

“Suh-laa-mai,” she said.

“Suh-laa-meeee,” her parents laughed.

“Suh-laa-meee,” she said again, with some effort. Her success was met with cheers from customers around.

Then my gaze lifted upwards and I noticed that the cafe I was in was strangely beautiful. There was a soft aroma of coffee and toast in the air, the chairs were comfortable, the walls were decorated with oil paintings and in the corner was little wooden carving of a lion. Outside, the sun was warm and bright – a rarity in Melbourne winter – and there were people strolling, jogging, and enjoying the occasion. Rays of sunlight lit up the cafe through the windows, and the golden hue made the room feel divine.

It struck me then that I had never noticed the beauty of this place, despite having visited previously, and for an instant the glory of this moment stunned me, almost to the point of tears. Then, just as quickly, the thought I had previously missed other moments like this, due to distraction, tiredness, or ignorance, sunk me into a deep sadness.

We often look towards unfamiliar places to escape the mundanity of our own lives. That is, I think, one of the greatest motivators for travel. But look up for a moment, and one might realise that paradise was around us all along, just waiting to be discovered.

A letter from Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, to a teenage student with learning difficulties who had recently begun reading science fiction:

“Dear Roger:

I have been told of your exceptional progress in reading during the last year and that you are especially interested in reading and writing science fiction. It was also suggested you might want to know how I feel about books.

First and most important, I consider reading the greatest bargain in the world. A shelf of books is a shelf of many lives and ideas and imaginations which the reader can enjoy whenever he wishes and as often as he wishes. Instead of experiencing just one life, the book-lover can experience hundreds or even thousands of lives. He can live any kind of adventure in the world. Books are his time machine into the past and also into the future. Books are his “transporter” by which he can beam instantly to any part of the universe and explore what he finds there. Books are an instrument by which he can become any person for a while—a man, a woman, a child, a general, a farmer, a detective, a king, a doctor, anyone. Great books are especially valuable because a great book often contains within its covers the wisdom of a man or woman’s whole lifetime. But the true lover of books enjoys all kinds of books, even some nonsense now and then, because enjoying nonsense from others can teach us to also laugh at ourselves. A person who does not learn to laugh at his own problems and weaknesses and foolishness can never be a truly educated or a truly happy person. Also, probably the same thing could be said of a person who does not enjoy learning and growing all his life.

The reason I have written you such a long letter is that we not only share a love of science and science fiction, but we share something else. When I was a child, I was disabled by illness. Although my problem was different from yours, it did keep me from enjoying many things enjoyed by other young people. In a way, this turned out to be fortunate for me, since it turned me toward books. In those days, I used to think that it would have been better to have no physical problem and to have become a great football star or something like that. But now I realize that my love of books gave me much more happiness than anything else could have done.

Please do try your hardest to persevere at reading. You will never regret doing that.

Very sincerely yours,
Gene Roddenberry”

For those pockets of time we surrender to our devices.

1. Smile at a stranger
2. Notice your surroundings / externally meditate
3. Notice yourself / internally meditate
4. Do absolutely nothing at all
5. Touch something
6. Contemplate your day and, by extension, your life
7. Call or text someone
8. Walk
9. Stretch
10. Drink some water
11. Journal
12. Listen to music / a podcast / an audiobook
13. Clean something
14. Breathe
15. Dance
16. Nap (if appropriate)
17. Create a story from the day’s events (a nod to Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks)
18. Notice
19. Notice
20. Notice

I once saw a psychotic patient who refused to accept any interventions. He knew he needed help, but hated the stigma of antipsychotics and going to a psych ward.

“I don’t want to be a freak,” he would say. “Don’t put me in that place for freaks.”

The treating team had tried nearly everything they could – reassurance, lengthy explanations, even bribery, to no avail. The only option left, it seemed, was the mental health act, a legislation resulting in compulsory treatment. Voluntary treatment, however, was always preferred.

After a one hour interview, the psychiatrist took one last approach before giving up. He began telling stories of his own shortcomings, and revealed that he also had previous struggles with mental illness. The psychotic patient listened intently, and for a moment it felt that this shared experience silenced his hallucinations.

“I’m not perfect here, he’s not perfect here (gesturing to me) – we all have baggage we’re carrying,” the psychiatrist said. “Truth is, we’re all a bit mad and full of shit. But this treatment we’re offering will help you be just as bad as other people, not so bad that you risk harming yourself or others.”

He accepted the offer.

It seems in our most troubled and ashamed moments, there is respite in knowing that our brokenness is not unique to the world, but rather that we know ourselves too well. Seeing the limitations of others paves the way, perhaps ironically, for self-compression and respect.

From Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:

“But I don’t want to go among mad people,” Alice remarked.
“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”
How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.
“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”