Halcyon Days / Innocence and Experience
31/10/2006 - -
31/10/2006
The last few weeks of my life have been among the busiest and happiest with new excitement every day! No time to blog about every event, but I'll just jot down events of the last couple of roller-coaster weeks in brief! Hope to eventually blog about those I underlined :) but I'm becoming more hardworking this posting so I may not blog for a very long time!
13th Oct Friday - 1-week break begins. Vivo City to shop for Neela and Mo's present and ice-cream dinner!
14th Oct Saturday - EEC in the afternoon. A Night To Remember (Mo and Neela's birthday celebration)!
15th Oct Sunday - HC's birthday dinner at East Coast Lagoon hawker centre
16th Oct Monday - TTSH Surg pple dinner outing at The Rice Table (hall for the night). Issue #2 of The Allegiance Newsletter sent out.
17th Oct Tuesday - Redesigned this blog. FT (reaching out) and home after. Ant disaster.
18th Oct Wednesday - Tiramisu making and movie marathon at my house - "Legally Blonde", "Catch Me If You Can" and "Walk The Line"!
19th Oct Thursday - Back to hall for ICN
20th Oct Friday - COFM patient visit and night cycling!!
21st Oct Saturday - Short meeting with Aeshan about yearbook. Youth group.
22nd Oct Sunday - Church. KE VCF prayer meeting - sharing on EEC.
23rd Oct Monday - 1st day of Paeds posting - lectures at NUH
24th Oct Tuesday - Hari Raya holiday: lunch with U-Liang, Dawn and Aurelia at Holland V and 10 hours subsequently in the JCRC room with Viknesk (who gave me a crash course on Photoshop and creating layout) working on arranging layout for "Altitude", the new KE Newsletter
25th Oct Wednesday - 1st day in wards. Tutorial with Dr Ong HT. Printed out 10 full-colour copies of "Altitude"! Success! Borrowed costumes for Playhouse from KE costume room.
26th Oct Thursday - Busy day. Tutorial with Dr M Aw. Neuro video on epilepsy. Clinics (I followed cardio). Night call - Hurler's Syndrome and ICU. Followed by a smidgen of insane props-making initiated by Janice (considering the hour).
27th Oct Friday - Professorial tutorial. Props-making and Playhouse rehearsal (hilarious!). KEOKE at 9 pm with yummy luscious donuts (oh the chocolate cream filling!!) and movie marathon. Stayed for first movie - "Thank You For Smoking"
28th Oct Saturday - Well Baby clinics. Home to pack. Was returned Davidson's. Just Worship - youth group worship event at E-Centre - very invigorating! Back in hall for the night.
29th Oct Sunday - Church. E Block's inaugural "Sundae Sunday". Went for my first 10 km run in 1 month (stupid haze). Prayer meeting - sharing on salt and light.
30th Oct Monday - Interactive: CNS 1. Tutorial with Dr Ong HT - did my first DA on a 1-mth old baby. Pubs Comm meeting to round-up first issue and discuss blog in lieu of second issue. Wrote and submitted ELnD article.
31st Oct Tuesday - Lectures in KKH. Went to Bras Basah Complex after that in search of red ball (Art Friend) and picture book (Popular - so much for trying the little shops!). Then with Dawn for Faith's birthday dinner at Marina South steamboat restaurant. Completely stuffed!
Halcyon days!... And meanwhile am slogging as hard as time permits at Paeds and still on my 'new leaf'. Have been staying awake for all lectures so far (not counting today's last one but there were extenuating circumstances)! A miracle, folks, a miracle!
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28/10/2006
Great stuff!
One of my favourite worship songs -
Here I am, humbled by Your majesty,
Covered by Your grace so free.
Here I am, knowing that I'm a sinful man,
Covered by the Blood of the Lamb
Now I've found
The greatest love of all is mine,
Since You laid down Your life,
The greatest sacrifice
Majesty, Majesty
Your grace has found me just as I am,
Empty handed, but alive in Your hands
Majesty, Majesty
Forever I am changed by Your love,
In the presence of Your majesty
Here I am, humbled by the love that You give,
Forgiven so that I can forgive
Here I stand, knowing that I`m Your desire
Sanctified by glory and fire
Now I've found
The greatest love of all is mine,
Since You laid down Your life,
The greatest sacrifice
Majesty, Majesty
Your grace has found me just as I am,
Empty handed, but alive in Your hands
Majesty, Majesty
Forever I am changed by Your love,
In the presence of Your majesty
================================
26/10/2006
Innocence and Experience
Be happy, young man, when you are young,
and let your heart give you joy in the days of your youth.
- Ecclesiastes 11:9a
Just met Dawn in the Med Soc Room after night call (a very interesting one during which we saw a boy with a very rare condition as well as some very sad cases of RTA) - she mentioned, "I've just read a very sad line in Ecclesiastes".
Me: Oh, which line? The one that says 'don't hang around happy people but go to funerals instead?'
Dawn (laughing): No lah!
Me: The one about a time for everything?
Dawn: That one's not sad...
Me: Yeah actually that's a very nice section.
Dawn: It's "For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief." (Ecc 1:18)
Yeah - one of the truths of life. As I told Dawn, it's a line I've identified with for a very long time as well. In the past I used to identify with it in the context of learned wisdom, the stuff I knew from books and reading and movies, though in the last year or so I've come to identify with it in the context of experential wisdom as well - the kind of wisdom that comes with life experience.
Ecclesiastes is one of my top five favourite books of the Bible (along with Isaiah and John and Psalms and Job) - one of the most personal to me, and most beautiful I think. Even before I became a Christian, it put into words everything which I felt about life - but at that time reading it didn't help me to answer my questions, it only formulated them. Later, after I had come to know God personally, I could read it in the context of the bigger picture of a loving, omnipotent God and feel reassurance where at first I only felt emptiness - and through it I also get a feeling of acceptance and the feeling that I'm understood by the Almighty. Like Psalms and Job, it's one of the books which - at times when I felt/feel very condemned or out of place even among other Christians because of the way my mind works - show that God's kingdom does not exclude the intellectuals, the damaged poets, the depressives, the rebels, those who think deeply about life and sorrow at the things that the merry crowd does not like to think about. In the past when I have waged battles with my old psychological foes (black emotions and dark thoughts), it has been a favourite battlefield, terrain that aids me - one of the books which provide the most reassurance that doubting, struggling, being sad at things one doesn't understand of God's purpose, asking anguished questions of God, wresting with personal demons and generally being such a flawed, evil and limited creature is all legitimate and even a privilege, in a way, compared to a state of content but stagnant ignorance.
That said, I completely agree with Dawn's musing that 'ignorance is a privilege to be enjoyed by children'. I don't remember having enough of it in childhood actually. Doing my Paediatrics posting at NUH now, looking at the way the children interact with us medical students and talk and play and answer questions, I'm reminded a lot of my own childhood - I remember how exact a child I used to be, how I was so quiet for much of my life mainly because I was too exact for the thought processes of most adults; I couldn't understand what answer the adults wanted because they never asked questions that were specific enough, they never phrased them in the way that left the fact that they were asking for unambiguous enough, and I was always confused as to what they wanted of me. And they never waited while I thought through their question and searched for a suitable reply that would straddle both possibilities and could be converted into either answer that they wanted - they would just zoom off into another tangent of thought and I would have to race to keep up with them. Many of the questions they asked me were phrased in a way that was illogical anyway, making it difficult for me to know how to answer. And I remember how I hated the way they 'talked down' to me in gooey voices. Absolutely hated it man...
My life since then has been a process of adapting to a world that is never exact, never ordered, never logical - where people don't play by the 'rules', don't talk by the 'rules' - and when I say 'rules' here I'm not talking about moral or institutionalised standards, but 'rules' that I tried to run my world on when I was a young kid - logical sequences, grammar, fact-remembering, stuff like that - but hey, no one really lives like that - and it's only when I learned not to care so much about all this that I actually started interacting better with people my age I guess :) Playing by these 'rules' can be fun, but it's lonely and rather impracticable - as Dawn mentioned before, I was probably pretty playful, only I played differently from others (the kind of playfulness that is in Lord Peter Wimsey: crosswords, fact-finding, watching the process of logic and the satisfaction of things fall into place: in fact that may be why I've enjoyed detective stories so hugely as a part of my life) - playing normally, as other people do, is what I've been learning to do only since coming to university I think! :) Learning to be careless, learning to make slips in grammar, to allow errors in memory storage and data retrieval - and learning not to be upset at these errors - this is probably one of the most valuable things I have learnt haha. For me childhood and adolescence will always be associated with exactitude and this rigid insistence on logic and being upset when things didn't 'make sense'. 'Growing up', to me, means letting things go - no longer keeping count, accepting that many things don't 'add up' or 'make sense' and that people will always act illogically, no longer having to be an encyclopaedia, letting flaws and errors in an old, outdated childhood system go without intrusion on one's personal sense of self-worth :D which, in functional terms, means being a much more relaxed person, less demanding of oneself and of the world around oneself, and consequently a lot less grumpy and a lot more fun to be with (whew).
As I grow up, I find I no longer care about things that used to mean a great deal to me. I just don't care anymore. A good thing or a bad? Both, I guess. A necessary change. In the past I saw what was to come and regretted it, had paroxysms of despair about it; but now that I have changed - have been so dramatically changed in the last year by forces beyond my control without having the time to think about what was happening - I am glad the transition has finally happened.
When I was small
I used to wonder
Why grown-ups thought
The way they did...
I could go through many things I went through last year and they would leave me unmoved - at least, not moved to depths of emotion that would cause me to open myself up to potential hurt (or is it simply the other way round and it's the fear of being hurt that causes me not to allow myself to feel moved? Same thing perhaps). But this way I'm protected from a lot of what I now think is unnecessary sorrow. And when I have less hurt to deal with, I can be a better blessing to the people around me as well. Poetic ideals of feeling and clinging on to 'rules' and the sadness we feel when they are broken are all very well, but they belong to full-time poets like Yeats who could use their spare time directing their energy inwards to battle the massive hurt that such intensity of feeling deals every day, but - out of the very idealism that caused the poets to be poets, and precisely because of all the poetry I read - I have chosen certain responsibilities in life and, paradoxically, in order to fulfil the spirit and the idealism of poetry I can no longer cling on to the feelings that it celebrates - at least, not in their full intensity. "The phoenix burns as cold as frost" -- yet, if all men were poets, "who [would] be the surgeon to this stone?" The transition has been made.
Wisdom, in the sense of knowledge (or the 'book' variety of 'experience'), made me rigid as a child - but the wisdom that comes from living life ('experience') has made me less rigid. I am sure for some other people the order is the other way round, and the effects of both on each person are also different. As for me, I think God has used my experiences of the last year to once and for all break the back of my rigidity and help me grow up a lot more, and finally reconcile my previously conflicting ideals about art and life (my passion and my profession), all in one fell swoop. And if ignorance is a privilege for (most) children, I guess wisdom (used in both senses - 'knowledge' as well as 'experience') is a privilege as well - and one which everyone is privileged to grow into.
And all these long-winded musings aside, I love Paediatrics. As I have just told Lydia, I enjoyed my Surgery posting a lot more than I enjoyed my Medicine posting, but I'm actually enjoying my Paeds posting even MORE! (well, it's only been two days lah so maybe I shouldn't say so soon! maybe when I get scolded by a tutor or two I won't feel so enthusiastic heh) When I was still a kid myself I used to feel very awkward relating to little kids, (for a long time I didn't even know how to relate to kids my age) but now that I'm past all that - now that the transition I have spoken of between childhood and 'wisdom' has occured (no doubt only one of many that will have to be made, but a significant one nonetheless)... When I go into the wards and see all the little kids it stirs up all these protective instincts I didn't even know I had and I feel this need, this responsibility, to protect them and learn to heal them and care for them and I know I must no longer be so blur anymore and I must be a lot more hardworking (I have not been entirely responsible in my role as a medical student come these three years and it would not be a falsehood to say I have been underperforming).
I have never forgotten what it was like to be a child - and the way children see the world is still the way I wish everyone could see it. When I was in secondary school, my friends and I were all of the mind that we'd never have children because we were all of that age of angst when you feel that life is such a torture to be lived that you'd never want to inflict life on another being. But I've come to a point when I feel that children are necessary because the world will always need children to keep it sane. (No, I don't mean 'necessary', which makes it sound utilitarian. Children are never something to have out of 'need' - but out of love, out of relationship and the desire to build more relationship - oh well you know what I mean - I mean important). And as I told Lydia, unlike with the older patients whom we've seen in our last two postings, the adults and the elderly, there's this kinship I feel with all of them because - I know them, I come from the same country that they do. I've never been an old person, so in a sense old people are all inhabitants of a foreign land, a country that I have yet to have travelled to - but children are from a place where I have been before, which in a way (because I first came from there) I still think of as the closest to 'home' that I have ever been, and I will never be quite as close to it again until I die.
Now I see that for me, even though it was very painful to be a child, it was because childhood was such a great privilege. ('With great power comes great responsibility' / 'With much wisdom comes much sorrow' -- with great privilege comes great pain.) And not only was it a privilege to have been a child, it is a privilege to be a person who once was a child. And it is a privilege to be in a position where one can be of help to more children - and even if not, at least to more people who once were children - if one works hard. So from now on I'm going to try to really work at being a student for the first time since coming into medical school and use the brains I have been given for other people and not just for my own gratification. This is my 'new leaf'! And I will pray that God gives me the stamina to see this through and finally to be in a posting where I actually work as hard as everyone else and know what's going on heh.
Haha and since a quote from Ecclesiastes started all this, here's a verse that I shall use to push myself...
"Sow your seed in the morning,
and at evening let not your hands be idle,
for you do not know which will succeed,
whether this or that,
or whether both will do equally well."
- Ecclesiastes 11:6
[Ecclesiastes also happens to be the only book of the Bible which I think Biggles ever quoted directly in a Biggles book haha! :) ('Biggles Sweeps The Desert', 1943)]
