What I experienced and learned from the biking accident

The accident was not a life-changing event. It brought physical pain but not trauma. It deformed my shoulder but did not ruin my life. It was, nonetheless, quite a remarkable experience. After all, it was the first time I have ever had an operation, spent some nights in a hospital and had medical leave for a couple of weeks. And the experience gave me some revelations and insights that I would otherwise be quite blind to in my routine daily life.

You can never be too careful when biking - Especially on the first few days, I tried to figure out how and why it had gone wrong. Haven’t I been coasting along the same cycling trail for years? Haven’t I been swerving to avoid manhole covers a million times? Haven’t I been biking on rainy days much worse than this one? Why did the bike just skid out of control this wretched time? And why was the injury so bad when the speed was not so high? Slowly, I began to see that I probably shouldn’t just put it down to sheer rotten luck. I should have been more wary of the danger of going biking when the ground is slippery, and the possibility of losing control when the thin tyre is in contact with the rim of the manhole cover on a wet day. The fact that an accident did not take place during the million times before is no guarantee that it will not happen. This is a costly but priceless lesson to learn.

There is a marked difference between public and private medical services - This is like stating the obvious, but the difference in my experiences was very pronounced. I must doubly emphasise that I do not have a single bad word to say about the service of all those who served me when and after the ambulance took me to the public hospital. They did their best and many of them were nice and kind, but the manpower of the public system is such that the medical staff do not have the time to communicate sufficiently with the patients. The unspoken message seems to be: “You can get whatever treatment we can provide here, but please do not ask questions because we do not have time for them.” 

The service in the private system, which I was privileged to enjoy thanks to insurance coverage, is an entirely different story. Comparatively speaking, everything in the private hospital was first class, from the comfort and privacy of my room with a good view of the Victoria Park and the Victoria Harbour to the meal to be ordered from an a-la-carte menu. Of course, this has everything to do with money. Just for an indication, the expense of all diagnosis and a day’s stay at a public hospital cost me less than taking one single X-ray photo at the private hospital. 

Many people are very kind, and they will demonstrate it when the opportunities arise - When the accident put me in the situation where I could do with some help here and then, it gave me the opportunity to experience, and be overwhelmed and moved by, the kindness of others. Examples of such kindness abound, and it did not necessarily come from friends and relatives, such as my mother-in-law preparing three boxes of cooked food so that I did not have to cook for myself while resting at home. There was also this heart-warming experience when I went to the hospital for physiotherapy on a rainy day. I was trying to open my umbrella when one of the two girls standing in front of me turned back and asked: “Can I help you open it?” I realised then that she had thoughtfully noticed how this man with one hand in a brace was fumbling with the umbrella. 

Without a doubt, the accident was unfortunate, but, like so many other things in life, it could, taken in a proper way, be an eye-opening experience and a blessing in disguise.

New lease of life

For the first time since I fractured the clavicle on my right shoulder during a biking accident two weeks ago, I do not feel being at the mercy of the combined influences of the trauma, the operation, the pain and the medicine. Recovery is still a long way away, but the feeling of being robust and in control is back. These last few days of rest have helped nurture a new perspective and I feel refreshed and renewed. Suffering, handled in the right way, does take you a bit closer to God. It is indeed a blessing in disguise.

So I would like to take this opportunity to resurrect my writing career - updating this blog which has been deserted for years.

And I am taking a small step first. Anyhow, Mobility of the shoulder is still fairly limited. It is unnecessary and unwise to apply too much pressure yet.

How to have more than enough time

Would I have time to update the blog every day? I most certainly should not worry. Time, like many other things such as wealth and happiness, is a funny thing in that the one who has an abundance mindset will actually have it aplenty whereas those with a mentality of lack ends up not having enough.

We are, after all, what we think.

Awareness for happiness

Another new year resolution I would like to put on record is to improve my self-awareness of the present moment. I realise that, at any given moment, one’s awareness of how his self is at work is the first and key step towards harnessing the self and anchoring it to the moment. With this sort of control, he will then have better clarity and calmness of the mind and achieve happiness. This certainly takes discipline and practice. So how about giving it a try so that I will be able to look back with satisfaction towards the end of the year?

Write away

It is this time of the year again, time for making resolutions.

Just to put it on the record, even though it is almost midnight now and I am exhausted after a long day’s trip back home from Thailand, I hereby declare that one of my humble resolutions is to make one blog entry a day like I used to.

Either I am setting myself up for resounding success or spectacular failure, only time will tell.

So yes, I have to keep writing.

Their day has come, and so will ours

Both the sad events of the Tiananmen Massacre in China and the Hillsborough Stadium stampede in English happened in 1989. Both involved the loss of many lives, the former far more than the latter.
But the major difference, as demonstrated by what transpired this week, is that while the truth of the Hillsborough tragedy has been uncovered by a 396-page report by an independent panel revealing that a police cover-up had taken place which had intended to shift the blame to the victims themselves, the truth of the Tienanmen is still hidden.

The victory of the Liverpool families is, of course, largely the outcome of their courage to persist in the fight for justice, but such courage has also been demonstrated by the families of the students who were killed, and the admirable effort of the group called the Tiananmen Mothers is an excellent example.

However, while in Britain the families have the rights and freedom to make the fight and the means and channels in the system for them to do so, in China any such attempts are forcefully suppressed.
And the outcome is that, the victims of the Hillsborough have now been, as Sunderland manager Martin O'Neill said, "totally and utterly vindicated". The Tienanmen victims and their families, on the other hand, may have to wait until the fall of the Communist Party for their names to be cleared. But I am totally convinced that, the day will come when, like the Liverpool families, the Tiananmen mothers will be vindicated.

One country, one system

A BBC article today, called China suicide blast man's 'act of desperation', reported how a wheelchair user blew himself up in a government office in Shandong using home-made explosives, injuring six government workers. According to his brother, the 49-year-old man had been paralysed following an accident at a building site almost 20 years ago. He couldn't make ends meet and had petitioned officials for years, seeking more compensation than he had already received.


The following are some observations made in the article:
The case is a graphic illustration of the social tensions that have been felt across China.
There has been a growing number of attacks on local officials in recent years.
There are thousands of protests every month.
Many people are angry about official corruption and abuses of power.

Ironically and worryingly, these phenomena in China have become perfectly applicable to the situation of Hong Kong today, although they are amplified in different forms here. Social tensions, protests and attacks on local officials (strictly confined to verbal attacks in the case of Hong Kong) have become the order of the day, and these are caused by many people's deep-seated anger about official corruption and abuses of power.

The evidence for the contamination of Hong Kong's way of living following the tighter and tigher grip and more and more naked intervention of China couldn't be more obvious.