Drugged

Had a bout of mild shingles a week ago. The doctor prescribed a week's dosage of a strong anti virus medicine which fogged my mind. The effect of this medicine on me is rather frightening because it is not just about being drowsy. For the whole week my mind was in a state of mild confusion and lack of clarity. For example, a few times I had difficulty recalling whether I had taken my medicine at the required time. I had to resort to counting the number of tablets left in each slab to work out the number of dosages I had already taken for the day.

Recently I read an article which described how a change in the brain chemistry can affect one's behaviour. In 2001 some sufferers of Parkinson disease in the US who were given the drug called pramipexole were found to have acquired an excessive gambling addiction. These were people who had never previously gambled in their life. Basically when a person suffers from Parkinson disease he has lost some brain cells which produce a neuro transmitter called dopamine. The function of the drug pramipexole is to impersonate dopamine. However dopamine in itself also performs another function which is to help a person weigh the costs and benefits of his actions,something like a risk audit. Any imbalance of this chemistry will lead to an impairment of this "risk check" function. Other patients who were given this drug were also found to become addicted to sex, drugs and over-eating. When the dosage was reduced their behaviour returned to normal.

I have at last finished the last dose of the prescribed medicine, and the fog also appears to have lifted. The pain in the affected area however still lingers. I would have gone running to the doctor again given my hypochondriac nature; but the fear of being robbed of the clarity in thinking stopped me. More than ever I see the importance for us to maintain good health and keep ouselves drug free. I dread the day when I have to choose between sustaining life and losing my own mind.

Weeding out Bad Faith

Embarking on the 57th year of life I feel the need to be 'wise', meaning to keep on discovering my inner wishes and living them out. Fortunately I have already taken the giant step to abandon a job that had required me to be consistently inauthentic putting on an act to meander around the whims and eccentricities of superiors and a false front towards business associates. Though I still occasionally fantasize about the beautiful holiday home I may be able to enjoy had I continued to draw a good salary, I more often than not feel grateful that I have the means to retire early from corporate life.

By far the biggest satisfaction is the liberated self, ie. being who you want to be. Indeed I want to carry this to a higher level, to avoid as much "bad faith" or self deception as possible.

Existentialists believe that human beings have a tendency to deceive themselves about why they do what they do. "Bad faith" is denying ourselves the freedom to choose and blaming it on external circumstances for not being able to do so. For example a person fears having to choose between being an artist or taking over the helm of the family business. When he convinces himself he has no choice (due to social and family pressure) he is acting in bad faith. These self deceptions can be so deeply ingrained in us that it becomes part of our belief system.

To be truly authentic one must uncover the true intentions behind one's actions and weed out self deceptions. To give a preposterous example, say I discover that I love Chinese calligraphy to a point that I can spend everyday of the week day and night at it and giving up my other commitments. However I deny myself the choice of doing that for fear of being frowned upon by my husband that I am not doing something useful. Hence I choose not to do what I love by convincing myself that I am better say at counselling or investing money which I may not really be.

What I am trying to drive at is that at this juncture of my life, I should continue to discover the things that I really want to do, something true to my nature and weed out self deceptions which create the false "whys" for what I am doing.

Hope

Listened to an interesting forum on the subject of 'hope' over podcast. 'Hope', it appears is not a topic in Buddha's teachings (according to one dharma teacher). It was reasoned that perhaps 'hope' is associated with expectations and may set a person for disappointment. One guy called expectations "premeditated resentment". Another participant apologetically but very bluntly described 'hope' or faith as leaving your brains at the church door.

Two other health care workers however spoke of the importance of 'hope' which helps patients to recover faster and fight terminal diseases. They felt that 'hope' helps to build resilience. Similarly, it was 'hope' and optimism that helped people survived concentration camps as another participant suggested. (I also personally feel that "hope" is a good strategy for counselling). On the other hand, one participant who suffered from cancer related her mental anguish when her open warfare strategy yielded no result. She then adopted an acceptance mode which brought her more peace and which she believed contributed to her remission.

The Dharma teacher felt that for Buddhism, it is more of trust where trust is opening ourselves to what's happening around us instead of creating a story to hide our fears. A participant opined succintly that whilst 'hope' is wishing an external factor will change our life, trust is knowing what we believe to be true and trusting ourselves to change our life with our internal resources.

I relate this interesting discussion to my own experience in counselling. In counselling we try to bring 'hope' by helping the client see the alternative steps that may be taken to alleviate a dire situation or a reframing of the attitude towards an irreparable one.

Something Lost

It was raining at the Tanjong Pagar KTM Railway Station on its last day of operation. I was lucky that morning for shortly after I arrived, a train pulled into the station. As I had been taking pictures at the platform, I was able to take a good shot of the approaching train from the barricade. Only when I turned to look behind did I realize that a crowd had piled upon me with camera held arms stretching high in the air.

The rain had given a grey tinge to the train platforms which enhanced the nostalgia in our hearts. I took a picture of the metal collapsible gate with the arrival sign. I could feel the angst and anxiety of the 15 year old me walking through those gates to join a secondary school in Singapore after years of Malaysian education. From then on until I graduated from University I would pass those gates yearly on my annual pilgrimage home. They were easily 10 hours of watching the plantations, jungle, kampong houses went by to the rhythm of the chugging wheels against the track and the occasional hoot of the horn. Without the help of ipods, handphones or even walkman, reading was the only other pass time. I remembered on one trip I had to hide my tears the whole journey whilst reading “Elephant Man” amidst the stares of other passengers. The stops at small towns provided brief breaks. Watching the passengers alight slowly I tried to imagine their background, the homes they lived in, the families they came from and wondered whether they led happier lives than me (long train journeys often induced moods of excessive reflections).

That same spot was still there that morning just like 40 years ago, at the Departure Platform with its long low metal table for the custom officers to check departing passengers’ bags for taxable items. My mother made regular trips from KL. I could almost see my mother unzipping her luggage bag filled with new fabric, zips and sewing accessories for my father’s tailor shop. The edges of a ten dollar note though lodged in between the folded fabric was visible. It would soon disappear after a few ruffles by the custom officers. Those were tense moments for me as I followed her through those custom checks with her poker face. I think of it now it was more to save the harrassment of having the luggage turned upside down, the custom people needed extras to buy their "kopi" (coffee).

I could have gone on and on reliving those memories but one can not always live in past. Soon I left the station and headed to People’s Park to eat “Xiao Long Bao” from a stall run by Chinese Nationals. The rain had stopped. I had intended to do some shopping but the crowd deterred me. I suppose my mind was still filled with scenes of small town Malaysia. They together with busy People’s Park are part of me but that night after the last train pulled out of Tanjong Pagar Railway Station, I felt as if something in me was lost forever.

Pack them in?

I have a classmate at taiji class who travels on an average of more than 4 times a year for leisure and has been to exotic places like Sudan, Nepal, South Africa etc. When she is not travelling she runs a factory and works 12 hours daily for 6 days a week and often goes back to office on Sundays after Taiji. She envies my semi retirement lifestyle but laments that for her retirement is not an option as her business sustains many people and looks forward to the day when her son can finally take over.

This morning she complained about weakness in one leg during taiji and let out a long sigh. I thought it must be quite bad and asked her how she felt. Instead she replied "So many more places to go. Don't know whether I have the chance".

2 days ago I listened to one of many podcasted lectures by Shelly Kagan (Yale professor) on the philosophy of death entitled "How to live given the certainty of death". He talked about how some people need to pack as much as possible in their lifetime given that our lifespan is limited. According to him, if given a choice most people will choose a relatively shorter life packed with good stuff to one long draggy century of "barely worth living" stuff. It also creates anxiety in some in that there is not much room for "do-overs", ie. you don't have the luxury of immortality to try a lot of things to decide what is the thing most worthwhile ie. make your life most valuable. So given the constraints, some may choose to pack life with easily attained pleasures "eat, drink and be merry" whilst others go for the "big potatoes" (lifetime achievements) whilst some settle for a mix of both the above in varying degrees.

The above however is based on a fundamental assumption that life is good and it is a matter of strategy how and what good stuff you want to pack in. He described it as a mainly Western outlook. What if, however, the assumption is life is no good and death is no loss? He described this as an outlook present in Eastern thoughts. He mentioned about the Buddhist concept that life is suffering and to free oneself from such sufferings one has to detach oneself from these good stuff. (The constant desire of good stuff and their impermanence when achieved also cause suffering as I see it). In addition death is terrifying insofar as one worries that it is the end of oneself. However, if there is no attachment to self, there is nothing to loose.

The professor however described himself as a child of the West who does not accept such a negative outlook. Instead he quoted a phrase from a poem which goes like "Once I lived like the gods, and more is not needed".

"Eat drink and be merry"
"Once I lived like the gods, and more is not needed"
"If there is no attachment to self, there is nothing to loose"
All the above are rich fodder for thoughts.

Obedient Wife = Happy Family?

My Malay counselee asked me a couple of days ago whether I know much about the OWC (Obedient Wife Club)which she has strong views against. I had come across that name but had not bothered to know more. She enlightened me about the OWC in KL advising its members to be a "first class prostitute" to their husbands. The club believes that satisfying their husband's sexual desires will prevent loads of social problems and curb the proliferation of prostitution. My counselee does not abide by the idea and thinks the club is advocating wives to be husbands' sexual slaves.

I do not want to disagree with her but instead I shared with her an encounter I had whilst interning at the Family Service Centre some time ago. A husband had called in to ask for counselling because his marriage was on the rocks. He was a young man of early thirties and was able to divulge frankly to me the circumstances leading to the emotional strife between him and his wife. The couple had a new born baby of nine months. His wife had denied him sexual favours right from the day she was aware of the pregnancy until the baby was already nine months. In fustration the young man secretly watched pornography and called sex hotlines in another room while engaging in self satisfaction. When the wife discovered his "secrets" she was abhorred and a cold war ensued between them excalating to the wife toying with the idea of divorce.

Fortunately the marriage had not reached a point of no return and I was able to persuade the wife to have separate counselling sessions with me prior to the joint sessions. To my greatest surprise the young woman had absolutely no knowledge of the physical needs of men. She covered her mouth in horror when I enightened her about the "comfort women" during the Japanese World War II and why the Japanese had to resort to such an evil crime. Armed with researches on the gender differences in sexual needs I highlighted to the young lady that the most common reason women gave for initiating sexual intercourse was to receive love, intimacy and care whilst the most common reason for men was just TO RELEASE SEXUAL TENSION. "Yes" I had told the young woman then and now repeated it to my counselee, "despise them (the men) for all you want about their primitive animal instincts but that is how they are constituted, it is like denying a tiger food!"

I can still remember that case was quite interesting and enlightening for me too. During the joint sessions when I encouraged both husband and wife to express their feelings, the wife described feelings which surprised the husband and myself too. Apparently after she caught her husband in the self satisfaction act (sorry I am too conservative to use the M word here) she could not thereafter remove imaginations of her husband engaging sex with different women whom he chatted with over the sex hotlines. Hearing it directly from his wife, the young man realised for the first time how his activities impacted his wife; and had to repeatedly assure her that not a tinge of emotion was involved with those other women.

I told my counselee that as absurd as the OWC sounds there may be a slight glimpse of good advice in what they are advocating. In fact if I don't remember wrongly, there is a Chinese saying or maybe Cantonese saying (Cantonese always have excuses for vices)that goes like, a perfect wife is one who has the social graces of attending officious functions and at the same time possesses the looseness of behaviour in the private bed chambers (yin fu). Perhaps the OWC just need to change their name and refrain from using the word 'prostitute'. Sure enough in today's papers, the OWC may have a branch in Singapore but probably with a different name, the "Happy Family Club"!

AMD?

The recent news about an old lady being mistreated in a nursing home highlights the problem of shortage in manpower to look after the sickly aged. One can only shudder at the thought of how much worse the situation will be like when the baby boomers become dependent on caregivers en masse. Our children will have to suffer the dilemma of putting us in nursing homes as it is literally impossible for them to quit their job to look after us, given the shortage of manpower and the fewer siblings in a family. It is already an economic strain on their generation to support an overwhelming greying population. I guess the baby boomers have a responsibility to keep healthy but even then it is inevitable that the day will still come when the body succumbs. The reported incident also gave a glimpse into the anguish and differing opinion faced by the children of that old lady in deciding the best care for her. One must also remember that a senile old folk can be a real challenge to look after and can affect the care giver emotionally too.

A few years ago when I visited a mountainous region in Malaysia, I was taken in by the enveloping mountain ranges. They seemed to look upon the world for thousands of years with unquavering tranquility. I remembered having a strange thought then, wondering whether it would be better for a terminally ill person to spend his last days in an abode admist those mountains instead of being wired up in a hospital. The strange thought was perhaps prompted by memories of a Japanese legend. The story has it that in a certain ancient town in Japan it was mandatory for old folks upon reaching 60 years of age to be carried up to the mountain where they would be abandoned. The story of course has a happy ending when the policy was aborted after the mayor recognised the wisdom of an old man who was hidden at home by his son. The story appealed to me in a strange way, not about the abandonment of course but more about dying naturally and with nature. Of course it is like a romantic fantasy of a city folk who runs to the doctor at the slightest health symptom. Having said that I am ever ready to opt out of life support or medical treatment when the situation is inevitable death or permanent coma etc. In this respect I am reminded that I have yet to make a living will or AMD (Advance Medical Directive).

(btw I found out that you have to appoint a person to speak on your behalf in case you can no longer communicate. Apparently the person can not be someone who is a beneficiary of your will. Hmm... rather problematic isn't it!)