Nature

Nature is a perfect playground.

Now that travel is considered unsafe, our family holiday is mostly built on the raw beauty of countryside. That might not necessarily be an once-in-a-lifetime adventure, but the terrains of the New Territories boasts surprisingly diverse array of natural scenery.

We picked a rugged and treacherous mountain trail hidden among the foliage near Pak Tam Chung this Sunday. The hike was challenging, with both figuratively and literally hands-on moments for our family. As we wound our way down the


Steps

In his book Last Child in the Woods , Richard Louv created the shorthand description "nature-deficit disorder" to highlight the human alienation from nature. The term reminds me of a research paper published in the medical journal Lancet . Seventy-eight 3-year-olds were monitored by small electronic accelerometers clipped to their waistbands for a week. The finding of only twenty minutes of moderate physical activity a day is clearly demonstrating our divorce from the wildness.

Put simply, we are spending more and more time in couch,


Forest

For this school year, nothing is more challenging than the socially distanced class.

With the new set of ground rules in classrooms, school is no longer what it used to be. The good news is that we have found an extraordinary secondary school for my daughter. When I received the notice of out-of-class learning from her school early this week, I didn't think twice before clicking the reply link.

That's a canyoning experience (yes, into the canyon!), with challenges provided


Ball

There are few tricks as strategic as "learned incompetence", by which a husband (mostly) is trying to escape sharing the work or chores.

I suppose that a small confession is in order before I go on. That’s me. I'm among one of those husbands.

School is back. If you want to know my contribution to preparing my daughter's new school term, I shall talk to you privately. If you're still curious about how much I help my daughter's


Bookshelf

A coronavirus-laden world has changes far greater than any event in living memory. Everything is shuffled. Many become uncertain. Quite a lot have turned topsy-turvy. Simple as it should be, breathing becomes uneasy.

What matters to surviving the pandemic, whether as grow-ups or as children, is best explained by Dostoevsky who believes that human is a creature who can get used to anything.

One trick lies in the fact that we can look at more than one side, and at least at the positive


Hogwarts

Few things are more rewarding than preparing and seeing our daughter enter the secondary school.

There was so much excitement when Jasmine received her own student Chromebook laptop. The first time she opened the personal laptop, she was riveted by the idea that it has a touch screen. She is feeling like Harry Potter after receiving his first broomstick.

Oh yes, we’ve been reading Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone . This had to be why, when my wife was tidying up the study for Jasmine, I felt


Gratitude

It is the first day of running after my foot injury.

Stifling as running with mask always is, the joy of being on the track again is hard to beat. I couldn't believe my ears when my Runkeeper app audio chronicled and tracked my pace - almost back to my previous one.

Instead of catching my breath as I sped, I sucked in my mask with each breath, huffing. It wasn't long before I came up with an excuse of not wearing mask: I could run much faster

Zoom

Over the last few months, most of us have learned to make Zoom video call.

The old-timers FaceTimed mostly. Now, we're zooming , everywhere, and many times. It's unbelievable how quickly everything has changed.

One unique reason of relying on Zoom during the pandemic is when we go to great lengths to give family members a chance to say goodbyes to their loved ones who are dying from the virus. For obvious reason, visitors are not allowed to go to the bedside of an infected

Sky

Right now, the coronavirus has reached the planet's most far-flung corners. It's everywhere.

The stars at the night sky, luckily, remain out of reach. "Why don't we have a night walk to sky gaze?" my wife suggested, and how could I resist?

I always marvel at my wife's creative ideas. And within minutes we packed our bags before twilight and headed to the highest peak in Hong Kong. Offering sweeping cityscape views at an elevation of 9

Touch

I had learned many lessons these past six months; some of them are so dense that could have hidden from our narrowed eyes, so deep that I didn't realize until I sat down and looked back.

For many of us, the novel coronavirus outbreak is the first time to experience the specter of a highly infectious virus jumping continents, across the community, and changing life for everyone around the globe.

Back in early months of this outbreak, the rituals of "seeing" patients are by and large through the