It starts with belief

Coming out of injury and trying to go back at doing the things you like doing is a stressful process mentally and physically.

Right now, I know I feel stronger and I know I am definitely stronger than before I got injured, having been working out twice a week in the gym for the past 5 to 6 months.

But despite all the iron pumping and effort, there is this nagging fear in the back of my head that continues to linger. That uncomfortable thought lingering at the back of my head is the fear of injuring myself again. Having had multiple injuries over multiple times, the fear does get to you and I know recovery rate for any person will slow down as you age. I may not be that old but I can definitely know the difference.

In order to break that barrier and try to make up for lost time, I engaged a trainer who helps with my workout for twice a month. He designs the workout for me and makes sure I get my technique right when I workout whilst the rest of the month I just continue the regime that he has given me.

At this point in time, I got to admit, progress is less than satisfactory but at the same time I have to accept the fact that I only have the weekends to workout because my weekdays are jam packed with work and I am most of the time too tired to do any workouts after work anyway. So when it comes to the weekend, I really try to give myself 100% when I am at the gym.

So today, when I was working out at the gym with my trainer, he was starting to increase the weights quite dramatically to increase muscle strength to get me in shape for upcoming squash tournament in a few months time and when I saw him adding up the weights I unconsciously mumbled, "uh oh!".

My trainer heard it and he went, "Don't worry bro. I gotta believe in yourself because I believe in you. You can do this. Come on!". Call it placebo if you may but his encouragement went a pretty long way to spur me on today's session. At the end of my session, whilst I was catching my breath from the weight pumping, my trainer had a grin on his face as he said, "Told you that you could do it! You have to believe in yourself and then you can do it. If you trust yourself, you have already admitted defeat before you even lifted the weights man!"

Whether it's weights, running, swimming or work, you have to have that self belief, knowing you can achieve whatever you are planning to do. Because setting a goal but not believing you can achieve it is already admitting failure before you even pursued your goal. Placebo or no placebo, self belief goes a long way in getting you to your goal.

softer touch to a problem

Last week, I had a fair bit of trouble trying to fix one of my car door locks. One of those central locking systems when you lock the driver's side, all the doors in the car are supposed to lock. Only this time, one of the door lock refused to go back down everytime it popped up. I won't go into the details of how the mechanism in the door works to unlock (pull) and to lock (push) the car door but basically there is this little magnetically driven mechanism that does the unlocking and locking.

It wasn't the first time it has happened to me and all this while it simply involved tightening the screw that held that mechanism in place thinking everything that ages (especially a 24 year old car) will always have a bit of loose screws here and there, which simply requires a bit of tightening. Going on that mindset, I got home from work one evening, pulled out the mechanic portable light, opened up my toolbox and got down to removing the necessary door panels to see what was causing that little mechanism to not work.

Released a couple of screws, pulled out the panel, and I was now looking at the inside of my car door, observing the linkages that set the motion of locking and unlocking my car door to see where was the loose end to the entire mechanical loop. After about half an hour, I finally found out that a particular screw holding the mechanism wasn't holding its place and thus causing the door to be unable to locked itself everytime I used the central locking system. So, when there is screw not holding something in place and you are holding a screw driver, the most logical thing to do would be to tigthening the screw right? So that's what I did, I grabbed my screw driver and tried tigthening the darn screw that was making me go through all this trouble!

So by the time I thought I had tightened the screw, I gave the system a shot and found it working. Satisfied, I put back all the panels, screwed everything back on and gave it another try. This time the door refused to lock itself again. After almost an hour by the time I had the door back in its original state. Fuming, I spent the next hour or so repeating the above steps only this time I realised I think I spoiled the screw. No matter how hard I tried to tighten the screw, it just wouldn't tighten. It pretty much became and infinite screw loose. It just kept turning, turning, turning and turning without tightening.

The next 15 minutes went to searching for a new screw in the pile of spares in my toolbox. Eventually, I found one of the right size and I took a deep breath, thought about it carefully and then tightened the screw but this time, I didn't screw it in too hard but sufficiently hard enough to hold the screw in place. Did a couple of testing and put everything back on the door and tested it again and WOALA! It worked.

Sweating after all the effort in the middle of the night (by the time I was done, it wasn't evening anymore), it dawned on me that not every problem or glitch can be fixed with just hard, punching solutions. Certain things can be dealt with with a little bit more delicate touches instead. Fixing a problem isn't like boxing where you just keeping throwing hard punches, and sometimes even in boxing a light punch can deal a killer blow if you hit your opponent in the right spot.

goodness in simpler things

The Chinese New Year season typically signifies the few things below:-
1. Ang Pow;
2. Plenty of eating and drinking;
3. Gambling; and
4. Companionship, meeting your relatives  and friends after a long while.

Over the last couple of weeks, eating was one of the main things I had been doing. It was always nice, fancy, lavish dinners. As much as I don't get to eat fine dining very often in my daily lives, it was in some way pretty surprising to note that I don't really having lavish dinners in restaurants despite the nice ambiance, service and food - I mean really rich food.

It was nice in the first week, eating some long 8 to 10 course filled craftily served chef's specialty touches and so and so forth. After that, I started to get a little bit dull from all the restaurant food. Not that it didn't appeal to my taste buds. I did but I quickly realised too much of richness in my food, for too often quickly led to a bit dullness in my food tasting experience.

I found myself missing the simpler dishes - prawn mee, friend kuey teow, beef ball noodles, nasi lemak, and the list of local delicacies may well go on. I mean those meals are not cooked up by highly celebrated chefs and neither will you find them in restaurants but these were simple meals. Meals that everyone of every stature and walks of life can enjoy.

What I realised lately that our generation of people are becoming more sophisticated. Eatery places didn't only need to have good serving food but it required the right ambiance and all the other finer details to be matched. In fact, I find it quite surprising that there are some who are willing to pay the extra for what they'd call a "dining experience".

Maybe I have a difference interpretation of the term "dining experience" but enjoying my dinner simply meant, I could wear anything I felt comfortable without any "blink blink" (decent of course) and eat the food I order and not be bounded by massively regulated table etiquette. And most importantly, I'd very much like to see myself giving a good, "aaaahhh!" after finishing my meal.

Not that I didn't enjoy all the fine dining I had over the span of Chinese New Year, but after having all the fine dining meals that didn't come cheap, it was refreshing to know I could find goodness in simpler things in life - cheap, good 'ole hawker food!

Money can indeed buy you good service, expert presentation and chef craftsmanship in the dish that is served to you but when you reflect on your daily lives, you will quickly realise that you can still find similar goodness in simpler things - you can't deny you still love the bowl of prawn mee you order from an old uncle who's probably been running the stall for decades, sweat while you enjoy the spiciness, taking a cold drink to quench your thirst from the sweating and spiciness and it'll only cost you at today's inflation adjusted price of maybe 5 Malaysian Ringgits! That's goodness in simpler things!