Confessions of a researchaholic

I am an afterthought
left by you
at the airport.

Biological life forms are evolved to procreate, ideas are disseminated to propagate, and I exist to serve others instead of myself.

Anything that depends on others, can be taken away from us, and is not ours.
Which basically applies to everything, including our life, as we will all die on day.
But we can prioritize them based on their proximity to and controllability by us – mind, body, wisdom, skills, relationships, accomplishments, money, jobs, etc.

We won’t fear losing something if we don’t think it belongs to us.

During a physical training exercise today my sifu pointed out that I haven’t been making as much progress as I should have in all these years, because I haven’t been putting in enough focus and effort.

This triggered me to realize that this generalizes to other areas of my life as well.
I was very motivated and hard-pushing earlier when there were specific goals and expectations, such as getting good grades, attending prestigious schools, getting posh jobs, publishing top papers, and such.
However, as time went by, the goals and expectations became less well-defined and the pushing became less intense.
Eventually I just took it easy and settled into a cruising mode without realizing it.

Thanks to this wake-up call, I am getting back to my previous self, starting from this physical training class, and other areas of my life as well.

During my morning Caltrain rides I often see a guy waltzing across the train fist-bumping and chatting with passengers. Today I came to meet him again, and I took the chance asking him why he is so cheerful.

“I am suicidal” was his reply.

The conversation was overheard by a nearby train conductor who later brought another conductor towards me and asked me to repeat what I heard. Turned out that they need to report such cases to the police to prevent suicide attempts.

Professor Yen was one of my favorite teachers in NTU EE. I really enjoyed his discrete mathematics class and a special project on reading computational theory papers. In my eyes he was a very smart and caring professor. He even went to the same junior high school as I did.

I learned that he has passed away from a recent department newsletter. I couldn’t get a chance to say goodbye to him but I will always remember his kindness and appreciate his teaching and guidance.