My mother loves chocolate. She can easily finish a whole box in a day. One of my earliest memories is playing with colour chocolate wrappings, watching her picking at the box all the while. My mother had to use denture when she was still very young, but she would not give up chocolate over a couple of teeth. Such is the power of chocolate. Chocolate does have medicinal properties. The use of chocolate as a medicine originated among the Mayans and Mexicans. More than a hundred medicinal uses have been documented in European texts, and treatments of physical and mental fatigue are at the top of the list. Even chocolate flowers were used to treat fatigue. Chocolate can provide energy because of its sugar content and large amount of caffeine-like psychostimulant substances. Life would be so sweet if all our energy could be derived from this sweet “food of the gods”. Wouldn’t it? Life would be even sweeter if we were never tired in the first place. Why are we so tired and so often tired anyway? We no longer need to hunt for food. We have fast food and microwaves. We do not have to wash anything except ourselves. There is a machine for each of the washables. We do not even have to walk any real distance as a necessity. We have all kinds of convenience. Besides physical fatigue, we are also subject to mental fatigue, emotional fatigue, television fatigue, information fatigue (coined by British psychologist David Lewis), and most recently the screen fatigue (US Psychologist S. Turkle)… Come to think of it, may be this is all Thomas Edison’s fault. We haven’t had enough sleep ever since he played with energy and gave us the light bulb. Perhaps we have been working too hard at working less, like forever updating the technology of emailing to replace hand-writing. Perhaps that is why we are overtaxing the limits of our wits trying to find ways to cope with the resulting fatigue. What if we stop for a minute? If we take the time to look around, we will find that the sun is out, the flowers are blossoming, the butterflies are dancing…they are full of energy. They are naturally full of energy. They live, with life’s rechargeable batteries. But so do we. Don’t we? In this issue, we ponder another wonder of life: it’s energy, and energy conserving mechanism called fatigue. Lillian Chan

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