Five times a day

When I got shingles, I had to drink an anti-viral medication five times a day for ten consecutive days. It is tougher than what I expected. At the same time, it gives me insights on what it means to really want to achieve our goals or build relationship.

It was tough because it is more than three times. If something is to be done for three times, at least we can match it with our meal times. In fact, we may even not be able to meet three times if we skip one of our meal or if we forget to bring the medicine during a meal. Five times means that we need to insert one between breakfast and lunch, and another between lunch and dinner. Of course we can do other things such as taking it before bed time or right after wake up.

For the first five days, it was fine because I was at home due to the medical certification. But the moment I started to go out, I started to forget. It became worse when I started to work as I did not have the habit of taking a meal break between breakfast and lunch. The busy activities in work also made me forgot about it.

What I learn is that by putting it into five days, we need to ensure that we really want to do it so that regardless of the time, we still allocate to do it. It requires us consistency to reach our goal which in this case is to get fully recovered from the virus. To do well, we needed a plan, we also need to adjust if we know the timing had a clash with something.

Five times a day also reminded me of our Muslim friends who pray five times a day. It is an amazing thing if they can remember those five times. Or perhaps at least they make an effort to put it in the calendar or use an app or something to remind them.

Interestingly, there are many times that we do more than five times a day. Going to toilet, drinking water, checking whatsapp, checking time are all done more than five times a day. It becomes easy as it has been repeated many years. So, let’s try to nurture a good habit and repeat it frequently in each new day.