Tree Pen Hong Kong Supervisor - Director General of Handicapped Social Workers' Service Society

What is the sense of geographical distance?

Before, I didn't know that Hong Kong people are so unconscious of geographical distance. Why? Maybe because Hong Kong is so small that the distance from one district to another is measured in such a way as MTR station A to MTR station B. But since I came to work in Shenzhen, I suddenly realized that there is no sense of geographical distance. However, since I came to work in Shenzhen, I suddenly realized that the country is so big. In Baoan District alone, it takes at least two hours to travel from the east to the west by car. The sense of geographic distance has suddenly become twice as wide.

The sense of interlacing time and space is another thing that amazes me, why?

Once, I had a 10-dollar lunch in Baoan at noon on the same day, and then I had to eat a 40-dollar fast-food meal when I returned to Hong Kong in the evening. I was thinking, in fact, in the same time and space, but there are two very different forms of life, and then, my head thought, in the very different, in the end, what is the human needs? There is not much difference between a ten-dollar meal and a forty-dollar meal, nor does a forty-dollar meal taste much better than a ten-dollar meal, so what are people's needs in life? Previously seems to be a very understandable thing, all of a sudden but in the head back.

Maybe it's the sense of geographical distance and the sense of time and space interlacing that shocks me, and sometimes I'll suddenly ask myself, "Where the hell have I been? What is this place? Look, I'm back in Shenzhen, or I'm back in Hong Kong." In the past, when I lived in Hong Kong, I was not so aware of my own existence because the environment had not changed. However, people who often travel to and from different places and time zones within a day will suddenly be at a loss as to where they are, and ask questions about their own existence in a very profound way. The feeling is very suspenseful, human consciousness, human sense of existence, turns out to be changed with the geographical distance and time-space interlacing. Of course, this kind of lengthening and broadening experience also loosened my head at once. Previously, I thought it must be that way, slowly being stretched out to become boundless.

Many times I feel that as a social worker to help service recipients, sometimes it is also a process of pulling loose and pulling wide. People think that the problem is that ah, the solution is only those times, the confines of the box, really have to be pulled apart to find a window of freedom. I hope that we as social workers, first of all, the self-restriction to pull loose, so that they first become a free bird to fly.