Covid Crisis Part 1

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Hey everyone, this is Dr. Sam Lam. Basically phoning this one in from home, sheltered in place now for a little over two weeks. And we closed down in advance of the directives that were given to us by the local authorities as well as the Texas authorities, because I felt that we really needed to shut down given the crisis that was looming at us. And it’s something that I’m been dealing with multiple phone calls trying to figure out financial, emotional things that have gone through with me in the last couple of weeks. I’m sure all of you have experienced the same thing. Ultimately, you know, in the future I’m very, very confident that everything will be back to full swing. The question is just the uncertainty of when. I want to reach out to you as patients and just first of all, thank you for all of your support in the last few months and years.

Trusting in me to do your work, whether it be nonsurgical or surgical therapies, hair restoration, facial rejuvenation from surgeries to fillers and Botox. I’m very proud of being your doctor and wanted you to know that I can’t wait to go back and do this. You know, this is something that’s a deep passion of mine, you know, seeing at home, the only outlet for me, from an artistic perspective as you know, my whole life has driven toward artistic things, is painting. And in a way it’s been great because I really have barely had time to do painting when I was working. And as you know, I really need an artistic outlet. And so, when working with all of you, you know, that my pros and cons as a person is that I’m pretty blunt.

What I say because I’m very artistically driven to help you get natural results and beautiful results. But, you know, at home I don’t have that outlet. So by miracle, late mid, late December as I was evolving my art, I was going from very, very abstracted patterns, large scale canvases, I was doing a watercolor series that you will see in my office expansion when we get it reopened or opened, watercolor series that were more figurative in nature. And I was doing different types of plants and animals. And then my wife challenged me, and she said, you know, why don’t you do our dog? Kumo? And I said, well, okay. And she said, you know, but I’m going to warn you that, you know, doing a dog may not really look realistic.

I may not really look like our dog. And that’s one of the big pitfalls. So, I took that as a challenge. I did the dog and watercolor and abstracted a bit in terms of, cause it was monochromatic. One color is blue gray, and it really looked like him. And so, I thought, I have a little confidence now. And so, I started embarking on, doing different things with watching YouTube channels and reading some books. And I started going watercolors and portraits, color pencils, now pastels. And you can look at my Instagram and my Facebook accounts to take a look at some of the artwork I’ve been doing. And that’s something that, by miracle, I was able to get all that art supply before everything shut down. And I was able to acquire a new talent that I didn’t even know I had to be honest with you.

Cause everything, I was doing, if you’d been in my office, has been very abstracted pieces. And I’m actually gonna return to that soon. But my point of talking about this is that, you know, we always, always have to have a passion. And what drives us oftentimes during a crisis is not only emotional support, spiritual support, which is huge for me, and making sure financially we’re good, but we have to still have an outlet for our passions, you know, and for me, art is everything. When everything was open, I was going to museums, seeing artists, things like that. And I’ll obviously, as you know, as I was mentioning, just doing what I was doing with you guys was my artistic passion. So, one of the things I encourage you during this time is sit down and brainstorm.

Find where your passion is in life, you know, and what your five-year goal is. Cause it’s going to come back. I call it a hot pen exercise. I’ve actually done this myself where you sit down in a quiet room by yourself and you write down what your one year goals would be your five year goals and your 10 year goals and those goals, you just sit and write. You don’t necessarily criticize it or critique it and you don’t even, you know, figure out why you’re thinking something. You just keep writing. And if you asking are those goals personal or professional? The answer is yes, they’re both, they’re basically everything. You know, what you want to do with charities in your life, which you want to do spiritually to develop what you want to do, with your avocations, which your vocation.

Financially what you want to do, familywise, what your plans would be and don’t even limit it or structure it. Just allow it to just to be open. And things just happen, you know, that you may never have even thought was possible. For me, art is just a huge passion. I’ve just now pivoting back into large scale, design and slightly more abstract. I just finished a pastel of my wife in San Terranea a trip. You can take a look at that. I think it’s probably will have been imposed posted by the time this comes up or may not be. But I now going back to a very large flower design, slightly more abstracted that’s going to be for the entryway of the Willowbend Wellness Center, my building.

So hopefully that will be up and be able to be installed by the time our business is back operational. But that is what I’m actually doing a little micro study of right now. And, you know, if you are interested in art and you don’t think you can do it, I didn’t think I could actually do portraits. I didn’t think I could actually do all these things, but start working, try to really look at what it takes to do good design. In fact, I’m going to probably do a podcast just on the things I’ve learned of how to do your own artwork at home, since we’re all at home, thinking of new creative outlets of things that we can do or things that we can occupy our time. In fact, I was looking at a drawing that one of my friends did.

And I immediately messaged him and said, look, here are the things that you know, you could do and some resources out there. And then he said, Oh, this is my 14-year-old daughter. That’s that. I said, okay. And it was still good work. But you know, these are things that I didn’t even know when I started my art and design. So I hope all of you are doing okay emotionally, financially, physically, all those elements are so important, you know, and I’m going to try to do series of podcast like a fireside chat about what I’m going through. What you guys are probably going through and just trying to get through this altogether.