And so, I find myself wondering what to write in this missive. The year has been good, full of love and learning, growth and understanding, and yet in this moment, we are sad, we are mourning, we are dancing with grief. It is strange how a recent event can colour the feelings that you carry for a year, how a single moment in time can mark that year in your mind, how a single event becomes the moment that may name that year. It happens all the time… oh, that was when Sam was born, that was the year I started medical school, that was the year we got married, the year when grandmother died, these single moments are large enough in our psyche that they colour the memory of the year.
Good luck, bad luck...
Sometimes we are simply too close to be able to see clearly, it is as if our breath fogs the glass we want to look through, we need to get some distance. Is this a good thing or is this a bad thing? it is hard to know. As I look back on life, I look back on things that in the moment seemed terrible, but as I reflect on them from where I am now, the view is so much different. I remember clearly the scene from “the dead poet’s society” when Robin Williams asks the students to stand up on their desks to change their point of view. As I look across my life, I realize I am moving from desk to desk to desk, and looking around, and the view, is always, different.
In this moment...
It was another weekend of training in Hakomi. We were working on figuring out our resources (those things in our lives that help us get through tough times). It was the second day of training for this block, and my student therapist asked how things were going, “day by day, usual days, usual stuff.” “Why don’t you take me through a usual day then, how do you start seeing your patients? “. I begin to recount how I work without a nurse, and that I go up front to pick up my patients. She asked me to stop, slow down, and really focus on what I do when I prepare to get a patient, and as we work through that, I came to see what a resource I have built over the last 10 years.
Where the fear comes from...
What is it that hold me back? What keeps me from being all that is within me? It is a funny question for me to ask, given the work I am doing to help others finds their way through this briar patch. I know, deep inside, that this answer is within, but as I sit here with this question, my mind provides me all sorts of reasons why I cannot step into that place, and as I look at these reasons, they all circle around fear, the fear of rejection.
Needing to be helpful.....
Sometimes Medicine wants more than you can give, and there are many times in the past when I’ve given Medicine everything I had and a little bit more. These days, I give medicine what it deserves and nothing more. I don’t spend myself into debt for Medicine, I don’t empty my emotional banks to make sure that Medicine is full, I do what I can and when I get to the end of what I have to give Medicine, I stop.
The inner child...
He is watching me as I go about my morning. I can feel him just below the surface, noticing what I am up to. He is ever curious, this little one, and lately he has not been far away. I can hear his questions about what I am doing, why I am doing it, and what it all means. He is always asking ‘Why?’ and as often as I can, I work to answer his questions. He did not used to visit me at all, and for the longest time, I did not know he existed.
Sorrow and the teacher...
Something was missing as I walked in to the house, something was just not right. It took me a moment as I closed the door to realize, my greeter was not present, and then I remembered, she would not be coming to see me any longer. Her time with us had come to an end, and in that moment, the sorrow that had been lurking near the edges of life came in the door with me and settled into my heart.
Compassion returns
There she was, it had been so long since I had caught sight of her, I wasn’t sure at first if I recognized her, she had changed so much over the years, or had I? She was peeking around the corner checking in to see how I was doing. I am surprised she still visits me, after the way I treated her all those years ago. If I let myself, I can easily remember those days. Those had been rough days, when it wasn’t safe to have her around anymore.
Speaking to the heart
‘How did you know what to say to her?’ asked the resident, ‘We have been trying to figure her out all morning and have gotten nowhere.’ An expression of mixed curiosity and frustration crossed her face. ‘I try not to focus on how she is acting, as much as I try to talk to the part of her Jesus would love’, I found myself answering. This catch phrase would find its way into conversation regularly during the years of teaching, it captured a concept I had struggled to teach prior to that moment of insight. The concept of connection, it is one of the most difficult things for doctors in training to understand. Years of training make this more difficult, training that does not focus upon the human connection, instead focusing upon the biological working of humans.
My 'Why'.....
Why? I am sure if you were to ask my parents, they would tell you that this is the first word that I ever said. It is certainly the most common word that comes to mind, and out of my mouth on any given day. It has been this way for as long as I can remember and it continues to fuel my searching to understand the world in which I live. Simon Sinek has become famous for looking at this, and lately I have found myself delving ever deeper into this fundamental question of ‘Why?’