I am sitting in the library delaying the necessary finishing touches for a paper due tonight at 2359 and remembering a few tid-bits of remarkable wisdom I've recently found written by others involved in the pursuit of a career in medicine. I found these thoughts to be enlightening at the very most, curious definitely, and maybe just a little pretentious and too highly intellectual to hold any water in the real world... maybe.
The first, found
here, at Partners in Health, was written by a young man who had been part of several not for profits and spent several years on the front lines. He was later diagnosed with cancer and these were some of his thoughts. I don't pretend to have the time to write well about this, so I will just quote him directly and leave you to your own ends to imagine and dialogue with his thoughts. The quote comes after he has been sitting with an older man in an emergency department with a broken hip. The older man shares his meal with the volunteer. "Moments like these continue to deepen my understanding of what it means to embrace the non-doing. It's come to mean being brave enough to disarm myself, to set aside my intellectual firepower and self-protective shields, and to enter into another's chaos-- not to do for them, but to simple be with them."
The next one comes from a 4th year medical student at Indiana University.
Here is the link. This one is slightly less applicable, but still a unique thought. He claims that a person is essentially his desires, intentions, or volition. He builds a metaphor of maze and his interaction with it. He, the physical body stands at the beginning of the maze, willing himself to move through the maze to the end. His goal, mind, psyche, soul, intentions, are at the end of the maze. The means to that end are navigating the maze. So, he says, " I stand as a soul at the end, waiting for my body to catch up, hoping it goes about things in the right way."
