“When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.”
– Jacob Riis, a Danish immigrant and social reformer.
For a while I have been looking forward to my wisdom tooth surgery, as the recovery period would have provided a convenient excuse to avoid all responsibilities and hardships for one week. All the hours spent close to burnout during the year would be worth this period of doing nothing productive, of letting go and fully relaxing. Yet when the week came and went, it turned out to be pitiful; I failed to write, eat and exercise, was frequently disturbed by distractions and spent an absurd amount of time mindlessly scrolling the internet. I realised, to my surprise, that even in rest, change and challenges were necessary, that too much order was a parasite that stunted growth, and while rest is necessary, too much is pathological. So I began to voluntarily work and set expectations for myself like I would during my working days, and immediately it felt right.
From Dr Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life:
“Order is not enough. You can’t just be stable, and secure, and unchanging, because there are still vital and important new things to be learned. Nonetheless, chaos can be too much. You can’t long tolerate being swamped and overwhelmed beyond your capacity to cope while you are learning what you still need to know. Thus, you need to place one foot in what you have mastered and understood and the other in what you are currently exploring and mastering. Then you have positioned yourself where the terror of existence is under control and you are secure, but where you are also alert and engaged. That is where there is something new to master and some way that you can be improved. That is where meaning is to be found.”
A few days ago I had surgery to remove four wisdom teeth. It was overall a smooth experience – I was lucky to have a lovely surgical team and no major delays or post-op complications. I am still a bit drowsy, mostly due to the medications, and my waking hours rotate between sleeping, taking my pain medications, wearing my ice pack, drinking soup, playing games and reading books.
As the swelling and pain subside, all that is left is immense gratitude. I am grateful for modern surgery, which continues to transform many lives every day; for anesthesia and painkillers, which make absurd procedures painless; for the new restaurants downstairs I’ve tried thanks to my new liquid diet; for the quiet time I was able to have after exams; for friends, love, and life.
What an amazing thing it is to be alive.
From The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran:
Say not, “I have found the truth,” but rather, “I have found a truth.”
Say not, “I have found the path of the soul.” Say rather, “I have met the soul walking upon my path.”
For the soul walks upon all paths.
The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed.
The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals.
“Courage is not something that you already have that makes you brave when the tough times start. Courage is what you earn when you’ve been through the tough times and you discover they aren’t so tough after all.” – Malcolm Gladwell, David and Goliath
“Courage doesn’t happen when you have all the answers. It happens when you are ready to face the questions you have been avoiding your whole life.” – Shannon L. Adler
“Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and think, I’m not going to make it, but you laugh inside – remembering all the times you’ve felt that way.” – Charles Bukowski
Today’s rainy weather and final exam marked the end of another year of medical school.
It was, on reflection, a great year of learning, perhaps my favourite yet. I connected with wonderful people, made precious memories, learned much about the world and got pushed to become a more disciplined, loving, curious version of myself.
As I arrived home from my exam, drenched and hungry, I sat on my desk chair, the chair I spent countless hours studying on, and felt the weight of placements, lectures, assessments and stress seep away. It was a good year. And now it is time for rest.
Today I read through an old journal and relived some memories.
I relived the stress before high school exams, the joy of quartet rehearsals, the aroma of mum’s cooking, the burn of summer days, the mundanity of viola practice, the joy of late night runs.
Without the words I scribbled down in the moment, these memories would have been lost forever.
Note taking is the closest thing we have to time travel, it is a note affirming our place in the word, a rebellion against the entropy of memory.
It is moments that remind me of the power of the written word.
I haven’t been writing much lately and I can notice it. My thoughts feel cloudier, slower, as if weighed down by an invisible force, a weight that consists mostly of medicine, as the exam season is here, a time where levels of neuroticism and conscientiousness reach their annual high, and other priorities are unconsciously pushed aside.
My athletics coach once told me that if you don’t run for one week, your body begins reverting back to its weaker, less coordinated state before you started running. It doesn’t take long for your aerobic and muscular efforts to be completely nullified back to baseline levels. Your body needs constant stimulus to keep growing. The antidote to deterioration is consistency.
I suspect a similar thing happens with our minds. If we stop thinking and seeing the world in a certain way, we begin to remodel them as if they don’t exist. It takes constant action of our priorities to best spend the limited time we have.
We are verbs, not nouns.
Today in the elevator, I overheard a man talking to his son. He said, “There’s a big difference between someone who is peaceful and someone who is weak. A peaceful person is capable of great violence. If you are not capable of violence, you are harmless.”
The elevator reached my floor. I looked back at the kid, he must have been only four or five, and he stared back at me with big, brown eyes. As I walked out, I murmured a quote I remembered under my breath.
“Those who have swords and know how to use them, but keep them sheathed, will inherit the Earth.”
Last week a moth flew into my apartment. I first noticed it as I was hanging out my washing, it was sitting on the balcony while I was minding my own business and suddenly it flew inside. I didn’t think much of it at the time because I was sure it would fly back out except it never did, so then when I was finished with the washing I was left to choose between leaving the door open and risking more bugs flying in or closing the door and living with a moth. What ultimately tipped the balance was the weather, as it was getting cold outside so I went inside and shut the door, effectively sealing our fates. And so, we’ve been living together for the past week.
It’s a pretty big moth, definitely larger than an average sized one, which led me to wonder if by any chance I had a royal moth in my home, but soon it became terrifying, largely because it was so unpredictable. For hours I could go without seeing the moth but then suddenly, as I would cook or open my sock wardrobe, bang, there it would be, flying directly at my face, and it was shocking, like being getting attacked, and in those moments I realised I hated big, black furry flying bugs.
I tried everything I could to get it to leave. I would open the balcony door for hours at a time, but once it flew on handle of the door but not actually outside and then I tried to shoo it out except it flew back inside the living room. It was as if it were repelled by the air outside. And then I thought of leaving it a food trail to lure it outside but upon Googling, I found out that moths don’t actually eat that much so abandoned the idea. After this, frustration got the better of me and I decided that the only option left was to kill it so the next time I saw it I would end its life. I spent many nights carrying a thong in my hand and a tissue in the other, waiting for the moth to land on my desk or somewhere I could reach but for whatever reason, it knew when I had murderous intent and began hiding itself from me in unreachable places – the ceiling, behind the fridge, the back of the pantry. It was an awful, humiliating dance. And for each passing day I began to hate the moth more and more.
This morning though, I saw that the moth was finally dead. It was under my desk, lying next to my laptop charger, without a trace of movement. I kicked the charger a bit, seeing if it would wake up, but it didn’t. I have no idea what killed it, maybe it ran out of energy, or it was killed by a predator bug (I sure hope not) or maybe it had enough itself and flew into one too many walls. I was a little sad seeing it dead, despite hoping for this outcome previously, because in that moment it looked so pathetic, so un-royal-like and it occurred to me that the moth must have starved to death. And then I began to feel sorry for the moth, thinking how awful it would be to die in a foreign apartment, when it probably desperately wanted to get out.
I sat up, grabbed a tissue then gently pinched the moth from the floor and looked at it for a while. Seeing it up close, I realised it was beautiful, it had silver tinges around its wings and wavy patterns on its body. I took it outside and placed the moth on the balcony where I first found it, hoping it would wake up and fly away (but please not into my apartment). But it never did. I looked up at the sky. It was a day similar to when I had first met the moth – chilly and overcast. I wondered if, in a way, things had come full circle. When I looked down, the moth was gone.
May you rest in peace.