Today for me is more than another
day, more than an ordinary day. Tomorrow is Day One for the person
replacing me in managing our department’s surgery clerkship by which all WUSM 3rd-year
students spend twelve weeks being introduced to the surgical care of
patients. Tomorrow I move into the driving instructor’s seat, into the
relay runner’s baton passing. We have four overlapping weeks together to
make this transition as seamless as possible. As I walked reflectively to
the medical school campus early this morning, I recalled a Ralph Waldo Emerson
quote I came across more than twenty-five years ago when I was still new to the
experience of being embedded inside the healthcare sphere filling positions
that – to use Dr. Elkins’ interpretation – put me “on the field” or “in the arena”.
In the early 1990s, I joined a team being led by a University of Miami
neonatologist with the aim to find a sustainable intervention for breaking the
downward spiral of cocaine-abusing women who were delivering prematurely
cocaine-exposed babies. My primary responsibilities were to optimize the
field results of the case managers and to develop the project’s internal
evaluation process (including a nuanced approach to defining ‘success’).
My secondary opportunity was to encourage the neonatologist whose spirit was
sagging and whose vision was dimming. I had an idea new for me as well as
for her – i.e., I offered to assist her in building a ‘to be’ list. Every
couple of weeks, I would send her a new entry for the growing list. The
Emerson quote below was one of the first entries. The quote remains
centering for me and clarifies where/how as a family you and I continue to
meet.
[Ralph Waldo Emerson quote]To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived -- this is to have succeeded.