Musings: Summer 2025
One of my favorite sayings in teaching surgery is: if you are repeatedly touching the same tissue without forward movement, all you are doing is creating inflammation. Every step in surgery requires knowing the next step. Repeated handling of the same tissue causes friability and prolongs healing. A skilled surgeon can visualize the movements of the entire surgical process akin to the maestro who knows every tempo and dynamic change of a concerto. A visualization deeply ingrained like a Proustian moment - that freshly baked smell of a madeline evoking every associated memory.
My 16 year old recently asked around my birthday: what are you doing on the cusp of your 6th decade? While I have been reflecting on this, the way of that question, surprisingly hit me hard and prompted this musing.
A favorite family dinner activity since the girls were little is a sharing exercise built on the rose/bud/thorn framework - share a positive, a thing to look forward to and a negative. Still works well for getting teenage girls to communicate their emotions in a constructive manner. Over Mother’s Day dinner, the girls and Ryan used this framework in sharing their sentiments of me. My husband, a man of few words, shared this: my favorite part of you is the way you light up right before a live show of your favorite musicians like a child experiencing something new for the first time.
On the back half of my existence, I should feel content in the comfort of my current orchestration. Yet, I remain eager to discover, question, and synthesize. I recently had the chance to sit in the rarely photographed (by design) second-floor reading room of the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris. Amongst the shelves of weathered books, creaky floors, and low ceiling beams, exist moments in time and place that are never repeated.
We move through the monotonous routines of life without the attention to those patterns of moments that may never be again. Often, it is a disruption (whether a positive or negative one), that helps us become more aware. There is no controlling the negative disruption that comes our way, but I am searching for those positive disruptions. The ones that evoke the feelings of exploration, of undiluted possibility.
Part of what I loved about the practice of medicine was that continuous exploration- that practice helped me understand the world and my place in it. Chatting with strangers who remain as strangers, or patients, or friends is getting to know each other not in the construct for which we started our connection- a beginning without knowing how it ends. Apply that to books, music, art, shows, travel, {fill in your blank}, and the possibility is exponential.
Unlike a learned surgical procedure, or a composed musical piece, or written history, I can’t quite visualize how this ends, nor where these notes lead, nor how it all lingers, but I will gladly take on the chance to keep moving, to remix life as a variation on a theme, the coda can wait.
“If I could say I was assigned something at birth, it would be to keep the soul fresh and clean, and to not let anything bring it down. And that’s the spirit of childhood, usually. Once you know that that’s what you’re doing, even when you’re walking through a war field, you’re carrying something to keep it safe. It’s invisible but you know it’s there, and it’s a kind of vision and a weight.”
~Fanny Howe