Random thoughts, Part 11. Intention and mindfulness.

1. It has become more clear to me over time that mindfulness, acting with intention, and making decisions deliberately are the roads to maturity. 

2. Mature people take ownership of their decisions and their consequences. 

3. Revealed preference has played an important role in my life. And it has often been surprising. 

4. Lately I have become totally infatuated and obsessed with the notion of symbiotic bacterial relationships with humans and health. I cannot read enough about it re: Dermatology, Mental Health, GI, infectious disease… Fascinating. 

5. Interestingly, over the past 2 years I have come to believe that yoga and massage are as critical to human health as exercise. 

6. Speaking of mindfulness, it seems to me that a critical component of the health benefit of massage is the necessity to tune in to the senses. In addition to feeling the warmth and dexterity of human hands for releasing the tension in my body, I am smelling the oils, listening to the sounds, feeling warmth and breath… My mind wanders sometimes to the person, who is this person who chose this profession, who is so intimately attuned to the tension patterns of my body in this moment…. Critically, I am not passively staring into a digital screen. This really makes me wonder about how much value we have lost in traditional western medicine via giving up so much interaction and touch. How much time instead is devoted to charting and compliance. And how damaging that is to the healing relationship. I’m talking about all of us: physicians, nurses, and physical/occupational therapists. 

My massage therapist today told me at the end of our session to be mindful of keeping my shoulders back, chest open, head erect. With that advice, I felt like I was floating instead of walking back home.. When I am doing my job, I feel like the weight of the world is on my shoulders and neck as I lean forward and slump down. 

7. I listened to an interesting segment on NPR recently about the “Project Home.” The message was basically that it is incredibly healing to a homeless person simply to be treated as a person… To be spoken to, asked questions of, even only just acknowledged by people walking by on the street. The people being interviewed listed being "humanized" again amongst the most essential elements of escaping homelessness. It was a beautiful and sad message. I still have not stopped to talk to a homeless person since then and probably haven’t ever except in clinical settings, but since I listened to that story, I actually have thought about doing it. And I have made eye contact a few times. It’s interesting how cruel humans can be toward one other. 

https://projecthome.org

8. My last 2 talking points were way too long for this format. Reset. 

9. I threw up a bunch of blood the other day and then my nose started hemorrhaging. I’m hoping I was just having a retrograde nose bleed that made me nauseated instead of some massive upper GI ulcer or platelet disorder, but I can’t be sure. 

10. Residency life is so, so, so unhealthy. 

11. It’s been really easy for me to regress into being the “fun” parent, which solidifies my theory that sometime around 7 years old was the peak of my life. 

12. Out of desperation on a long flight, I accidentally taught my kid that punching me in the face is completely hilarious… Ooops. 

13. Today, I dug up and opened my old box of books that I’ve hauled around 4 states and many more apts…. It was literally like opening a treasure chest of gold!

14. An attending recently told me that he firmly believes that reading something on paper solidifies a topic in your mind much better than reading the exact same thing digitally. I read a chapter that night in a book instead of my kindle app and it was true. I’m assuming this must have something to do with mindfulness, intention, and attention. But it is much less convenient. Maybe that is part of the point, though. 

15. My sister, brother, and I are both coming to life crossroads again at roughly the same times… I guess this happens so often because there are so many of us? Or is my family exceptionally unsettled in life? 

16. My husband speaks to my son in Vietnamese. Now that my son is saying words in Vietnamese back to him, I feel a combination of pride, relief, and abandonment at the same time. 

17. Blaming burnout as an excuse for bad behavior is immature of me. 

18. It is so hard to focus when I am depressed. 

19. Pitch darkness at 4:30pm does not help. 

20. Regular sleep and exercise would do wonders for my mood, but alas… 

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and 

rightdoing 

there is a field. I’ll meet you there.”

-Rumi

------------------------------

Roses

Everyone now and again wonders about

those questions that have no ready answers: first cause, God’s existence, 

what happens when the curtain goes

down and nothing stops it, not kissing, 

not going to the mall, not the Super

Bowl. 

“Wild roses,” I said to them one morning. 

“Do you have the answers? And if you do,

would you tell me?”

The roses laughed softly. “Forgive us,”

they said, “But as you can see, we are

just now entirely busy being roses.” 

-Mary Oliver

------------------------------

I have decided

I have decided to find myself a home in the 

mountains, somewhere high up where one 

learns to live peacefully in the cold and the silence. 

It’s said that in such a place certain revelations 

may be discovered. That what the 

spirit reaches for may be eventually felt, if 

not exactly understood. Slowly, no doubt. I’m

 not talking about a vacation. 

Of course at the same time I mean to stay exactly where I am. 

Are you following me?

-Mary Oliver

------------------------------

“A dying man needs to die, 

as a sleepy man needs to sleep, 

and there comes a time when it is wrong, as well as useless, 

to resist.” 

-Steward Alsop

------------------------------

“The rain began again. It fell heavily, easily, with no meaning or intention 

but the fulfillment of its own nature, which was to fall and fall.” 

-Helen Garner