perspective without tragedy.
in my work, i've realized there are two ways that something can be seen in perspective.
my patients often look at what's happening to them in the perspective of what's happened to them in their lives.
-this is the worst pain i've ever experienced
-i've never felt so uncomfortable in my life.
-i can't believe i have to wait this long to see a doctor.
we see what's happening to them in the perspective of everything else that's going on in the ER and often, everything else we've seen.
-room 2 is much sicker and might die, she's my first priority
-my last patient had metastatic cancer and didn't require as much narcotics as your sprained ankle
-this has been bothering him for five weeks, why is he here in my ER at 2am demanding to be fixed now?
it's important for me to remember that people are seeing things the first way.
i'm starting to wonder how to get people to look at things the second way too.
you hear about people changing their lives and perspectives after a tragedy. loss of a family member or a love shows them to appreciate the "small things" in life.
travel to bigger tragedies: genocides, areas of extreme poverty or illness makes us realize how good our lives actually are.
volunteering in our own cities with people who are less fortunate remind us that our lives are more fortunate.
i listened to Paul Farmer speak today (amazing man who's done decades of significant humanitarian/medical work in Haiti and now Rwanda). He said that we don't need to watch horrible things in person to really know to help. Watching a woman die in childbirth because of poverty was excessive, something he didn't need to see first hand, he could've read about it or heard about it and it would've been just as motivating and powerful.
i don't agree with him. i want to agree with him but i don't. because we hear about horrible things all the time that happen in our city, our country, our world and we don't get motivated to do something about it.
you can definitely argue (and i've felt this way) that the amount of horrible is overwhelming and demotivating b/c where do you start? what can you really do? that's a perspective (our ability to help is tiny in a huge world) that suppresses many of us and ultimately doesn't do any good even if it has some validity.
but what i've seen over and over is that when we see and experience tragedy ourselves, firsthand, logic changes and becomes less important, and instead the instinctual inner need to help takes over.
so that leads me to my question. how do we do this without having to experience tragedy? how do we gain and keep this perspective that in the bigger scheme of things, in the bigger picture of the world, our lives are amazingly fortunate and good, that people are suffering in ways that we never have to imagine and from that find inspiration and need to give back? how do we do this without having tragedy happen to us or without knowing to look for suffering?
my patients often look at what's happening to them in the perspective of what's happened to them in their lives.
-this is the worst pain i've ever experienced
-i've never felt so uncomfortable in my life.
-i can't believe i have to wait this long to see a doctor.
we see what's happening to them in the perspective of everything else that's going on in the ER and often, everything else we've seen.
-room 2 is much sicker and might die, she's my first priority
-my last patient had metastatic cancer and didn't require as much narcotics as your sprained ankle
-this has been bothering him for five weeks, why is he here in my ER at 2am demanding to be fixed now?
it's important for me to remember that people are seeing things the first way.
i'm starting to wonder how to get people to look at things the second way too.
you hear about people changing their lives and perspectives after a tragedy. loss of a family member or a love shows them to appreciate the "small things" in life.
travel to bigger tragedies: genocides, areas of extreme poverty or illness makes us realize how good our lives actually are.
volunteering in our own cities with people who are less fortunate remind us that our lives are more fortunate.
i listened to Paul Farmer speak today (amazing man who's done decades of significant humanitarian/medical work in Haiti and now Rwanda). He said that we don't need to watch horrible things in person to really know to help. Watching a woman die in childbirth because of poverty was excessive, something he didn't need to see first hand, he could've read about it or heard about it and it would've been just as motivating and powerful.
i don't agree with him. i want to agree with him but i don't. because we hear about horrible things all the time that happen in our city, our country, our world and we don't get motivated to do something about it.
you can definitely argue (and i've felt this way) that the amount of horrible is overwhelming and demotivating b/c where do you start? what can you really do? that's a perspective (our ability to help is tiny in a huge world) that suppresses many of us and ultimately doesn't do any good even if it has some validity.
but what i've seen over and over is that when we see and experience tragedy ourselves, firsthand, logic changes and becomes less important, and instead the instinctual inner need to help takes over.
so that leads me to my question. how do we do this without having to experience tragedy? how do we gain and keep this perspective that in the bigger scheme of things, in the bigger picture of the world, our lives are amazingly fortunate and good, that people are suffering in ways that we never have to imagine and from that find inspiration and need to give back? how do we do this without having tragedy happen to us or without knowing to look for suffering?