Photographs by Jessie Leong
Even as a child I understood that life is a very temporary arrangement, but years later, as a grown-up doctor, my work was to rebel against the tyranny of disease and death. By listening carefully, observing carefully, examining carefully, I tried not to miss anything and to be a safe pair of hands protecting fellow humans in the inherently risky business of living. If ever there was an emergency, I would endeavor to act with method and speed, clarity and calm. And towards an inevitable closing out of a life, I tried to be reassuring and sometimes just be present, to be a hand to hold. Although medicine is often touted as life-saving I always found the phrase ‘to save a life’ to be somewhat meaningless, implying a kind of surety which does not exist. All I could ever hope to do was help to extend or improve a life. But recently the phrase ‘to save a life’ has developed a new meaning for me, one that has taken me a long time to discover.
I have my own impatient wranglings with physical pain which disrupts my sleep, disrupts my plans and worst of all disrupts my spirits. As a friend said to me recently by way of empathizing with my ongoing bodily problems, “There’s nothing good about it”. What is ‘wrong with me’ seems to be a bit complicated, too complicated for medicine to be any significant help. I long for someone to fix me, to make it alright, so I can just go about what I want to do unhindered. And I resent the fact that nobody can. Nobody that is except myself.
Learning what it means - ‘to save a life -’ is no easy lesson. I recently remarked to a friend that although I have the PhD in stoicism I’m still in primary school when it comes to self-compassion. I don’t fully understand why it almost physically hurts to invite kindness into my inner relationship with myself. Doing tough stuff has always been what has felt good. It’s not about being selfless or heroic. This way of being has come about because of many influences and probably also from a fear of missing out. Yes Willaim Blake you were right, “I want, I want, I want the moon”.
If I was my own physician I would advise a paced approach. I would advise keeping an open mind about how medicine may be able to help but not getting bitterly disappointed when it doesn’t. I’d advise physiotherapy, massage and graded exercise and adequate rest, and most of all I would advise all this is carried out with kindness. To engage with myself kindly is oddly difficult. Sometimes when in difficulty I am helped more by a poet than by a doctor, and my wise guru Mary Oliver is still there on the page to advise me. In her poem ‘The Journey’, she describes the inner voices which scream out for someone to “fix my life”. She describes the journey between this place, where the desperate “fix me” voices are screaming the house down to a place where
-
“[…] there was a new
voice
which you slowly
recognised as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and
deeper
into the world
determined to do
the only thing you could
do –
determined to save
the only life that you
could save”
And so, the poet tells us exactly how to save a life. By striding on, deeper and deeper, and by learning to recognise our own voice and let it keep us company. Determined to recognise and honour that voice when it says we need nurturing but not fixing. I’m not talking about simply acting selfishly, or putting my own needs above those of others, or about a kind of bubble-bath pampering. I’m talking about the hard quest to develop a basis of self-respect, which can so easily be fatally undermined by encounters with careless brutality in those of us who have been rendered vulnerable. If we do not bring, at the deepest level, a quality of loving kindness to how we treat ourselves then how can we expect anyone else to do it for us? This is not easy, but it’s important. Life Saving in fact.
