An ode to another year.

2018 was a year, this can be said with certainty. Good, bad, its just another year like every other, filled with our personal dramas, our successes, our failures, our wishes, our fears. We play better on Facebook, but really, our lives are pretty much just as muddy as everyone else's. For most of us our lives are essentially unchanged after this year, for some it was the end of time, emotionally, literally. For some, our lives have been lifted, for others it was darkness, but mostly we are where we were this time last year. Nothing we haven't seen or known of before. It happened, it is what it was. It has been said that with every recall, a memory changes, becoming different, no longer a representation of truth but believed as so nonetheless. Our realization of this year lived bears a shadow of the actuality, and in that the emotions of happiness are blunted, the memories of tragedy are sharpened, cutting deeper, wounding more, until enough change to the memory comes, and we no longer recognize it with the ferocity it once brought. This new year, simply a road marker, will of course be no different, for we are the same person, with the same issues, the same consciousness. This past year has consequences, but we are still us, only different.

2018 passed by, and it changed me, though that process has been a constant for me, but one theme plays out day after day. I am not the person I was born as. This past year, like all before it, had its good moments marred by bad ones. I grew as a person and a physician, but I also had parts of me hammered down, I lost parts I liked. I end this year a bit melancholy, grieving some. I enjoyed some success and the success of others, and I suffered loss, and the losses of others. Too often I watched people cast out, fired, divorced, abandoned, ignored, bullied, and I suffered my own similar trials. I saw people deserving and undeserving built up, and broken down. The end sum it seems, is one of loss. From our nation to ourselves, we are all diminished this year by the larger events of our times, casting an inescapable pallor over everything. It has been quite a year.

It has been forming in me for sometime, this idea, that life being what it is, we all just want to be protected from it. It all boils down to wanting to be accepted, being part of a whole, to feel the protection of membership, to be safe. It is what we focus on in myriad ways, struggling in the whirlpools of power and control. Sadly some don't understand this and ruin it for themselves, abusing jobs, people, and they fail at life. Some ruin it for others. I thought about what affected me the most, and it was watching myself and others feeling outside. I watched some struggle so hard to belong to this or that clique, and watched the Machiavellian gaming, fear, favoritism, psychopathy and bullying that form the dynamic of relationships, the balance of power and control that lies at the base of every human interaction no matter how big or small. I watched truth contorted, biases advocated, success mocked, weaknesses publicly shamed, first narratives claimed, more often than not these negative interactions, not so many positive ones. I watched and experienced poor leadership and poor followership damage good people, scar lives. I saw so few allowed in, too many kept out. It's a human thing, to gateway others, giving us some sense of self value by diminishing another rather than raising ourselves up, keeping them out. We are just animals with animal instincts. We expect so little of ourselves, allow so little for others. There is no place for human beings.

I have never felt like I belonged to anything or anyone, and now I just want to be left alone, the old curmudgeon. I share this not for sympathy, only at times does it sadden me. I share it as it informs my view of the world. I don't usually enjoy the company of others outside my family. Like all of us who work with others, I do long to feel like I belong at work, but my driven manner in medicine makes this impossible, and being the only clinician in the clinic isolates. It isolates too because I am a high example no one wants to make the effort to match, becoming a target to lower the bar of work expectations. Its a contradiction. Most people want to do a good job, work hard at it, but there are some for whom this is not enough and they need to bring others down. I expect much of others, a weakness, I know. I don't claim to be "all that", but I am all too often the best clinician in the room because I think getting it right matters, and I am self-devastating, often more than warranted, when I fail. In medicine such a claim is arrogance, it is a handhold against another to keep the competetive stakes manageable. That is as much a comment on the failure of others as of my own skill. I raise the bar and all too often, instead of rising up to meet it, I and others like me, are brought down. I have stood up only to be beat down. A friend who some years ago recognized this about me shared a pin with a paraphrase of Einstein's words, "Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds."   This is a part of me hammered off this year that I liked. I am now a fool taking refuge in silence. I am but an employee, I no longer wish to be a part of the change, to make things better, as Imonce felt was an obligation. To paraphrase E. M. Forster as a child, "I don't want to be brave. People hurt you when you are brave." Leave me alone, I will not be in charge of anyone or anything. But this is not a unique thing, I see this time and again in those around me. Workplaces, our communities, filled with oppressed wonderkind who have given up, all too Ayn Rand. Better people overcome, and if our livelihood did not hinge on it, we too could abandon caution. As it is, I find my voice muffled as I more and more hold my tongue (or my fingers), so as to keep my job, even when the issue is wholly unrelated. I am done struggling. I am just an employee and just want to be left alone to do my job. And sadly, so is everyone around me, some from their character, others from the daily trauma of the workplace. This is America, and I fear, the world, yesterday, today, tomorrow. Our greatness is cowed to others and we work towards a common mediocrity.

There is such beauty in this world. The tears of happiness of a loved one, hugs from true friends, head butts from a kitty, the sound of rain, a bird of prey in flight, the rush of wind across a field... All of us appreciate the beauty of these things. We appreciate belonging as a thing of beauty. We know the pain of being outside, the pain of the fear of not belonging, of not being safe, and once inside we are never quite sure, the pain persists. Knowing this I have to wonder how we can be so cruel. We weep at the compassion of others, and yet so easily deny our compassion to others. We hurt those who simply want to truly be with us, a gift we can so easily give. There doesn't have to be something in it for us, no Ferengi bargain, we get by giving. So give this beauty, let people be, include them all. That is where the joy of being alive lies: its not about you, it's about them.

2019 will be yet another year seeking to belong, for we all just want to matter, to feel safe, to be worthy of protection. We want to be able to rise and fall and know there is someone there to lift us and hold us, remind us we are among people who care, we are safe, we will be here tomorrow with our gifts and quirks. Be a protector, appreciate the palette that makes up the wonder of those around you. Make room for the eccentric. There is always someone smarter, better, richer, more gifted than you, and that makes you better, not less. Be compassionate of the seeker of belonging. Be a bettter human.

In the Scheme of Things

No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Manor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee. 

MEDITATION XVII Devotions upon Emergent Occasions John Donne

~

“No Man is an Island”. The notion is that we are all an essential part of a Whole, that the loss of any one of us diminishes us all.  Time and again, through the recidivist folly of mankind we see this brought fully into the light, when we fail to recognize the Islands, and cast them into the sea to make ourselves larger. While aware that there is a Whole, we are wont to erode the beaches of others, thinking that we alone matter. It is our nature.

It comes in small, and it comes in large. It comes in the body politic wherever people gather, every single relationship a struggle for power and control. It requires no words, though they are often slung against reason as scythes, it can be a glance, an act, an attrition, “the silence of our friends”, “the words of our enemies”.  It is out of the mind of the workplace psychopath, friend to all, enemy to all, the one voted best in class while Machiavelli takes admiring notes. It is in the murmur of underlings who despise the good Prince for being smarter, more than they. It is in the eyes of the unaccomplished seeking station through intrigue or rhetoric to make themselves whole, to assuage their insecurities. It is the foggy bottom of kindness returned with disparagement, with the making of another into a less than, the bully and the stone. It is in claiming the narrative as one’s own. History is not writ large, but rather small and perennial as we lack imagination and use the same hammer to strike at everything we see as nail to build ourselves.  All of us have clods of ourselves shorn and tossed.

To the Island, however diminutive or expansive, complete or broken, being part of the Whole is the reason for the sea, that we can be part of it all, valued. How does this parcel come to belong, becoming an essential element of the Whole? Who ordains belonging? Who outcasts the wretched? When we work so hard and fearfully to gain union, why do we not miss a moment to wash away another who is clinging to our shore awash in those same fears? Is it human nature to stand on the necks, rather than the respected shoulders of those around us? Eyes wide with empathy and compassion when someone else lifts another, while in the next breath diminishing Sisyphus, placing our foot against the rolling stone as he reaches the top of the mountain as if it is our place. We are terrible beings capable of great things, stuck in the mud of our own oppressive nature for fear of being less than.

Take no solace in being aware of this. Be not of the character to shoot first, to gain the first narrative at all costs, to form the chess moves in mind as you plan three, four steps ahead of another for your gain and not theirs. See others taken off the board, tipped to the checkered square, being able to do nothing but adapt to their lessened place in the game in anger and frustration for having been leveraged. Have no wish to control another to grow, but rather to make your respectful and graceful path towards the Whole depending on others to do their heavy lifting as is their task, lifting when it is yours.  Whatever you do, it is important that you do it well. If we depend on you, we will make demands of you, and this does not make you less than, for yours are the shoulders that all of us depend on, just as ours are there for you. That you might feel less than is the chip on your shoulder, not ours. Do not project this fault of your character as a fault of our character. It makes you base. Be responsible for yourself, your success and failures are not always of your own making, but they are yours to endure with grace. If someone hurts you, be graceful, if you help another be humble. This is the mettle defines who we are, not that we are adept at intrigue.

The rising tide lifts all boats. That we cannot appreciate this is our weakness, for we fear that there is not just the success of others, there are our own failures. Our character is the piecemeal assemblage of our innate being, shaped, carved, burnished, into the person we are now. Those who grow will not be that person tomorrow, but whether we are better, or not, depends not just on us, but those around us, those other Islands who are the Whole. An Island is warmed by the sun and blue sky, and then the hurricane strips it bare, it is washed in rain and burned in fire, and yet it persists, changed, better or worse. Do not for a moment think that, if the others cannot stand your fierceness you should stand your ground, for by and large they will bring you down to make you equal; there is no room for the eccentric now, no place for the different, we all must pretend, act our part. How then does an Island move to surround themselves with those who recognize their unique colors, not as a threat but as a contribution to the palette? That… that is the mystery of life.  Finding it is the joy of life.

So, when the bell tolls for you, in your time and place, if you have done well, there will be so many who are better than you for your having been, and you are not one iota less for having known your place. Be at peace with that knowing that you helped someone else belong to the Whole. But know your place, and do your thing well.

“In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.”

~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

“Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.”

~ Mahatma Gandhi

“No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.”

                                                            ~ Eleanor Roosevelt