I rode my ten-speed to work every day of my residency. I wasn’t deterred by the steep hills or the weather’s mercurial mood swings. In Iowa the winters are dark and deep, but even on the coldest winter mornings, I assumed the attitude of a mail carrier and saddled up. In the opaque December dawn, streetlights cast liquid shadows across the pavement, and I heard nothing louder than the gentle snowflakes as they fell from the sky, like in the third act of La Boehm. The stillness reminded me of how tree leaves become silent just before a cold front moves in. The looming towers of the University Hospital were the distant thunder, portending an approaching storm. The calm ended at the hospital’s glass doors.
The first year of my Internal Medicine residency was difficult. It was designed to be that way but not as a method to grind us down and mold us into something different—like they do to marine recruits or to college freshman pledging a fraternity (although the medical profession is that, in a way). Our basic training was an attempt to cram as much experience and information into our brains in the shortest possible amount of time.
We slept two nights out of every three— the third spent on the inpatient wards performing every kind of task you can imagine doing to, or for, a sick person. Each morning, after a long call night, we met in the office of the Chairman of Medicine for morning report, where we were fair game for criticism about our clinical decisions the night before. I usually lurked behind the potted plant in the Chairman’s office, trying to be inconspicuous and hoping he wouldn’t call on me to talk. My effort to blend into the surroundings made me even more noticeable, like a bad hairpiece, so I learned to hide in plain sight by sitting right next to him.
One morning, after report, I got on the elevator with two of my friends who also had been on call the night before. With drooped shoulders we stood in silence, chins on our chests, contemplating the full day ahead. We could not go home yet, and sleep was a distant shore.
The elevator ascended one floor and stopped. Its doors opened, and a third-year resident stepped through. He looked freshly minted—well breakfasted, hair combed, wearing a necktie, of all things. Those had all become foreign concepts to us—-how people behaved in another country, not ours.
We greeted each other without words as the door closed behind him. A beat passed and his face donned a wry smile as he looked us over and said……..”Aah yes, the young lions.“
I knew about the young lions. He was invoking Earnest Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, a book that should be on the required reading list of every American young man, like Treasure Island is for every boy.
Santiago, the old fisherman in the novel, ponders youth and old age during his three-day fishing journey. In his bed in the village and in his boat, he dreams of lions on the beaches of Africa at sunset, which he saw when he was a boy on a ship that sailed and fished off the coast. The lions symbolize Santiago’s youth, strength, and virility.
I recently attended my granddaughter’s graduation from high school. I like commencement ceremonies and the way everyone is awash with joy and optimism. It is a time of celebration, and the graduates are rightfully congratulated for all that they have learned and accomplished. They are not thinking about how it is really all still in front of them and how much there is for them yet to learn. Commencement is a good name for it—it’s more the beginning than the ending of something.
As I watched the procession, I remembered the young lions and suddenly realized that I no longer am one. For me, it’s not still all out in front. There is no escaping the basic fact of accounting that the days ahead are outnumbered by the ones I have left behind. I was allotted a certain amount of time, and it’s something I cannot invest, only spend, until it runs out.
Once I was a young lion. When I stopped being one I couldn’t say for sure because sometimes I still don’t feel like a grownup. I never really noticed getting older, although I’m sure others did. There are some things that younger generations think make us look old just because we know about them, like cassette tape players, the movie You’ve Got Mail, or a kazoo.
Once was I the one with vigor and boundless enthusiasm. I had that going for me, yet I now realize that I had little understanding of the way the world actually works and almost nothing in the way of self-awareness. l was booksmart but as dumb as they get when it came to why humans act the way that they do—especially myself. I was one of those who did well in class but had no clue about practical matters. I could recite the kings of England or explain the Periodic Table but stumbled at wearing clothes that fit or made sense.
I was a source of endless frustration to my roommate in college. He used to ask me how was it that I could get good grades yet had no common sense. Caroline, my current roommate, has had the same experience and frustration—she once called me “remedial.” She was nice about it and said that I had just been busy and that I hadn’t really had time for self-reflection.
Maybe. It’s true I hadn’t even considered trying to figure myself out. I didn’t know that was a thing—introspection. The workings of my interior self were Sanskrit to me.
I’m better than I used to be. This is the most introspective post I’ve written, and now, when somebody asks me, “How are you?” and I say, “Fine,” a part of me asks myself, “Are you really fine? Which parts are fine? Which ones are not fine?”
Did you ever notice that a truly wise person doesn’t say much while the foolish can’t stop talking? It’s because true wisdom is knowing what you don’t know, or as Socrates famously said, “…is in knowing that you know nothing.” He also said that the unexamined life is not even worth living, that all knowledge is founded on self-knowledge.
As we age, it turns out we don’t find all the answers like we once thought we would. It’s the questions, like the turtles in that creation myth, that go all the way down. Where did I come from and where am I going? Why am I still so unfinished and unvarnished? What have I learned and what, sadly, do I never seem to learn? What do I know and, most importantly, what do I not know? As my youthful audacity has worn away, I have become more aware of just how much I don’t know.
What is life if not constantly either hilarious or devastating? I had a friend who once told me, “The reason young guys don’t like to listen to the Blues is because they haven’t lived them yet.” He was right that it’s only after being in life for a while that we realize how hard it can be and how little we know and understand. We learn the hard way as our ideals and pragmatism war with each other and our bodies give way to the slow advance of entropy, creeping in like the tide.
There is a particular type of creative genius that arises only in the young. The romantic poets Keats and Shelley, Vincent Van Gogh, Mozart, or Bob Dylan come to mind as people who did their best work in their youth. You could say the same about most every rock band you can think of— certainly of every athlete.
The exuberance of youth is marked by a sense of wonder and a voracious lust for life. Promise and possibility are the basis for everything. Every moment of your life you enter a new universe, and with every decision you make, you are setting a path. And there are no easy paths—just paths.
Knowing and Not Knowing
The Dalai Lama, a wise person by most accounts, likes to say, “This seems like a good time to be quiet.” People come to him because they think he has reached the summit of understanding, and they ask questions about all kinds of things, including marriage or child rearing. He laughs and says, “I am a Buddhist monk; I am the last person to ask. I know nothing about those things.” Each morning his followers ask the Dalai Lama, “What will happen today?” and his reply is always, “I don’t know.”
There seems to be an inverse relationship between thinking of yourself as wise and actually being wise. As I have gotten older, I have been trying to more often say the words “I don’t know.” Because I usually don’t .
Albert Einstein (another person who did his best work when he was young) knew a lot of things, yet he is also famous for some of the things he got wrong. He was usually the smartest guy in the room but was willing to acknowledge and learn from his mistakes. He knew how much he did not know.
Einstein didn’t think that the universe was expanding even though his own theories suggested it was. To resolve the discrepancy, he introduced a fudge factor, the cosmological constant, into his equations. As the evidence for an expanding universe mounted, he admitted that he was wrong and considered the cosmological constant as his greatest mistake.
He made other errors, and it must have been difficult for him to sort it all out, knowing he was right about some things but not others. His theories were revolutionary enough to draw plenty of detractors even when they were correct. When Einstein was told of the publication of a book entitled 100 Authors Against Einstein, he replied, ”Why a hundred? If I were wrong, one would be enough.”
That seems to me like the right balance. We are entitled to our opinions and need to plant our flag somewhere, yet there is always the chance that we are wrong and will need to revise.
When we think we already understand, we fail to notice anything else. When we think we have the answers, we stop searching and thinking—nothing ever progresses and nothing more is learned.
To the traditional list of human virtues I would add the willingness to change one’s mind. It doesn’t happen as often as it should. I’ve listened to conversations where one gets the impression that world affairs have been settled once and for all. Some people will tenaciously cling to a position they didn’t really hold in the first place or argue with the fervor of a Pentecostal an opinion that is less about truth seeking than what makes them feel comfortable. As Carl Sagan said, “We should not be overly attached to a hypothesis just because it’s ours.” That’s true, nor reject one because we don’t want to share it with people we don’t like.
We do well to hold our dogmas lightly and approach things with humility and curiosity.
Ways of Knowing
There are ways of knowing that don’t involve thinking, and we can know something without really understanding it. The intuitive forms of knowing bypass the conceptual side of the brain; they aren’t made up of thoughts and can’t be explained in words.
Anyone who knows how to ride a bicycle would be hard-pressed to write down just what that knowledge is that allows them to ride. They could not easily explain exactly what they are doing and how. We know more than we can say, and our concept of reality itself is shaped and formed partly by intuitive or tacit forms of knowing. So there is also wisdom in not believing everything we’re thinking.
When perspective shifts, our reality is transformed. For example, up versus down is a concept that is shared by everyone around us but not someone standing on the other side of the Earth. I have friends in Nepal. If one of them and I are both told to point up we will be pointing in opposite directions, yet we will both be correct.
What we think we know for sure might be dependent on who is watching and where they’re watching from. Not every object or event we witness is fixed and immutable. Some of our most basic perceptions may not always be what they seem. Look at a star that is light-years away — it might actually have gone dim a long time ago. What we think are absolutes might be more like the constellations, which seem real enough but vanish when the same stars are viewed from a different spot in the galaxy.
What exists and what happens next, like Schrodinger’s cat, depends on the observer. The feathers of an indigo bunting contain no blue pigment. They appear blue because of the particular way light is refracted from the bird onto our retinae. “Blueness” is not a material present in the strands of the bunting’s feathers, just as “sweetness” is not something present in the molecules of a jar of honey. Blueness and sweetness are names we give to the subjective experience that occurs when we encounter those objects. We assume that the experience is the same for everyone, but there is no way we can say that for sure. I can never be certain that what I see as red is the same as what you see. Blueness and sweetness (and many other aspects of our reality) are real things that exist in the world; it’s just that they wouldn’t exist without us.
One person’s perspective is as unique as their fingerprints and more malleable. We can change our perspective when we assume an alternative viewpoint and see things through the eyes of another person or from another place. Say I take a walk in nature to ponder solutions to my problems. Once I get out there, I realize that everything looks different, as if they aren’t really problems at all.
Knowing and Timing
Perspective partly depends on where we are on the timeline. To a young lion, the thought that anything is possible is both exciting and frightening while to an elder, life can seem like a knot of paradox and contradiction.
My oldest granddaughter, the graduate, just left home for her freshman year of college. She is riding the winds of change, where uncertainty and anxiety are buoyed by youthful optimism. My life perspective is different than hers, and my innate idealism has worn thinner as I have had time to reflect on the oddities of life.
One thing that I have noticed is that however good or bad a situation is, it will change. Nothing stays the same, and we just hope that it all evens out in the end. I’ve seen that if you hang on and keep moving, you make a breakthrough to the next level, where things can be great for a while, until the pattern repeats itself. Each cycle pushes us to a higher level of consciousness and character. We don’t know that until we have lived through it a few times.
In any well -examined life, there comes a point where regret creeps in like a chill autumn mist. I wish I had continued taking piano lessons as a kid, and my boxes of vinyl records, along with my turntable —I sold them to a pawnshop. There are other, more consequential, regrets. For me, suffice it to say that mistakes were made. Many of my regrets are a result of my poor understanding at the time. They are complicated, and some things I would like to change, but not all of them. Everything is intertwined, and we take the good with the bad.
The poet/farmer Wendell Berry wrote that the best remedy for mistakes is to not make them in the first place. That’s a good thought but not an option for most of us. It’s too late, and anyway, our mistakes can be the best teachers of all. Our regrets are really just another way of wanting our wishes to come true, but we should be careful with our wishes and dreams—they, too, have to be put into perspective. Like Stephen Colbert said, “If we were all granted our first dreams, the world would be overrun by cowboys and princesses.”
It turns out that life is hard to understand while we are living it, and the world is not a wish-granting factory. The only way to look at it is that chance and choice are what make us who we are. We might mistake one for the other, but our choices are the cobblestones that pave the way to our destiny. The process of becoming one’s self involves the willingness to own our choices and their consequences. It is easy to mourn the lives we never lived, but we can’t tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse, and we only get one life.
It takes a long time to grow all the way up, and in some ways it’s like coming full circle. We spend the first half of life tying to learn ourselves, and then we begin to see there are some things we are better off unlearning. We start out thinking that we don’t need “anybody’s help in any way,” until suddenly, “those days are gone and (we’re) not so self-assured.”
Bob Dylan, as usual, says it best:
“Ah, but I was so much older then,
I’m younger than that now”
(My Back Pages)
Caroline has a way of saying something with a few word while it takes me many. I shared some of my thoughts while writing this blog and she summed it all up with this:
“When we are younger, we are so sure of ourselves. We think we have all the answers. We get older, and we realize we don’t really know anything.”
There is an internal dialogue between what we hold as accepted fact and the questions that linger and gnaw at us. We think that a sign of adulthood is when we have it all figured out, but then the opinions that we once held with passionate intensity are shattered by the doubt and uncertainty that comes with knowing that we don’t know everything.
It’s not as if we have nothing to hold onto. We do, and it’s fine to have the courage of our convictions, but it’s only when we know what we know and know what we don’t know that we have arrived. It is when we throw out the certitude that we cling to like a security blanket and start over with fresh perspectives rooted in a “blank slate” way of looking at the world that we actually live the freedom and innocence of youth for the first time.
When we unlearn ourselves, we unlock ourselves and reawaken to openness and possibility. The font of wonder need never run dry, and it’s never too late for a happy childhood
Journeys and Journals 