Better/ besser

Hugs for Haiti!

I'm healing. My jaw's still swollen, but this time there's much less pain. It's like the jealousy thing. Some deep-seated fears and hurts are difficult to deal with. But when you face them head on with patience and loving kindness, it works.

The wounds are still there, but they're no longer unbearable. In fact, it's thrilling to feel them slowly getting better. What a wondrous way life works!

Es hat sich alles verbessert. Sowohl die Zahnschmerzen als auch die Herzschmerzen sind zwar nicht ganz weg, doch minimal geworden. Und werden Tag für Tag weniger. Das wird jetzt zum heilenden Blog. Hurra!

In Waiting/ Wartezeit

Procrastination has a bad name, but it's no thief. It's a lender of time. I procrastinate. A lot. But instead of calling it that, I call it waiting. What a difference a twist of terminology can make.

If you procrastinate, you're bad, you're lazy, you're self-destructive, sabotaging, etc. All the success gurus preach against it. But waiting is another story. Waiting makes you patient. And sometimes saves energy that might be wasted doing unnecessary things.

I don't need to do everything that occurs to me. Waiting gives others a chance to do them. Some things turn out to be a bad idea. Then I'm glad I waited. I can wait years for the right time, decades for the right thing. Yet, when the moment is right, things happen instantaneously with little effort on my part and hardly any duration of time.

Time to dream, time to rest, time to let things work themselves out; sometimes we have more time than we think, if only we would take it.
Hugs for Haiti!

In Deutschland wird die Man~ana-Mentalität belächelt. Die Deutschen seien nicht so, meint man. Schade. Denn manchmal ist es nützlich, warten zu können. Es passiert sehr viel, wenn man selber nichts unternimmt. Wir überschätzen manchmal die Wichtigkeit des Tuns. Gelegentlich ist das Lassen nicht nur wertvoller, sondern essentiell.

Also, tue, was du nicht lassen kannst--und geniesse den Rest.

Pershon/ Patient

Someone once asked why doctors call what they do "Practice." It's probably the same reason we call the people they treat "Patients." Unfortunately, practice doesn't always make perfect.

One of the first patients to express gratitude for my caring was a woman named Betty. She sent me a bright Thank You card after her release (another telling word) from hospital signed "your pershon, Betty." I've forgotten what ailment she had, or how I helped, but it was a rare, special feeling to know I'd done something she found worthwhile.

I was never sure of the effects of my treatments. It is impossible to gage the full consequences of an action. Life isn't as neat as the statistics we base therapeutic decisions on. I have a healthy portion of skepsis about those statistics and the glowing publications they inspire.

Today, I am grateful to all the patient people who entrusted their lives to me, shared their most intimate stories, enured my prodding, and let me poke my fingers into unspoken orifices. I thank them for suffering my requests, forgiving me my shortcomings and sharing the triumphs of recovery, too. How many? Innumerable. But I'll add a round 200 to the thank you count and Betty's variation on patient to my vocabulary. Pershon is like a hybrid between patient and person. It sums things up nicely and feels a lot more human to me.

Heute bedanke ich mich bei allen Patientinnen und Patienten, die sich von mir behandeln liessen.