excerpt from a letter to a friend 08/10/12
Sometimes I think more clearly with a pen in my hand.
"I like to hope I could create a more ideal world. I guess this tells how young I still am.... I was talking to a [rare] very contented patient. She has cancer and was saying how, in the end, death happens to everyone and life never quite makes sense. She said, "Don't waste your time trying to understand it. You never will. You can't figure it out. Just be thankful for it while you're here." And sometimes I think my idealism needs a good dose of thankful senseless reality. But I can't get away from hungering to know it all because it is unknown, or to do it all because it is undone, or to perfect my life simply because it isn't idealized. Challenge and novelty and the forsureandcertain impossible. Doesn't the dreaming keep something alive even if it never becomes more than dreaming? And would it be a bad thing to believe in the achievability of what was known to be unachievable even if it did look like a willful delusion or stupid fantasy - if it gave you hope? But then again, is that same willful wild idealism the spirit that engenders what I find in so many people and patients - unwillingness to accept that there is a time for everything? Refusal of the gift of death? Settling for what can become angry empty quantity rather than quality of life?
"I think about these things on my job. The questions are my friends. Some people are addicted to Dilaudid; I am addicted to wondering. Elie Wiesel says that "questions are the true dialogue," that "man raises himself toward God by the questions he asks," that "I pray to the God within me to give me the strength to ask Him the right questions" (Wiesel, "Night"). Elie and his haunting questions born out of a beautiful soul and a legacy of faith he couldn't just inherit and a heart shattered into stark truth-seeking by a holocaust. Sometimes I wonder which of the questions, or what part of them all, is born of what element. Is this a piece of what I'm made to be, a piece of my honest response to legacy, or shrapnel from a holocaust? Either way I find God here and maybe in the end, as Elie suggests, that is the deepest dialogue and the real meaning of a question... maybe? Maybe?"
"I like to hope I could create a more ideal world. I guess this tells how young I still am.... I was talking to a [rare] very contented patient. She has cancer and was saying how, in the end, death happens to everyone and life never quite makes sense. She said, "Don't waste your time trying to understand it. You never will. You can't figure it out. Just be thankful for it while you're here." And sometimes I think my idealism needs a good dose of thankful senseless reality. But I can't get away from hungering to know it all because it is unknown, or to do it all because it is undone, or to perfect my life simply because it isn't idealized. Challenge and novelty and the forsureandcertain impossible. Doesn't the dreaming keep something alive even if it never becomes more than dreaming? And would it be a bad thing to believe in the achievability of what was known to be unachievable even if it did look like a willful delusion or stupid fantasy - if it gave you hope? But then again, is that same willful wild idealism the spirit that engenders what I find in so many people and patients - unwillingness to accept that there is a time for everything? Refusal of the gift of death? Settling for what can become angry empty quantity rather than quality of life?
"I think about these things on my job. The questions are my friends. Some people are addicted to Dilaudid; I am addicted to wondering. Elie Wiesel says that "questions are the true dialogue," that "man raises himself toward God by the questions he asks," that "I pray to the God within me to give me the strength to ask Him the right questions" (Wiesel, "Night"). Elie and his haunting questions born out of a beautiful soul and a legacy of faith he couldn't just inherit and a heart shattered into stark truth-seeking by a holocaust. Sometimes I wonder which of the questions, or what part of them all, is born of what element. Is this a piece of what I'm made to be, a piece of my honest response to legacy, or shrapnel from a holocaust? Either way I find God here and maybe in the end, as Elie suggests, that is the deepest dialogue and the real meaning of a question... maybe? Maybe?"
"Addicted to wondering." Nice!
ReplyDeleteElie Wiesel once spoke at a temple in Deerfield, so I went, not to hear what he had to say, but just to see him. I wanted to see what the person who wrote all those haunting words looked like.