First day of class today; had to write a journal entry about “how I’m doing.” Talk about vague!
How I’m doing, in the context of ITP, lab research, and music:
Today’s first class came as a relief to me – a chance to step back and reflect on the course of my recent life and consider the priorities of my future. Having worked in lab up to the very last instant this past weekend, I was overwhelmed by the smaller picture, fine-tuning protocols and refining figures. While such work is the inevitable follow-up to charting out the grand scheme for a project with potential clinical use, it was refreshing to hear about caring for patients again, and to bring back the emotion and moral guidance that led me to embrace medicine in the first place.
I decided to become pre-med because I wanted to be able to impact people’s lives by granting them greater health to sustain their happiness. I remember when I was first starting to pay closer attention to the vast sea of people around me and realized how many talents sprung out of each and every individual. It became my conviction then that I could best serve this world by finding ways to preserve that capacity for creativity and love through clinical work.
Between that point and today, I discovered my love for research, and carefully picked my most recent project as something that I could really believe in, a creative concept that nevertheless was still grounded in the ambition to formulate a paradigm applicable to real patients’ needs. But research is only a beginning, and like a rocket launching off, a destination must always be in mind if not in sight. Scientific knowledge, research, procedures, clinical equipment – all of these are the machinery; they are the path but not the end.
Today I was reminded of the true end – people’s livelihood and happiness – ideas in the company of souls and emotions. But I thought to myself: can soul and emotion only suddenly appear at the very end, and not be anywhere before? That cannot be true; no tree bears sweet fruit if it were not already channeling sugary sap as a sprout. Somehow, I have to infuse my work and study, in lab or in medical school, with bits and pieces of the humanity I want to serve in the end.
After class concluded for the day, I practiced violin for two hours – repertoire for one, improvisation for another. Sure, I confess that I have an audition for the LSO coming up, but my fingers, by proxy for my own soul, were itching to make music regardless. I express my own emotions, my hopes and my disappointments, best through music, especially music that is of my own pen and mind. I know that whatever stresses medicine and science throw at me, I can find my outlet and meditation through music.
Music is for me that infusion of humanity. I am reminded that there are beautiful qualities of the human being which are not easily explained or quantified; yet, the process of creating that beauty involves minutiae and physical forces which do require rational thought and diligent practice. I have sworn to myself that I will never give up music, no matter how tempting it is to quit to spare myself those precious hours every week.
My biggest regret this summer, I think, was that when I began working in lab again, I only played music once a week or so. I thought I was creating more time to work, but the less I played, the more stressed and confused I became. I realize now that that was because I started living day-to-day, thinking only about the next day’s experiments, even forgetting for awhile about the paper that was to come out of the experiments.
The human mind is strange thing, where stimulating one area can stimulate a completely opposite area. So, today’s reminders in class and my subsequent meditation on these ideas through music have helped me recalibrate myself and hopefully continue moving forward in the right direction. In short, I’m doing better, all things considered.