What I Do, I Understand
Confucius and Me
What I hear, I forget.
What I see, I remember.
What I do, I understand.
- Confucius, about 451 BC
My first sight of an open abdomen, the exposed organs, took my breath away. Under the bright surgical lamps, moist tissues gleamed. Looking inside the living body was like seeing mountains for the first time, or the ocean, or the stars in a brilliant night sky. Experiencing the truth of breathing on this planet, being alive.
Bowel, liver, arteries pulsed in time with the patient’s heartbeat. I thought, we have no idea what our glistening insides really look like …
When you’re given the scalpel
I was a new graduate, assisting as an intern in the operating room. The patients were having operations for breast cancer, gallstones, bypass of blocked arteries, emergency surgery for bowel perforation, the whole gamut of miseries that send us onto operating tables.
From the other side of the patient, the surgeon turned and looked up at me. Below his blue surgical cap, a few wispy grey hairs stuck out behind his ears.
“What are you planning to do following the internship?” he asked, half-interested.
I was still planning to specialize in endocrinology, or another branch of internal medicine; alternatively psychiatry, pediatrics, obstetrics—I loved them all. I wanted to learn as much as I could in every specialty. (Of course I ended up in family medicine, which included the whole lot. I didn’t have to give up anything, but that’s another story.)
We interns soon grasped that the staff doctors—the specialists who supervised us—became more interested in teaching us if we said we were planning to enter their specialty. In my case, I wasn’t exactly lying. Everything interested me.
So I said, “I’m planning to specialize in surgery.”
His face, at least the part of it I could see above his mask, lit up. He eyed me over the top of his glasses.
I said, “Yes, surgery.”
In a suddenly chipper voice he started to explain the operation in more detail. He spent extra time teaching, and gave me a more active role. Then he handed me the scalpel. My heart thumped in my throat.
Temporarily, the surgeon became my assistant. Working under his guidance, I learned “by doing” to perform hernia operations and appendectomies myself, from the first incision to the very last stitch to close the abdomen.
When it clicks
As a boy I loved to watch baseball players swinging at the plate, football quarterbacks backing up to throw beautiful, long passes; but until I swung the bat myself, and held the football in my own hands, I could not fully understand.
I watched the marvelous skiers who carved confident, smooth, and graceful parallel turns down mountains; I dreamed of being like them. I poured over the book, How to Ski. I stared at the photos on the crucial pages, those showing the transition from intermediate skiing, where I was stuck, to expert skiing. “You will start to feel weightless, to float and swoop like a bird,” the author wrote.
But reading his “how to” didn’t help in the slightest. Only with actually doing it, trying again and again under an instructor’s eyes, did it finally click; one day, suddenly, I discovered that coveted feeling. Floating, swooping.
What I hear, I forget. What I see, I remember. What I do, I understand.
During my training my heart quickened to assist the surgeon while he explained every step. Yet it wasn’t until he handed me the scalpel, and coached me while I did the operation, that I truly grasped things. Only when I performed an appendectomy myself did I truly “get it”.
Yet I can’t brush aside the power of seeing, as opposed to doing. With apologies to Confucius, seeing, too, brings profund understanding.
My heart quickens to gaze inside our open, living body. I am overcome with marvel. Its an awe that runs deep; it never leaves me.
For there is understanding in that glistening view. Beneath it, I’ve begun to grasp its mysterious, underlying essence: the wondrous, pulsating, astonishing fabric of life itself.
You are a fantastic writer! Loved this piece and the one before about color and mood 😊. Keep it up!
Beautifully written, Peter. I especially like the way you tied the first paragraph to the last, making your point about the wonder and fragility of life. You made me feel it, too!