Moved!

To scribeintheward.blogspot.com to record this chapter in life involving medical school!

Leisure: I Can't Get No Satisfaction

Ecclesiastes 2:

1 I said in my heart, “Come now, I will test you with pleasure; enjoy yourself.” But behold, this also was vanity...I searched with my heart how to cheer my body with wine—my heart still guiding me with wisdom—and how to lay hold on folly, till I might see what was good for the children of man to do under heaven during the few days of their life.

4 I made great works. I built houses and planted vineyards for myself. 5 I made myself gardens and parks...I had also great possessions of herds and flocks...8 I also gathered for myself silver and gold and the treasure of kings and provinces. I got singers, both men and women, and many concubines, the delight of the children of man. 9 So I became great and surpassed all who were before me in Jerusalem... 10 And whatever my eyes desired I did not keep from them. I kept my heart from no pleasure, for my heart found pleasure in all my toil, and this was my reward for all my toil.

11 Then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it, and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun.

So here we have a pretty picture of a life of leisure, (leisure defined as enjoying yourself and having no obligations ). He gives himself to whatever his heart desires, and even works hard at this lesire. Yet he concludes that all is vanity, and there was nothing to be gained. Leisure fails to satisfy. "What does a man gain," he asks, "by all the toil at which he toils under the sun?" (Eccle 1:3) Leisure is no gain; it is no compensation for toil.

Have you experienced this? Perhaps you come home from a long day of work to veg out in front of the TV. To get a little fun in your life after hours of long tasks. The TV show is never funny enough, didn't get your adrenaline pumping enough,wasn't heart-rending or passionate enough. You're dissatisfied. So you flip to another TV show. Maybe this one will hit the spot. Or maybe it's not a TV show - perhaps it's a Whopper (or a couple Whoppers), or bar-hopping, or shopping for gadgets or clothing. Part of the joy of shopping is the anticipation, the choosing, finding a steal. But after about a week, the new iPhone turns out to have bad reception, or the sweater shrinks two sizes in the wash. So you look for something else. Leisure seems like a hunger that rarely is satisfied. We're never having enough fun to compensate for the hours in the cubicle. At least that's what I experienced during my stint in the working world.

I'd like to think that the concept of leisure as a necessity is a relatively new one. That leisure in the middle ages, say, was primarily a privilege of the wealthy. That the majority of the world's population had little time for leisure, between practicing a trade, doing the laundry, cooking, cleaning, and raising the kids. Leisure for the masses could be found on the rare occasion during holidays, Sabbaths, perhaps. So leisure generally could not serve as a justification for toil. But given the technological advances of our time, specialization which enables more efficient distribution of labor, and the extension of our day by artificial means, we suddenly have extra hours in our day with which we can please ourselves.

The article on leisure in Wikipedia supports this view:

The word leisure comes from the Latin word licere, meaning “to be permitted” or “to be free,” via Old French leisir, and first appeared in the early fourteenth century.[2] The notions of leisure and leisure time are thought to have emerged in Victorian Britain in the late nineteenth century, late in the Industrial Revolution. Early factories required workers to perform long shifts, often up to eighteen hours per day, with only Sundays off work. By the 1870s though, more efficient machinery and the emergence of trade unions resulted in decreases in working hours per day, and allowed industrialists to give their workers Saturdays as well as Sundays off work.
Affordable and reliable transport in the form of railways allowed urban workers to travel on their days off, with the first package holidays to seaside resorts appearing in the 1870s, a trend which spread to industrial nations in Europe and North America. As workers channeled their wages into leisure activities, the modern entertainment industry emerged in industrialized nations, catering to entertain workers on their days off. This Victorian concept—the weekend—heralded the beginning of leisure time as it is known today."

We are a nation intent on enjoying ourselves. The pursuit of happiness is even written in our constitution. And yet what's curious is that as a nation, we take less vacation days than most European countries. A study titled "Overwork in America" Found that:

• The average number of paid vacation days employees have is 16.6 days. The average number of vacation days employees had already taken or expected to take in 2004 was 14.6 days.
The most important finding on how U.S. employees take their vacations is:
• More than 1/3 of employees (36%) do not plan to use their full vacations.

And comparing US paid vacation time after 10 years tensure, n a study from Mercer HR consulting in 2007: We have much less vacation time than most European countries (25 hours compared to the maximum of 44 in Finland), and are pretty on par with many Asian countries (25 hours also in Taiwan and Indonesia, and 19 hours being the minimum in Thailand and the Phillippines). Perhaps it is because we are driven to work so hard and so long that we demand entertainment as compensation. Despite the cries for "more vacation time!", leisure, I would argue, is neither a right nor a necessity.

Yet I think there's something very real here going on underneath the surface: you and I are hungry and dissatisfied. Leisure promises laughter, distraction, pleasure, satiation, and contentment, but its promises invariably ring hollow. Toil, too, is ultimately no source of satisfaction either, in and of itself.

After his long exploration into the ways of man in Ecclesiastes, Solomon concludes, "Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil." (Ecclesiastes 12:13-14) Solomon leaves us no hope for meaningful lives, other than to live in light of judgment. And yet his father David experienced so much more:

You make known to me the path of life;
in your presence there is fullness of joy;
at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.
- Psalm 16

Henri Nouwen reminds us that true Christian leadership is rooted in being in the presence of God. Yet on the spectrum of obligation and pleasure, I confess that prayer and Bible study for me inevitably fall on the side of obligation. I continue to seek meaning through my work and through my leisure time, though I find them empty. How foolish I am! Here I die of thirst while I am lying beside streams of living water! I continue to grope blindly in darkness, only because I refuse to open my eyes!

Lord, teach me to shun the foolish pleasures that I seek, the shiny, empty promises which do not satisfy, my sins and idols. Teach me to seek what is truly good, to pursue in my leisure the source of life, fullness of joy, and pleasures forever!

Science's Myopia

There is a short-sightedness which plagues science. Somehow as science becomes focused ever-smaller, from peering at small things under electron microscopes to dissecting the properties of single atoms, the scientists forget their excitement.

As a fifth-grader, I had more awe and wonder when my first seed poked out its tender shoot, than I did in college level, stirring up concoctions in beakers and over bunsen burners. Stopping for a moment on a hike to gaze over a mountain vista, I think I grasp the beauty and sheer magic of life much more than I ever did hitting the books.

As science becomes continually more specialized and more downwards focused, it has lost what was most precious about it: the sheer wonder of it all that speaks of God.

I tried to capture some of that lost excitement by putting together a science of cooking class. We made vinegary wine, visited a goat cheese farm, and did pretty cool experiments cooking amino acids. The picture you see is the liquid nitrogen ice cream one student did for her final project. We had fun (and it was a lot of work on my part), but we never got past the getting-excited-about-science piece. Our good friend David Scudder captured the worship part through his website.

In science classes, we are always taught, "isn't that so neat that form follows function?" They always forget to mention the last part: "and doesn't that speak of an awesome God!"

Let's throw off our glasses and look to the heavens! (Sadly, with my poor vision I would only see about five feet.)

Knights in Shining Armor & Damsels in Distress

When I was growing up, I had a big weakness for fairytales. And I think part of my shameful attraction to them might be this: I secretly wish that I had some special significance or talent and will be picked out from the crowd as the one for success. That I'll be Cinderella scrubbing the floors and then 'discovered', and then I'll be crowned Queen of the land and everyone back home who was mean or overlooked me will beat their heads saying, "Gosh, was I a fool to be so mean to Jennifer." Or something of that sort. Or that I would be Beauty, who would see past the rough exterior of the Beast and redeem his world through my simple belief, my own unique ability to see. In effect, I wanted to be both the damsel in distress, saved from her squalor and the wretched people around her because of my specialness, and I wanted to be the knight in shining armor who fate rewards for being nice to the ants. And listens to genies. And things of that sort.

Most movies, if you think about it, fall into the categories of knights and damsels, or in less fairytale language, heroes and victims. The Titanic was moving because they were all victims, which you knew from the start: victims of a doomed ship, victims of a doomed cross-class love. The Dark Knight - appealing because he tries to be so heroic despite the seemingly insurmountable odds of evil.

In some ways, it seems necessary for there to be exaggerated heroes, victims, and foes. It's necessary for the protagonist to make himself a victim in order to be the hero, in order to have some big odds and enemies to fight. Heroes are heroic in their victimhood. The members of the Fellowship of the Ring are victims, having inherited the foolish decisions of their fathers, victims of their own latent evil and greed which disintegrates the fellowship. Their battle is a huge one: the seemingly small forces of good against the overwhelming omniscient forces of evil. People who are supposed to know things say that a story is a conflict and a resolution. What sort of story would it be if our proud hero's main struggle in life was with a stubbed toe? Would it be worth listening to? (Interestingly, there is a new wave of movies where the battles are little everyday stupid ones - movies like Juno, and About Schmidt - which is sometimes why I have trouble watching them, because the problems seem so inconsequential.)

So why is this important? Because what we think makes a good story affects how we narrate our own stories. It is tempting to paint oneself as a victim: a victim of events and forces beyond yourself, a victim of your parents and family, a victim of poor schools or friends. A victim for not having had the knight in shining armor leap the chasm of your loneliness and speak into your life, and tell you that you are loved, to snap out of it, to reach higher.

There's a fascinating study I learned about in Human Behavioral Biology. Some rats were exposed repeatedly to electric shocks, and eventually, with enough time, they exhibited symptoms of depression - curling up in their cage with their blood having chemicals released during high stress. Other rats had a lever in their cage that released dopamine into their brains, which stimulated pleasure and blunted the pain. When they were exposed to electric shocks, the rats learned to push repeatedly on the lever, and they didn't show signs of depression. Even when the lever was disconnected from the dopamine, and didn't do a thing, when the electric shocks started coming, the rats would race to the lever and madly pedal on it. And, strangely enough, even though the lever wasn't actually doing a thing, the rats still didn't show signs of stress or depression. The take home lesson, is that when the rats believed they had some control over a situation, they wouldn't get depressed or stressed out.

There are additional studies which show that individuals with depression tend to have an attitude of helplessness. Total victimhood is tempting, but not ultimately healthy or helpful. Victimhood is easy because it takes away responsibility, our responsibility to return good for evil, to act above and beyond the cards we are dealt in life. And that is the miracle of the gospel, really. That God wasn't a victim of us messing everything up, that He didn't just return evil for evil with which man treated Him, but He rose above the occasion and covered everything with love, and from death and injustice of Christ's death, He created redemption and salvation and sanctification. The beauty of Christianity is that we're not locked in an endless cycle of evil and hatred and suffering. We can be responsible for our actions and responses. As David Powlison wrote in an article, on the day of judgment, God will not ask, "Shat happened to you?" but rather "What did you do?"

As Powlison notes, there's certainly a real danger in veering too far and claiming total human responsibility. Which definitely is not true. Because the Bible notes how in a very real way, we are victims of the world, the flesh, and the devil. "Man is both responsible, and a sufferer. We are guilty and victims." To deny suffering is to have an unrealistic view of the world. Here's a question to tackle: So what is our responsibility? When do I know that I need to change my circumstances? Or if I just need to tough it out and get a better attitude?

I hurt all over!

In my experience, many women complain of aches and pains as they grow older - which makes me wonder, could the physical pain be also a manifestation of emotional pain?

This article made me think about how may psychiatric "illnesses" can have differing interpretations on causes, and it can have different manifestations, all dependent on worldview.

Adam shared with me this fantastic NPR Radio Lab talk (not sure where it is online) where our esteemed Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky shared about how we experience emotion: it is processed by our amygdala, which sends signals throughout the body, which we then interpret as the emotion: fear, disgust, joy, etc.

I talked with a pain specialist that he works with, and he says that women actually have a LOWER tolerance of pain than men do. Which perhaps is not surprising because emotional people also seem to also have more physical pain. So then, could all of the fibromyalgia, aches, and pains, have some kind of emotional cause behind them?

My first patient died today. I called the family member for a follow-up call for our study, and she said, "I don't feel like talking. My brother died this morning." I was shocked. I didn't know what else to say but, "I'm so sorry." He was a very nice gentleman too.

Fail Early and Get It All Over With

Rev. William Swing, at 2007 Stanford Baccalaureate:

Swing said some people don't fail until they're 45 years old—and it devastates them.

"Fail early and get it all over with," Swing said, a suggestion that elicited surprised laughter from the audience. "If you learn to deal with failure, you can raise teenagers. You can abide in intimate relationships. And you can have a worthwhile career. You learn to breathe again when you embrace failure as a part of life, not as the determining moment of life."

He advised graduates to work on their own passions, not someone else's.

"Whether comedy or faith or youthful idealism—whatever, be an apprentice in something that beckons your heart to pursue with endless fascination," Swing said. "None of us three was an expert in many things, but all three of us were passionate about one thing. Some unique one thing. My advice to you graduates: Stay with the things that draw you like a magnet. Trust your DNA. Pay attention to your daydreams."

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2007/june20/swing-062007.html