When Breathe Becomes Air

"Throughout college, my monastic, scholarly study of human meaning would conflict with my urge to forge and strengthn the human relationships that formed that meaning. If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining? "

Whitman ahd had no better luck than the rest of us at building a coherent "physiological-spiritual" vocabulary, but at least the ways in which he'd faied were illuminating.

Words began to feel as weightless as the breath that carried them. Moral speculation was puny compared to moral action.

Any neursurgical problem fores a patient and family to answer this question: What makes life meaningful enough to go on living?

Quote from his friend:

"There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of living"

The way forward would seem obivous, if only I knew how many months or years I had left. Tell me three months, I'd spend time with family. Tell me one year, I'd write a book. Give me ten years, I'd get back to treating diseases. The truth that you live one day at a time didn't help： What was I supposed to do with that day?

A physician's duty is not to stave off death or return patients to their old lives, but to take into our arms a patient and family whose lives have disintegrated and work until they can stand back up and face, and make sense of, their own existence.

From the Englightenment onward, the individual occupied center stage. But now I lived in a different world, a more ancient one, where human action paled against superhuman forces, a wolrd that was more Greek tragedy than Shakespeare