The sense of it is returning

4,665 was supposed to be some kind of departure. Not a departure from writing but a departure from the systems that left me gasping for air. Whoops.

Just as my mentors had warned, you learn more in your first year of medical practice than in the entirety of your residency training. You see more, say more, do more, be more. Even as someone who trained for six years in three venues, nothing could have been more true. It's almost a joke. My first day on call, I saw four or five disorders that I had only ever encountered in textbooks. That weekend I also met a child whose tardive dyskinesia had returned as a post-ictal phenomenon - as far as I can determine, this is a specific circumstance that no one else has ever encountered.

But in all of this more, you also feel less, sense less. Maybe you even are less. And in doing it all alone for the first time, you receive a primal education in the detached aloneness of medical practice. A certain priestly aspect that results from the emotional and physical labor, burning you out as distant and black as a cassock.

I had hoped for relaunch into the good of what had been before. Instead I took a deep breath and let something pull me even deeper in.

The sense of it has begun to return

I need this, and was re-taught that need, almost too late.

The word "need" is wrong. Recall that thing the you-that-you-are cannot not be. That bottomless fiery thing for which the word "need" is completely pallid, a description with all the fumbling inefficacy of tying wet shoelaces with numb fingers. That which, when the rubble is pulled away piece by piece and it emerges hard and bright into the sunshine, still pierces you.

That need - that sense of exigent longing is coming back to me.

It is returning to the senses

This past year, I finally got counseling, about 25 years overdue. There's a story I don't know if I could ever write to completion.

One crucial lesson from counseling: there are only three sources or streams of information. You have mental thoughts, you have emotional feelings, and you have bodily sensations. You can do with them as you will, follow them or bypass them, and either way is potentially to your detriment. But they are always telling you something.

Life, instead, instructs us to bypass. Bypass those sensations that drive you from your desk at school. Bypass those emotions that give rise to alacrity and suddenness and reckless joy. Bypass those thoughts that at the slightest touch spiral into the air or burrow deep below the water's surface or fulminate into crystalline equations. These crackling sparks bursting light into the air around us, wringing chords ex nihilo - all that we are taught to bypass and allow to evaporate, unseen and unheard.

Enough. We should be helped to listening.

Writing gives me a bodily sensation that is difficult to describe - not simply satisfaction or joy or fulfillment or epiphany but God I needed that, and even, God that needed me, too.

The sense of it is : returning

Maybe the sensation or feeling that arises from writing is simply that - returning. The returning to or the recurrence of some thing that we find we can't do without.

Fun bit of etymology. The word thing comes from the Middle English word þing, a word which first meant a meeting or assembly, but evolved first into a subject of discussion or concern, and then shed even more specificity to denote an inanimate object. My wife and I often find ourselves asking each other "Is this a thing?" which seems to means "Should we confer and satisfy our concerns about this objective fact?" A proper þing is thus tripartite. The objective fact. The subjective assessment. The moment in which we confer.

So the sense of it is : returning. Finding the path back to that item, that object, that concept, that concern, so that I can confer with you.

The sense of it is returning

I could never write a book, because I am never finished with any thing. But I could semi-wiki it.

I realize that I never have my entire story written. No one does or should even want to. Just as you are free to choose another present or future, you are always free to choose another past. The necessity of that freedom has never hit me so strong as this past year.

Because we don't ever settle on a single past. Granted, we must forgive. Meaning accept. It is essential that we relinquish the hope-fear that what has happened could have happened differently. Or even, the hope-fear that what will happen might have happened differently. Forgiveness for the events of the future and the nature of the present. 

But we don't have to stop learning from what has happened. Every past that we learn from allows us to choose another. This is why a book is unsatisfying. A worthwhile book instantly demands a sequel, reimaginings and retellings and relearnings that expand what paper and ink tried impossibly to contain. 

To some sense within me, that containment is unbearable. I was never here to make dead things.

Thus, we might entertain a slightly different format. Still words on a page, strung together in sections. But words that might never not change. Living documents given to the hands of future selves and others, that they might pass through an infinite succession of persons. 

Every þing is a returning. All is subject to update. Isn't that the point? I could really go for a samosa. Be out there.