In my last phone call with my book coach, she was giving me suggestions for getting more of my inner landscape on the page. She said, “Readers don’t want to read about when things are going well for you. They want to read about pain, about how you overcame it to move forward.”
I had written a scene in which I took my son to the emergency room. She said, “I’ve been in the emergency room with my kids. Describe the fear and worry that you felt.” I went back in my memory to my feelings at the time.
The emotion that was the strongest was relief. It was partly because, as a physician, the ED was not foreign territory for me. The people who worked there were not strangers. I had spent so much fear and worry in my decision to get there, that it felt good to turn over the responsibility to someone I trusted.
Flow and Mindfulness
It’s a similar relief at the beginning of taking a big, important exam. For me, the relief happens at the beginning, not at the end of the test. The stress and the worry are in studying and anticipation. Once the test begins, it’s just a matter of focus and answering the questions.
Time disappears, but I move quickly and efficiently. Part of this is because of flow. In some challenging situations, I have developed the skills to match those situations. But it’s not just skill that turns stress into flow. It’s also mindfulness.
After reading Full Catastrophe Living and practicing mindfulness with body scans, meditation, and yoga, I took a training with the author, Jon Kabat-Zinn. At the training, he said, “There is no stress in the present moment.” What he meant was, there are stress and worry in thinking of the future. There may be remorse or nostalgia in thinking of the past.
But if one is truly in touch with what is going on inside and outside the body, there is no stress, just observation and curiosity. The benefit of these skills for me was that I learned how to step outside of time, how to “hurry slowly.” Mostly I do this when I am in an encounter with a patient.
Time from the Patient’s Perspective
In my first year of medical school, one of my lecturers advised us never to let a patient know you were in a hurry. He didn’t wear a watch when he had office hours, he said, to avoid looking at it while he was with patients. It didn’t stop him from looking at the patients’ watches, though.
Stepping outside of time lets me make sure that each encounter comes to a satisfactory conclusion from the patient’s perspective. I still manage to move quickly, but if a patient needs more time, I’m not stressing about how many other patients are waiting. I’m with the patient who is in front of me.
Perhaps mindfulness makes me feel differently than others do in some stressful situations, but whatever my emotions are, those are the ones my coach wants me to capture on the page.