Have you ever caught
yourself rushing and could not recall why you were? Am I working to meet a deadline? No! Is
somebody breathing down my neck?
No! Do I want to finish this job
quickly before I forget how to do it?
Certainly not! Do I really have
confidence in myself to succeed at it?
Oh, yes! Am I cramming too many
back to back activities into one day?
Well-l-l! Maybe! Hmmm!
Or is this my usual habit? Am I
just naturally a rushing individual? Is
there a pace my psyche is trained to maintain?
Have you ever been employed by a company that required you to work “with
alacrity?” It is hard not to take the
habit home with you.
This habitual tendency to
rush shows up most noticeably and dangerously when motoring on the street or
highway. I get quite vexed when I see a
driver avoiding a Yield sign at the bottom of a ramp by sneaking around those
of us who are patiently waiting on the ramp for the proper moment to move onto
the main road, then barging into the next dubious opening, nudging drivers
aside who must slow down in order to avoid a collision. We hear a lot about road rage, but not much
about road hogging and pushiness. None
of us I daresay likes being tailgated.
You know that that person nagging at your rear is in a bigger rush than
you are and you know that driver would like to push you off the road. I also cringe when someone turning left who
is supposed to yield to oncoming traffic takes a breathtaking turn with only
feet and inches to spare between their car and the oncoming vehicle, cutting it
dangerously close.
But then I am humbled to
recall, as I often do, that I was something of a hotrod myself at an early age,
and am still a little impatient with slower drivers under certain
circumstances, so eager to get where I am going. I have to take note of it and say to myself
as I have said countless times, “What’s the big hurry, bud?”
I am also infuriated by most
of the TV car commercials we see, wherein the car being sold is shown speeding
or simulated as speeding. The whole
sales pitch is a demonstration of how fast it can travel, of how sleek and
soup-ed up it is. Swooping, swerving,
gunning for all its worth! Appealing to
the craving for race car swiftness! The
auto manufacturers and marketers do not stop to think that they are inspiring
the kind of driver attitude that results in deaths of innocent people. Creating speed demons!
We are a society that seems
to thrive on speed, doing things with competitive swiftness. We are encouraged to buy the dishwasher that
works the fastest, to buy the computer that delivers the fastest, the printer
that spews out the copy the quickest, to purchase the IPAD or IPOD that
downloads in the fewest minutes, to buy the microwave that cooks the quickest,
to take the medication that works in fifteen minutes instead of three quarters
of an hour. We cater to movies that can
be streamed in a flash instead of losing precious time (or precious
something!!!) waiting for Netflix to ship it.
We like things instant and electronically delivered, books that can be
downloaded and keep us at home rather than require us to enter into the experience
of driving or walking to the public library and browsing the shelves. Few people, after all, ever make a rush trip
to that library.
I am not saying that any of
these preferences is bad. I just cannot
shake the feeling, standing way back and taking the long look, that there is a
connection between this speed orientation on every hand and the statistical
medical fact that more people than ever contract high blood pressure and such
like.
In a 1991 movie called “The
Doctor,” William Hurt portrays a San Francisco surgeon who does not believe in
forming friendships with patients.
Detachment is his favorite term when giving instructions to his
interns. Keep them at arm’s length! A surgeon should simply cut! Well, this doctor as it happens gets sick
with cancer of the throat, has to take a leave of absence from his job for many
months and soon finds himself getting some of that detached medical treatment
himself. In fact, the name of the
autobiographical book that the screenplay is based on is entitled “A Taste of
My Own Medicine.” It becomes his turn to
sit in waiting rooms and fill out forms and wait, and sometimes wait and
wait.
While waiting he meets a
fellow patient, a young woman who has an inoperable brain tumor (Elizabeth
Perkins). He gets drawn into her
predicament and out of a new sense of uncharacteristic humanity combined with
curiosity he offers to drive her far out into the Nevada desert to attend a
concert by a favorite musician of hers, someone she never thought she would
ever get the chance to hear in person.
The leave of absence gives him great leeway in his schedule and the
young lady has nothing much to do waiting for the clock to run out. So they go!
While driving at top
highway speed with her at his side, to his surprise, she asks him to stop the
car. He does and she jumps out and
starts strolling around, really seeing the desert for the first time. When he shuts off the motor, gets out and
draws up to her side, she tells him that she has just made a vow to herself. She says she has been rushing by things all her
life and in what short life she has left (which turns out to be little more
than twenty-four hours) she will never rush past anything again. They walk all about in a beautiful twilight
setting. The concert is forgotten. They end up dancing together on the sand,
this middle aged professional physician and this obscure youth.
As a result of his
encounter with her, the doctor’s eyes are opened. Now he too makes discoveries. He sees that he has been rushing past his
patients, rushing past people who were just something to cut on. And in the months that follow he starts
teaching his interns to be aware of peoples’ names. And he does something unheard of. He requires them to spend time as patients
themselves. He makes them dress up in
patient garb. Each is assigned a disease
or an affliction. They are ordered to
take all the treatment that condition requires, to be poked and take shots and
eat the hospital food and sleep in the hospital beds attended by nurses who
wake them up in the wee hours for temperature and blood pressures
readings. To walk in the shoes of
people, to use his own words, who “put their lives in our hands,” people
“scared, who want to live.” And in an
earlier sequence of the picture, while he is temporarily without a voice from
the surgery and is forced to convalesce at home, he realizes that he has been
rushing past his wife (Christine Lahti) and child too. What a transformation!
The film is still available
from Netflix. It is slightly dated in
some of its depiction of medical industry shortcomings, but it still packs an
emotional punch and highlights the meaning of compassion. “The Doctor!”
2 hrs & 8 min, color, 1991.
I had an English literature
professor in college, under whom I took two courses in creative writing, one on
essay writing, the other on short story writing. He taught that the most important thing for a
creative writer to have is a sensitivity to life. Creative writing is not just the sum total of
the words you put down on paper; it is more than discipline or vocabulary, more
than good grammar and syntax, more than mere reporting or telling stories. It is reflecting on life in all its striking
fine points, seeing and calling forth what most people never see, and one
cannot be in a hurry to accomplish this.
To illustrate he told about
an esteemed author who visited the college, and this professor of mine was
assigned the task of escorting him all around the campus and the town and the
area. And my professor said it was all
he could do to keep up with the man.
They started to walk somewhere the professor wanted to show him but the
man wanted to stop and examine everything he passed along the way. He would leave the walkway when he spotted a
tree or a flower or a rock, or he saw somebody doing something that interested
him, something the average person would take for granted. “Let me show you something here. . .What is
this over here?” The best writing comes
from collected sensations and impressions and discoveries, things the average
person is not likely to take in, if one is in too much of a hurry to absorb
them. A good writer takes his/her time.
Let us all buck the 21st
century trend and form the habit of checking our speed.
From Thoreau’s classic
masterpiece, “Walden”: “Only that day dawns to which
we are awake. There is more day to
dawn. The sun is but a morning star.”
To
read other entries in my blog, please consult its website: enspiritus.blogspot.com. To learn about me consult on the website the
blog entry for August 9, 2013.
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