Sterling Terrell

smart ideas from books

Resembles The Practice

Resembles The Practice

How true it is that the education never really resembles the practice.

I do remember my uncle who is a doctor saying how much he enjoyed delivering babies though…

It is one of the few times in the hospital that is a (mostly) happy occasion.

We entered the room. I stood awkwardly off to the side until Melissa pushed me to the front, between the patient’s legs, just in front of the attending. “Push!” the nurse encouraged. “Now again: just like that, only without the screaming.” The screaming didn’t stop, and was soon accompanied by a gush of blood and other fluids. The neatness of medical diagrams did nothing to represent Nature, red not only in tooth and claw but in birth as well. (An Anne Geddes photo this was not.) It was becoming clear that learning to be a doctor in practice was going to be a very different education from being a medical student in the classroom. Reading books and answering multiple-choice questions bore little resemblance to taking action, with its concomitant responsibility.

-Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air (Amazon)

Robert Frost Wrote

Robert Frost Wrote

Robert Frost wrote his most successful poetry much later in life.

I like that.

How often we forget that it – more often than not – takes time and patience to do anything well.

Of course, I think it’s also possible that grief and pain changed Frost’s voice as time went on.

After losing both parents, Frost later buried his wife – and then outlived four of his six children.

I can’t even imagine that.

Robert Frost wrote none of his most reproduced poems in his twenties and just 8 percent in his thirties, finally blossoming in his forties and again in his sixties. “Step by step,” poet Robert Lowell observed, Frost “tested his observation of places and people until his best poems had the. . . richness of great novels.” Like an explorer, Frost gathered material by venturing out into the world, listening carefully to real conversations. “I would never use a word or combination of words that I hadn’t heard used in running speech,” Frost acknowledged.

-Adam Grant, Originals

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