Now almost six months into COVID-19 here in Rhode Island, I find myself thinking back to January, 2001 when my Doctor’s Without Border’s boss was kidnapped in Chechnya. I was helping to hold the fort in Ingushetia while local and international organizations searched for him. My job was to manage the local team--keeping them occupied so they wouldn’t spin off and create more problems for DWB. I instituted language and computer skills classes. My life lesson was stay in the moment. Stay present. Be present to those I was with and to myself. In other words, stay grounded. I did a lot of yoga and breathing.

Two recent experiences reinforced that for me.

I just finished reading Ben Ehrenreich’s book Desert Notebooks (Counterpoint, 2020), a few sections each morning as a meditation or reflection. I became a fan of his when I stumbled across his book about Palestine—The Way to the Spring: Life and Death in Palestine. Before that, I was familiar with his mother, Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickeled and Dimed, 2001). The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, as they say. He wrote the Notebooks pre-COVID, during the first years of the current administration, but it seems even more relevant now.

Ben’s an outstanding writer and he explores the ancient concepts of time as circular and the continued wrestling between the forces of good and evil in the world. He postures that the world is not evolving toward perfection; like Christian thinkers such as Teilhard de Chardin theorized, but instead examines Greek and Roman mythology deities as well as Mayan and Native American origin stories. He also led me to the derivation of a stanza In the Laurie Anderson song, Progress, which I have pondered for years.

She said: "What is history?"

And he said: "History is an angel

Being blown

Backwards

Into the future."

He said: "History is a pile of debris

And the angel wants to go back and fix things

To repair the things that have been broken."

But there is a storm blowing from Paradise

And the storm keeps blowing the angel

Backwards

Into the future

This comes from the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, who committed suicide instead of being captured by the Nazis in 1940. He purchased the Paul Klee painting Angelus Novus—and interpreted as: His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back his turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. The storm is what we call progress.

Somehow that has made today’s realities easier to take. We can do our part, try to make sense of things, but life is messy and good and evil are intertwined. We cannot stop time or go back in to do things over or fix things, time marches forward inexorably, but is also circular, civilizations rise and fall. Time is the wind blowing us into the future.

The second came with tapping into the idealism and enthusiasm of the next generation of physicians.

I agreed to teach an asynchronous, on-line undergrad course on Medical Communication this summer. Last summer I co-taught and it was in person and students spent time in clinics. Not possible with COVID!

I pushed myself. I’d never done more than a lecture via Zoom, and never been solely responsible for an entire course. This was the opportunity to move into the 21st century and involved mastering Zoom and the online teaching platform at Brown. It needed to be asynchronous so students living at home, in New York, Texas, Nebraska, and California could access content at times convenient to them. I made use of technical support’s advice and created a short video introduction and brief overview lectures for each week.

The students told me the course was well organized, and much to my surprise IT chose my video as an example of a well done video to showcase for the fall.  The students, a diverse group of 16 predominantly pre-meds, liked the variety of the content –not just reading PDFs of articles, but linking to patient-doctor teaching videos, YouTube and TED talks, websites, medical journals, the Economist and the New York Times. 

The only time we came together virtually was for 2 hours on Wednesday afternoons. About half the class showed up for some portion of the time, anxious for some community, asking questions about class material, curious about my experiences, problem solving course assignments and talking with each other about whether or not they were heading back to campus.

I realized how much I love to teach, and savored the enthusiasm of this next generation. In fact, their enthusiasm shored me up. They bring an array of experiences to the problems they will face. Many are multi-lingual and have translated for family members in the medical setting, have experiences in accessing health care in other countries besides the US, and brought fresh perspectives to important issues. One elaborated about doing crisis support for a nonprofit via text messages and talked about how to engage in a meaningful way with the person seeking help when you could not see them or hear them. I'd never even considered this!

Another contemplated the unfair treatment of people with mental health conditions like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder and how traumatic it was for a classmate to be put on a 72-hour hold. I’ve ordered 72-hour holds for people dangerous to self or others. This caused me to pause. What had I over-looked? What implicit biases inform these decisions? I'll think more broadly should I be in a position to do this again.

So as COVID marches on and redefines how we can and cannot interact with family, friends and students; as we make choices about the future of our country, I honor the cycle of life and the idealism of the next generation. I recognize the impossibility of stamping out all negativity, commit to training future health care professionals and take comfort in savoring the beauty of the now.