Happiness in this World

“What do you want for dinner?” I asked my wife.

“I don’t know,” she answered.  “What do you want?”

“How about hamburgers?”

“No, I don’t want hamburgers.”

“What do you want then?”

“I don’t know…pasta.” Continue reading…

My wife and I are similar in a number of ways, but we’re completely opposite in how we feel about trying new things.  I resist and often fear it, while she positively craves it.  For as long as I can remember, I haven’t even liked trying new foods (an aversion my family and friends have alternatively found amusing and consternating), preferring instead to eat what I already know I like.  My wife, in contrast, almost never orders the same thing twice.  Continue reading…

A few weeks ago, a colleague and I were discussing the devastation in Haiti.  He told me he thought he should go down there to help out—but that he just couldn’t bring himself to do it.  His heart went out to the people suffering there, he said, but apparently not enough to get him to hop on a plane.

I asked him what was stopping him.  He thought about it for a moment and then said:  “I don’t have anything left to give.”  His answer took me by surprise.  I thought his reasons would have been the same as mine:  it would have been too disruptive to his life here, too frustrating to go down and be ineffective as a physician without adequate infrastructural support, and too personally uncomfortable or even risky.  But what he meant was simply this:  he was too tired. Continue reading…

Changing another person’s mind is literally one of the hardest things to do in the world.  Think of how many conversations you’ve ever had in which one of the participants decided the other was right and abandoned their previous views altogether.  It almost never happens.

Why?  Because even though ideas flit in and out of our heads like mosquitoes, ideas that are believed cling with electromagnetic power.  Once we believe an idea we develop an emotional connection to it, not to mention a commitment to it—as if to a person—and often become attached to it with a strength we often don’t realize has little to do with the merit of the belief itself.  And once we’re attached to anything—whether a person, place, thing, or idea—giving it up is extremely hard.  We will always grieve over a loss, no matter how small. Continue reading…

Several years ago, someone I know told me he was contemplating divorcing his wife.  I wasn’t surprised.  He’d been unhappy in the marriage for some time—and, in my opinion, with good reason:  his wife was jealous to the point of being neurotic, often behaving in ways that were shockingly inappropriate, offensive, and stress-inducing.

Or so he’d described to me.  Though he’d managed, over the years, to paint a clear picture of her personality and character, I couldn’t personally verify any of it.  I’d never met her. Continue reading…

Lately, my wife and I have been having trouble with our water heater.  Over the last few months we’ve been finding the blower blowing but no gas running along with it to actually heat our water.  Recently, the gas would turn on for only 10 minutes before shutting off, leaving the blower going, sometimes all night while we slept.

You don’t fully appreciate what you have until you’re threatened with losing it, especially hot water.  So my wife leapt into action. Continue reading…

In 2002, my third-youngest brother and his wife announced they were going to have a baby.  The news absolutely floored me.  This would be the first baby of our generation and represented a significant life change for us all.

I left their apartment that night thinking about life stages and transitions and found myself wondering why I wasn’t married yet.  I’d always felt I’d wanted to be and had certainly had a number of opportunities.  But I’d passed them all up for one reason or another and at 34 remained single.

Learning one of my younger brothers was going to be a father triggered something in me—a sense of urgency, a greater interest in moving my life forward, a need to shake things up—I’m not sure what.  But the next morning I began a campaign to find my wife. Continue reading…

One day, about a year and a half ago, my wife and I were walking along a street near our home when she grabbed my arm and suddenly exclaimed, “I think that woman is in trouble!”

I followed her gaze to a car stopped at a light and saw to my horror a woman being prevented from exiting the passenger side door by the man who was driving.  He held her hair clumped in his hand.  She was screaming and crying and trying to free herself to no avail. Continue reading…

Several months ago, my wife and I began toilet training our son, Cruise (the Montessori method is to train toddlers to use the toilet as early as possible).  We’d diligently put him on a small potty in his bathroom as often as we could drag ourselves into doing it and repeat over and over to him, “Pee pee on the potty, Cruise.  Pee pee on the potty.”  In order to get him to remain sitting on it so that he might actually pee into it, we’d read books to him, which he loves more than almost anything.

Like many toddlers, when his bedtime arrives, he often prefers to stay up playing with his parents.  One night as we were laying him down in his crib, he surprised us by grabbing his diaper with his hand and exclaiming, “Pee pee on potty.  Pee pee on potty” in a plaintive, expectant voice.  But we knew he didn’t need to pee as we’d just taken a freshly wet diaper off him. Continue reading…

“Maybe this is all from anxiety.”

“You think?  I mean, yeah, I am anxious, but it feels more like it’s from the symptom than causing the symptom.”

“Still.”

My colleague and friend—and physician—and I were discussing the sudden onset of intense nausea I’d started to experience roughly three weeks after I’d been released from the hospital, as I detailed in a previous post, Overcoming The Fear Of Death.  After a pulmonary embolus I’d been left dealing with a clostridium difficile infection, for which I was taking Flagyl, a drug known to cause nausea.  The only problem with concluding that the drug was the cause of mine was that I’d been on it nausea-free for a full week already, not mention I’d been on it previously without nausea for a full course the first time we’d treated the clostridium difficile infection (I’d relapsed, as commonly happens).  Why after a previous full course and then seven days would it suddenly cause this side effect? Continue reading…