I am...

On the search for identity and purpose

The other day, I was given an assignment. Lately, I haven’t been very good at completing assignments. My ability to complete assignments naturally atrophied as I progressed through my education and training. At about age 30, I made a brief attempt to return to the classroom to pursue a post-graduate degree during a research interval in my surgical residency. Within a week or so of sitting in a classroom, taking notes, attempting to complete assignments and preparing for the first quiz or test, I realized that those days had passed me by. Another 30+ years later, I attempted to learn a rather complex computer application by returning to the classroom, taking a community college course. I had no problem sitting in lectures, taking an occasional note, but I was spectacularly poor at completing assignments on time between classes. I just couldn’t bring myself to the discipline of doing something because someone else prescribed it. I attempted to negotiate a “personal education plan” which failed miserably. Next, I tried tutoring. I started with on-line tutoring and bumped into the issues surrounding broadband connectivity, time zones and diverse teaching styles. I had so many questions it was hard to allow the tutor to follow their customary method of teaching. I looked for face-to-face local tutoring, without much success. I questioned my capacity to learn in conventional formats as a mature adult “learner”. Now, I am a voracious consumer of non-fiction informational content, but I have somehow lost the capacity to submit to someone else’s organizational structure for teaching/learning a specific amount of subject matter. I don’t understand it, but am obliged to accept this reality due to serial failures in achieving the desired objective.

So, I accept assignments carefully, guardedly, even skeptically, unless they somehow strike a chord in me as particularly relevant. So, when my mentor asked me to complete the sentence “I am-”, I realized that this phrase encapsulates the primary imperative of my post-professional life, and felt the urge to rise to the occasion and see where the exploration could take me. My history of journal writing has been a serial effort to bring order from disorder in my mind, so this challenge seemed ideally suited to my unintended, but fiercely individual way of tackling the acquisition of new knowledge/viewpoint/clarity about a subject. As I write, I have no idea whether it will be a coherent, orderly or even useful exercise, but then ALL of my writing is extemporaneous, minimally edited and only occasionally re-read, for what that’s worth. I do find it entertaining to periodically read a bit of content from past months or years to see if I’ve actually progressed in any meaningful way from that point in time of the writing. I’m often surprised at the contrast between then and now, generally in a favorable sort of way, which is one of the motivations for continuing on with the journal habit. It seems to actually produce some measure of progress in a non-linear sort of way in my understanding of myself and my place in this tumultuous world.

I am….

an older adult. That’s an awkward phrase. Having attained the age of 65, I qualify for Medicare, Social Security, AARP, senior discounts at diners, but no preferred parking as of yet. I might be seen as elderly by some for whom 65 is far in the future, but it sneaked up on me pretty quickly. Maybe “a certain age” would best describe my posture towards the calendar. I definitely feel the effects of diminishing physical capacity, perseverate over whether to fight it with some sort of frenetic fitness regimen or simply accept what is coming eventually anyway.

a father. I would give myself a C- in that capacity. If my son holds my performance against me, he hasn’t made it obvious, but my conduct in that regard has been so far short of my own ideal that I won’t even go into detail examining it now.

a husband…what he said, in the prior paragraph.

a brother. I am the youngest of five, a unique and privileged position in the family.Each of my siblings was a role model in one or another fashion. I think I’ve done alright in that role. I make efforts to stay in touch and to be appropriately deferential to my elder siblings.

a son; that’s an easy one. My father passed away when I was 33, just before I completed my surgical training. I was aware that he was proud and pleased in my pathway following in his footsteps, but only indirectly, as we had relatively few opportunities to linger over the subject during my medical education and training. I remember the regret I felt at his death, having come so close to a time when we could relate to one another as peers, but that was not to be. I certainly understood him in a way that my siblings could not, from a standpoint of having trod a similar pathway to my professional career status, but missed the opportunity to compare notes on our anecdotal experiences. To my mother, I have always been the baby of the family. She ranks just slightly lower than the angels in my pantheon of heroes, even at the very advanced age of 97. I would do anything required of me to keep her safe and happy in gratitude for decades of unfailing support and affirmation of my potential to achieve my dreams.

an uncle and great uncle. I had a wonderful role model in this role. My uncle Bill ranks right up there with my mom. I derive a great deal of pleasure from reaching out and staying in contact with the many nieces and nephews and their children scattered across the world. I take full advantage of my exalted status to ask pointed, bordering on inappropriate questions about their lives and then gently teasing them by misinterpreting their responses. I’m careful to avoid insulting their dignity, however.

a retired professional; medical, surgical, burn and wound care sub-specialist. It’s truly hard to encapsulate this role and identity in simple terms. It was a very rich experience, worthy in every way of devoting a career to achieving mastery. While it was good, it was very, very good, fulfilling in a variety of ways. It was also the occasion of my relentless decline into disaffection, burnout, and deep clinical depression. It was the proximate cause of the slow motion, spectacular, technicolor crash out of my career. Compared to some of my peers, I didn’t fly all that high, but I flew high enough to fall rather spectacularly.

a child. Really? Well, in some respects, there’s an inner child with all of the primary emotions, needs, dreams in all of us that have been burnished by time and experience, but periodically rear their heads in a very primal way. This has to do with experiences of delight, joy, sadness, fear, anger, regret, vulnerability, desire for intimacy in it’s various forms, the need for connectedness and the search for identity and meaning.

A retiree…whatever that means. I certainly didn’t slip easily into retirement. I found myself there after about 4 years of attempting to find a suitable encore vocation that could fill the void of having crashed out of my surgical career. I backed my way into retirement, just like I backed my way into most of the major phases of my adult life. It’s actually amazing how little I knew about approaching the big steps in life, even after having multiple examples and mentors along the way. In the midst of the fog, I have learned that “retirement” is the most complex and challenging transition in my entire life. You see, my approach to retirement was to never retire. I fully intended to find a way to continue working as a surgeon until I either woke up dead or became so physically diminished that I could simply no longer do the work. God laughs while we make our plans…I am only beginning to become somewhat less than acutely uncomfortable with the title “retired” when asked what I am doing with myself these days. Retired is not a role with which I am comfortable. I never aspired to this title. I looked diligently for an alternative, but did not find it. I retain some idle hope that something might find me that fits my degree of energy, motivation and sense of adventure. I’m increasingly certain that it won’t be even remotely in the medical sphere, for all of the slowly aging fund of knowledge stuffed into every dusty corner of my brain from that phase in life. Surely there are deeper truths hiding beneath the technical details that could be applied to another sphere of endeavor. Matching the euphoria associated with that former, dominant role and identity would be truly a miracle.

a friend. Here’s where I believe I may have an actual talent. As a child I didn’t think much about the issue of friends; how many, how close, etc. I had a number of friends amongst my classmates, even a few older and younger by virtue of venues like the school band, church groups, etc. I had a couple of particularly close friends throughout each phase of my education. A single friend from school-days remains my longest tenured and one of my closest friends. In subsequent phases, the “crowd” in which I associated and individuals within it became a more important source of identity. I learned that I would have a finite number of significant friends, rather than a whole raft of casual friends. This was just my nature, a bit of introversion, some compelling subject-matter interests and an increasing tendency towards identifying certain traits in people that struck a chord of admiration and affection in me. From each phase of my education, I retained one or a few lifelong, close friends with whom I stay in contact over space and time. I described myself as a “head person” for the majority of my life, finding meaning in the sciences, mathematics, the pursuit of “how things work”; relationships were a by-product of those interests. However, as the years and decades passed, increasingly I came to understand that relationships mean EVERYTHING, and subject-based knowledge is a necessary but lesser valued currency. I believe that at the depth of our souls and personalities, we yearn for intimacy with others, to be in relationship over shared values and interests. The “who” in life is far more fundamental to our sense of equanimity and happiness than the what, where, how and why of our circumstances and experiences. I find that I am more hungry for knowledge of others than I am for achievements, possessions, pass-times, work and the like. Friendship is very much a two way street. To be a one-way friend is a another description for being a fan. It’s the mutuality in friendships that make them valuable. I think the highest form of intimacy is that of true friend. There are intimate relationships that rely on physical attraction and romance, but the best friendships transcend and are not dependent on them.

a traveler. I did my share of geographical traveling along the way between late teens and mid fifties. There were adventures, honeymoons (yes, plural), many professional education/vacation combos in interesting places in the world. My travels are now more spiritual and virtual in nature, a grand journey on the path to some form of enlightenment, to reach equanimity in a much more existential manner than I sought as a working professional. Then, I could quantify my impact in several ways. Now, I must find meaning and purpose in a far less empirical manner. I have used the concept “being, rather than doing” in the attempt to describe the fundamental shift in status I have experienced, although it doesn’t fully encapsulate the transition or the task of making sense of present and future.

a story-teller. This is a latent avocation. I wouldn’t be so bold as to call it a talent, more like a hobby. Somewhere along the way, I realized that my experiences added up to a story of some sort. More generally I realized that we all have stories. Some are stories of a particular experience, or a phase in life. They are articulated to make some sort of point about the world and how it works. On a grander scale, our lives themselves make up a story of many chapters. A writer recently introduced me to the contrast between “linear” and “cyclical” aspects of storytelling. Each of us is writing that epic story as we advance in years and experience. We are the writers, the editors and interpreters of that story. Making sense of it is our fundamental task, for which there is no simple formula. One can simply recite it, without interpretation or extracting any greater meaning from it, but I think we are hard-wired to seek meaning from our experience.

a philosopher. Truly, I have adequately described my fundamental task in life as trying to bring order out of disorder, understanding out of chaos, clarity out of confusion. Perhaps not uniquely, things seem reasonably clear in retrospect but largely obscure in prospect. When I get up to 10, 000 feet and the topic doesn’t touch particularly tender spots, I enjoy the architectural task of thinking and bringing some sense of order to my thoughts, even if it’s only in the method of approaching a topic rather than the actual components and conclusions therein.

a living being on this planet. I had no choice in this matter. I am tasked with living until I die. There is no alternative, and little means of modulating the experience. Like every other person and living being, I was obliged to experience infancy first, then childhood, youth, adulthood and now the meandering pathway into advanced age and ultimately death. No-one gets out of this life alive, immortal, or ever younger. We make great efforts at defining a “good life” in contrast to one wasted in various pursuits, on particular behaviors. As humans, we define healthy and unhealthy habits, socially acceptable behavior, consequences for socially unacceptable behaviors. We identify heroes and villains, stars and nobodies, we even sometimes redefine ourselves by “switching” genders, or at least gender identities. In many cases we are unable to live up to our own expectations and define ourselves as successful or as failures. However, just to live and to attain and pass milestones along the way could be deemed a success, given all the potentially lethal hazards in our world.

a child of God. Now, some will find this controversial, even deceptive or delusional. It’s a matter of belief, of hope in things unseen. Collectively, we humans seem to need origin stories, even if one’s favorite origin story starts with a big bang. My belief system is substantially adopted, having been exposed to it from a very early age. Later in life, I was introduced to a number of alternative belief systems, but never found it either necessary or compelling to abandon the one and adopt something different. I am content with my Judeo-christian world view, with some latitude to accommodate the geological and paleontological record in our world.

Seen from this point, in retrospect I have held many of these roles concurrently for several phases or most of my life. It was a faulty assumption to rely so heavily on the single title and identity of my professional life. True, attaining that status and then occupying the role for three decades consumed the majority of my adult life, but it was never “everything”, and for significant periods it was largely inconsequential to my well-being. I discounted much of what gave life it’s greater meaning while preoccupied with the tasks of career. This most recent phase required that I confront what I am no longer, and will likely never again be. In that regard, there’s nothing unique about my story. We all face the end of phases of our life and the obligation to move on and tackle the tasks of what follows. We carry some roles throughout our lives, take on and leave behind others. It has provided me with a strong measure of relief to grasp that leaving one dominant role and it’s associated identity behind is both natural and necessary to prepare for and grasp the following phase in life.

The prior phase was heavily populated with role models, instructors and mentors. This phase is well populated but far less homogeneous in nature. One finds role models and mentors where they are, not necessarily where you are. One has to be proactive, to go out and find that new tribe, the wisdom of elders, the writings of fore-bearers to help make sense of it. At it’s worst, it’s confusing and demoralizing. At it’s best, it is a grand adventure, full of endless possibilities. I’m coming around to the enjoyment in it, right here in front of me, without the need for dramatic events and achievements.