“No one becomes a good doctor before he fills a churchyard.”
Something about the imagery of a churchyard draws me to this sentence. In Europe, a churchyard is, of course, where they burry their dead after a funeral service at the church. To be a doctor responsible for all those deaths—or to be more accurate, missed lives—I can only imagine how difficult that is. I’m tempted to say that the saying is only tantamount to “practice makes perfect.” But there is something about the image of a churchyard that is telling me I shouldn’t interpret this lightly. I’m thinking about things in life that have more at stake, more freighted with meaning. Something like, in a very general sense “No one becomes a good human before he fills thirty calendars,” or in meditation, “No one becomes a good human before he fills his belly with a million in-breaths.” I am drawn to the little things we don’t count that perhaps we should. Like the days I will be waking up to hatid you at the DLTB bus moving forward and the days that past that I didn’t have to. I am really drawn towards days—the day, that single great measure of a life. Somehow, thinking about living a day removes the overwhelm of living a life. There is, of course, those of us who have seen so many days but don’t seem to have really lived. To quote Thoreau, “I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
In the end, it isn’t about the number of one’s days but about how one uses these days—whether they be to fill up calendars, lungs, or hatid someone on to a DLTB bus to the city, what matters is that we do so knowing that each day could be our last.