What Everybody Needs –Maria Popova

“The more personal you are willing to be and the more intimate you are willing to be about the details of your own life, the more universal you are.”

In 1994, Sherwin Nuland (1930–2014) — a remarkable surgeon and Yale clinical professor who in his nearly four decades of practice cared, truly cared, for more than 10,000 patients — received the National Book Award for his humanistic masterwork How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter (public library), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize that year. It is one of the most existentially elevating books I’ve ever read — a inquiry as much into how we exit this life as into how we fill its living moments with meaning, integrity and, ultimately, happiness. Four years later, Nuland followed up with How We Live (public library), addressing the art of aliveness — that spectacular resilience of which the human body and mind are capable — with equal wisdom and warmth.


Shortly after Nuland’s death in the spring of 2014, Krista Tippett — host of the sublime public radio show On Being and enchantress of the human spirit through the communion of conversation — shared her talk with Nuland, recorded several years earlier. The entire episode is absolutely fantastic, but one particular passage both illuminates the heart of Nuland’s legacy and articulates beautifully an essential, elemental truth — the same one at which Tolstoy and Gandhi arrived — that we, both as individuals and as a civilization, so easily let ourselves forget:

Do you know what I learned from writing [How We Die], if I learned nothing else? The more personal you are willing to be and the more intimate you are willing to be about the details of your own life, the more universal you are… And when I say universal, I don’t mean universal only within our culture… There’s a lot of balderdash thrown around — “You don’t understand people who live in Sri Lanka and their response to the tsunami because you just don’t know that culture.”
Well, there’s an element of that — but, to me, cultural differences are a kind of patina over the deepest psychosexual feelings that we have, that all human beings share.

To illustrate the inextricable connectedness of these deeper human truths, Nuland turns to a maxim that scholars attribute to the first-century Hellenistic Jewish philosopher Philo: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is carrying a great burden.” The phrase, the spirit of which Lucinda Williams echoed in her sublime paean to compassion, appears in the epitaph of Nuland’s excellent memoir of his father, Lost in America. He tells Tippett:

When you recognize that pain — and response to pain — is a universal thing, it helps explain so many things about others, just as it explains so much about yourself. It teaches you forbearance. It teaches you a moderation in your responses to other people’s behavior. It teaches you a sort of understanding. It essentially tells you what everybody needs. You know what everybody needs? You want to put it in a single word?
Everybody needs to be understood.
And out of that comes every form of love.
If someone truly feels that you understand them, an awful lot of neurotic behavior just disappears — disappears on your part, disappears on their part. So if you’re talking about what motivates this world to continue existing as a community, you’ve got to talk about love… And my argument is it comes out of your biology because on some level we understand all of this. We put it into religious forms. It’s almost like an excuse to deny our biology. We put it into pithy, sententious aphorisms, but it’s really coming out of our deepest physiological nature.

Listen to the full episode of On Being below and be sure to subscribe to this ennobling gift Krista Tippett puts into the world, then treat yourself to Nuland’s indispensable How We Live and How We Die. Dive deeper into the latter here.

 

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Maria Popova
brainpickings
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Let This Darkness Be a Bell Tower

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Quiet friend who has come so far,
feel how your breathing makes more space around you.
Let this darkness be a bell tower
and you the bell. As you ring,
what batters you becomes your strength.
Move back and forth into the change.
What is it like, such intensity of pain?
If the drink is bitter, turn yourself to wine.
In this uncontainable night,
be the mystery at the crossroads of your senses,
the meaning discovered there.
And if the world has ceased to hear you,
say to the silent earth: I flow.
To the rushing water, speak: I am.


–Rainer Maria Rilke
from Sonnets to Orpheus, II - 29

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clipped from an interview with Krista Tippet
via ayearofbeinghere

Krista Tippett
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Dying as a defining feature of living

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Contemplating Mortality: The Need to Remember That Death Is a Human and Personal Event, and Not Just a Medical One

by Krista Tippett

It’s difficult to believe these days, when so many of us have had some experience of moving toward death with a loved one in hospice, or even a stranger on the CaringBridge website, how “badly” people died in this country until very recently. That’s the word Dr. Ira Byock uses. He began his life in emergency and family medicine and recalls that when people were deemed to be dying — when what was wrong with them was beyond “fixing” — they too often died in pain in the hospital or were simply sent home. Doctors practicing now still recall their training, implicit and explicit, that death was a failure of the body, and of medicine. We turned away from it, scientifically and culturally.

The palliative care and hospice movement arose first in England and then took hold in the U.S. in the 1970s and 80s to compassionately treat the pain of chronic illness and all the suffering — physical and otherwise — as the end of life approaches. Its spread has converged with the continued advance of medicine. In our lifetimes, many forms of cancer have transformed from fatal diagnoses to chronic illnesses.

As I was preparing for my interview with Dr. Byock, I re-read a gripping New Yorker article by the surgeon Atul Gawande . It chronicles the increasingly blurring boundaries between treating illness, prolonging life, and staving off death. When one woman asks him if her sister is dying, he realizes, “I wasn’t even sure what the word ‘dying’ meant anymore.”

Dr. Byock sees this as a human opportunity and challenge. Medicine is remarkable, he knows from the inside, and will continue to get more remarkable with the passage of time. But we must “grow the rest of the way up” and acknowledge that we have yet to make one person immortal. Even while we fight for life with all the tools at our disposal, we have to reckon with the reality of death. The good news, as he tells it, is that there are riches to be gained in that reckoning. That edge of life — which our miraculous medicine allows some to perch on longer than ever before — can be a time of unparalleled repair and celebration. Like it or not, as Dr. Byock says, death completes us. These days more than ever before, we can shape that moment of completion together with those we love.

With this kind of thinking, Dr. Byock is taking the impulse behind hospice to a new place. He goes so far as to suggest that dying can be a developmental stage of human learning and actualization — like adolescence or mid-life accomplishment. He names “the four things that matter most” — words that can be transformatively spoken and enacted — at the end of life: Please forgive me. I forgive you. Thank you. I love you. These are four sentences, a mere eleven words, with a power to call up a lifetime of struggle in so many of our families.

I think here of that phrase attributed to Oliver Wendell Holmes that has recurred so often in my interviews: the “simplicity that lies on the other side of complexity.” For in the time of life we call dying, as Dr. Byock describes, these elemental human capacities like thanks, love, and forgiveness can unfold in their most complex and immediately redemptive power. I love this quote of the theologian Paul Tillich, which he put in the preface of his book The Four Things That Matter Most, and which points at the way being with dying has opened Dr. Byock’s imagination about the word “forgiveness”:

“Forgiving presupposes remembering. And it creates a forgetting not in the natural way we forget yesterday’s weather; but in the way of the great “in spite of” that says: I forget although I remember: Without this kind of forgetting no human relationship can endure healthily.”

One difficulty of this conversation is that there are no rules for when, in any life or any course of medical treatment, we can know we have crossed the boundary between fighting death and facing it. Dr. Byock suggests that this is not an either/or but a both/and. Still, there is something fierce and sacred in us that resists the end of our life and the death of those we love. That same impulse resists the kind of contemplation that happens in this conversation as well. One of Dr. Byock’s most basic insights may be his most helpful: we must remember that, even in the 21st century, death is never really a medical event but a human and personal event. Dying is a defining feature, strange and mysterious as it remains, of living.

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