Skills for Life

I continue to intimidate myself with the understanding that what I am learning here and now will become the foundation of my life's work. While my experiences, lessons, thoughts, memories, moments, successes, and failures which have formed me into what I am and how I think were by no means for naught, there is a sense of eternity that this new information has. I feel as though I am shaping future career as a physician and so each time I sit down to study there is an added sense of urgency to remember every morsel of biochemistry, genetics, and anatomy which presents itself; it is the (perhaps false) feeling that everything now matters.

Then, this sense of eternity transforms into a reminder of my own mortality, to an understanding that if I put off fun and games now, that I will likely continue doing so until sometime in my 50s when I wake up only to realize that I've spent the past 30 years worrying about progressing professionally and I've neglected the simple important things in life and in doing so, lived a dry, monochromatic existence. Of course, these are two extremes, but it is difficult to how the road ahead will and more importantly, should traverse them.

We had our first biochemistry and our first anatomy exams, both of which were wake up calls and proved to be adequately challenging (that is a euphemism). They were good wake-up-calls to not only my own need to study, despite any level of innate intelligence I may or may not possess, but as well to the caliber of my peers and my predecessors: there are a lot of smart people in this profession. It was a reminder that excelling in this world ain't easy and that simply hard work and diligence are not even enough to succeed. It requires that certain je ne sais quoi which I have not found yet.