Turn to Gold

There is the say­ing that one won’t be on his deathbed wish­ing he had worked more. I agree with this, but I am won­der­ing about work and rest and what lies between the two. I work lots. Most peo­ple do. I spend more time work­ing than I spend doing any other thing. My mom would say if you don’t work you don’t eat. Might be true, but not def­i­nitely true. When I would ask if she had fun at the med­ical con­fer­ence she trav­eled to she would not say if she had fun. She would say it was just work. I would dance around her and try to get her to admit that it was fun to travel. It became a joke between us. I would like to not work…until I couldn’t work. Then I would miss it, I think. The trick is to be involved in work that is a con­sum­ing (and regen­er­at­ing, more impor­tantly) pas­sion.

This is not news, but I would say that in my school­ing I was not taught this. I was not taught that if I am work­ing at my heart’s work, at the stuff that pulls me out of bed, then I will be rich whether I have money or not. Or maybe some­one tried to tell me that, but I was unable to understand.

The sec­ond half of my life is upon me (I hope). I wish it were the first third, but I will not likely live to be 120. I am grate­ful for the work I have in my life as a physi­cian, but I am also not wed to the idea that it is all I will ever do. When going through med­ical school, res­i­dency, fel­low­ship (17 years for me after high school) one gets the mes­sage that this is not a path taken lightly. Lots of delayed grat­i­fi­ca­tion, tak­ing the long view, etc. Not many doc­tors change once they are in the cat­tle chute of their careers. (Cat­tle chutes usu­ally do not lead the cow to green pas­tures by the way). The US Depart­ment of Labor states that the aver­age worker changes careers (not jobs) 3 – 5 times.

So I am giv­ing myself per­mis­sion to change my mind. In fact, I have already done this and my writ­ing it here is just another way to remind myself that doors open when I push on them. I do things that most sur­geons don’t do. I run two small ther­apy groups. I do this writ­ing and pho­tog­ra­phy project (not a big money maker at present). These changes in my careers have been amaz­ing for me. Also, I am giv­ing myself per­mis­sion to work less and rest more. Work less and rest more, as in do no work for more of the time in my day, week, life. I am not lazy and I never will be. I could die how­ever from blindly work­ing with­out paus­ing. So I take a day off each week unless I am on call that day (and then I try to make up the lost day off). I bring in less money as a result of this. I love it that I do this. I feel alive when I work less and I also like work, the less of it I do. If I got to zero work, maybe I would be in bliss, maybe even turn to gold.

If you want to read about another doc­tor who is chang­ing her life, check out my new blog­ging friend at http://​www​.find​ing​me​in​france​.com. She is on my blog roll – look over to the col­umn on the right…it’s a great story. I have loved read­ing her sto­ries of her life out­side of med­i­cine as she takes a year to live in Burgundy.