I signed up for one of these self-help groups where people work hard to become a better person, without the intermediation of traditional traders in that market (church, yogis, pollsters and else). Interesting how human beings pay time, money and soul to other people so that we can work on ourselves…sounds like too much time, a solid roof over their heads, clothes to cover their bodies and tables full of food. Well, I signed up… I am one of them. Truth be told, sometimes perspective is everything, we are so into our own ego and monkey mind that we lose perspective of the important things. Interestingly enough yesterday I was reading a book and the character said “ More than intelligent, she gave the impression of having that faculty, very rare, of orienting herself in the essential, in the lasting and true, disregarding everything else.”
What is wrong with me? I have no idea I know there is a gap between who I am and who I want to be. Prozac, Hollywood, Clinique or Ralph Lauren do not get me over the finish line.
In one of those exercises to better myself they asked me to write my own obituary. At first it seemed like an easy task. The guidance is not to talk about who I am now… but I do not care about guidances in general, always been a libertarian and assumed the consequences of my decisions. Life is literature and I love life, I have never believed in anything that is external, you know what you love and you love what you know Saint Agustin used to say, there is no meaningful truth other than inner conviction and belief. And as Maqrol el gaviero said “sometimes we bet against ourselves”, today that is called learning… the true word is mistake or just life, but this is a world where we hide in plain sight behind words, as if a paintings were just colors … Aristotle would say this is a world of accidents, not substance. Pedro Salinas, a sublime Spanish poet, said “who knows you in what you do not say or in the words you use not to say it”
First draft: Here I am, I did my best ….
That is pretty lame, and not even funny or witty. By the way… Did I do my best? Questionable at best.
Second Draft: Father, friend, meditator, occasional gourmet and frequent drinker of aged grape juice
This feels like Twitter nonsense. All those are external roles, some assigned some chosen, that say nothing about who I was.
This is more difficult than I thought. It is an interesting vantage point to describe the future from today, only knowing what I left behind, my past. Is what I have done and chosen so far all that there is? Is there an unknown “me” ahead? How will I peel that future me from the somewhat hard, heavy messy amorphous mass I am today?
Michelangelo said he just chipped away the stone that didn’t look like David. What do I have to chip away? Do I think there is something beautiful inside me waiting to be?
If this is an obituary let us start from the beginning…. wait this is a long story and in fact it would be an exercise of painting the mountains and not the central character in the portrait. I agree with Ryan Holiday when he says that true biographies are moral biographies, not detailed recounts of events in someone’s life, that is why I love biographies by Stephan Zweig. Well, the exercise has just turned into a real tour de force …
I am the oldest of four siblings. I have the best siblings in the world, none of us are perfect but I could not ask for better ones. One good thing of this exercise is my request for nature to follow course so parts of my world will never change, my wife, my son and my siblings should always be there.
I was born in Northern Spain, in a little town close to the national park of Urbasa, which had its glory days in the mid70s when the movie “Robin and Marian” with Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn had some scenes shot there. Barely 300 inhabitants, I recall going to school, one big room where all ages learnt together. If you misbehaved the punishment was to be on your knees by the board with your arms spread and a couple of books on them… after 5 minutes, the books felt heavy. However, my childhood was happy, I went to visit my grandparents in the next village few miles away frequently. In springtime I got to see every day the work horses my grandfather used to breed and ride a majestic black mare who was the leader of the pack. We moved to a different village when I was 5 years old. This village we call it home to this day, that is where we belong, where we spend Christmas, because we belong to the place where we spend Christmas. I know this is not enough “cultural relativism“ and too much “cultural ethnocentrism” as prescribed by Marvin Harris but this is my obituary, I am gone and I report who I was, I am beyond reproach, I cannot do any better or worse.
Interesting that houses are memories, not walls and to this day that is where our childhood is, with winters and Christmas by the fireplace and summers by the pool, full of bright long days and good memories. It was not a perfect postcard but it was real, loving and safe.
Life got busy when I started high school, our parents thought good education was the key opportunity they could provide for us, so we moved to the big city in the province to attend feeder schools for college. To me going to Pamplona was probably the most shocking experience I have had in my life, just by the combination of magnitude of change and lack of preparation. Nothing terrible, but I came from a world where everyone had his/her name, his/her role, everyone knew your father, mother, siblings, grandparents in the valley… One of the things I remember to this day is how I arrived at school and they called me by my surname “Fernandez”, I was and am Carlos!
High School was not my place, you know human beings peak at different ages and in different circumstances, I am not sure I have peaked…I am 100% sure I was not at my best in high school. The truth is that I did not belong… so I bulldozed through content and exiled my soul in books at night. Nothing terrible, nowadays I sometimes watch MTV as an exercise to see the outer world and that age group continues to be at war with the world … all normal stuff. Time went through quickly and … college…. chose medical school because I thought it was the most difficult. My father was an MD, but truth be told he has been the best in that regard, he never ever said anything to any of us other than asking the question: What do you want to do in college? Because you are going to apply and need to choose one! Later in life I read an article that crunched some numbers and concluded that the odds of firstborns to MDs of becoming an MD are X10 higher than general population… go figure.
Medical School was an intense 6 years but it was in my city, so I continued living at home, that part of learning by yourself was delayed in my case, In retrospect it was probably good, I would have made too many mistakes if I had been by myself. College was great, I learnt how to get drunk, I made few friends that last to this day, watched very deep and meaningful movies with its original soundtrack… played in our soccer team the college tournament each and every year, had my first girlfriend and enjoyed life. At the end of it I knew I had to discover the real world, get out of my cocoon. I continued to read, learnt English and worked the last summers to pay for back-pack trips in Europe. Med school finished, joined the army for a year and then off to Barcelona for residency.
The truth is that it was probably one of the most intense periods of my life. Interesting how I chose ICU residency. I had always been worried about the possibility of salvation from my tender childhood, the possibility of being sent to hell if I was not good terrified me but one thing that really got me worried is the possibility of being born somewhere that was not of my religion and the inevitability of hell in that circumstance. I always felt terrified of that, and that is why I have always been thinking of the possibility of reaching to God through reason (St Thomas Aquinas, Suarez from the Salamanca School), of the conditions of existence of truth (epistemology, from Aristotle, St Thomas Aquinas to Karl Popper etc). When I was in medical school I wanted to be a psychiatrist though I was not interested in any of the psychiatric topics like depression, schizophrenia or anything remotely related to that. I was interested in the condition of existence of human freedom, the intimate relationship between matter and spirit, how much we are determined by our physicality and how much we are free spirits to choose and exercise our moral conduct. When I realized psychiatry was pomp and circumstance covered in pseudoscience with randomized double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trials to sell Prozac I went the other way. I did not like human one-on-one contact like a primary care physician, I wanted facts, undebatable truths… which in my ingenuity I thought meant numbers! So, I went to Barcelona to become an ICU resident. Talking about life as an irony… in the ICU you have plenty of numbers that you have to make sense out of, and you do not talk to your patients … but you talk to their families. Those few minutes per day are as intense as life can get (outside of war I think). I remember to this day how I was on call with my mentor one Saturday and both of us told a mother that her son was brain dead. Her scream of desperation was and is to this day the sound of irredeemable, final defeat.
Those five years of residence I could have used my time much better. Every time I crossed that door of the ICU I was no longer important, there was something way more important than me but I was not smart enough to enjoy and benefit the service, the giving and being happy about it. So yes, looking back I started underperforming, I think I have always been late, always slow, not smart enough to realize what is in front of me. Sometimes I think life just went by… and it run away from me. I always say that we wake up every day with the assumption of immortality, we always think today I will go to bed, death is something that will happen in the far future, it is not even a possibility today … but none of my patients in the ICU thought they would be there 24 hours before.
So close to the end of residency I had a car accident that sent me to the ICU for 48 h with head trauma, another irony of life I was an ICU resident on call yesterday and I am here today as a patient! When I got out of the hospital I was shocked and depressed. No one had told me this could end … suddenly life was measurable, only what is measurable can have an end. So in my regular bulldozer style I was back at work within 2 weeks, I fled from the real questions and got into other pursuits, post-graduate education, moving to another country, start from scratch somewhere else. Sometimes I believe I can escape my own shadow…
So moving along, new challenges in a new country, new job and career… started working the corporate world and learning with the nuances of group dynamics, it was not a structured environment like ICU. Got into another post-graduate program, education education education up up up!!! Little did I know that I was ignoring the most important thing in life which is my ego and my own impossibility to understand and recognize the other. By not controlling my ego and being driven by my monkey mind I was not going anywhere, I could not recognize the presence of my own self and also of the others. After a number of mistakes, I hit bottom, I was lost and in search of a solution, I felt alone as I have never felt alone in my life. It was nothing tragic or terrible, it was just growth. The realization that I am an individual, ineffable spirit and that I live and die alone was painfully felt. The good news is that it led me to search for answers and I knew the answers had to be beyond books, beyond words. So I started this search and exam of my own failings, I started blaming me and moving on to recover the power of choice and tried to understand myself a little bit better. And that is where I am. If I were to have the ultimate ego trip and see who sheds tears for me in my funeral … what I would like them to think or say?
I would like them to think:
He was still searching, still unfinished, but he was grateful for everything he had, he saw the glass half full, and smiled with some frequency. He knew how to drink and share a bottle of wine. He was reliable and a true friend to his friends. He worked hard, he failed but he always came back.
But this is what I want you to think …. What do I think? I know there is a Gap between what I need to do and what I do, that I am not perfect, that sometimes I am driven by my ego, and my anger. I know I can be lazy, and a …. big hole
I have started working on it, but I am not as constant as I want to be … sometimes I think I like ideas and books more than the reality of digging inside me and doing the hard work, show up everyday
To be continued
References
“El Quijote” by Miguel De Cervantes, always a goof book even if it has not relationship with my demise
“Magellan” by Stefan Zweig
“Montaigne” by Stefan Zweig
“Ego is the enemy” by Ryan Holiday
“Empresas y tribulaciones de Maqroll el Gaviero” by Álvaro Mutis
“Confesiones” by San Agustin de Hipona
“Principles and Practice of Mechanical Ventilation” by Martin Tobin
“Razon de amor” and “La voz a ti debida” by Pedro Salinas
“The road to character” by David Brooks