Saturday, August 7, 2010

The Keen Eye of the Retrospectoscope




            A version of this blog appeared in 2009 on a coaching website I’d created with my wife.  Then life happened.  I took down the blog and let it marinate in a vat of good intention.
I’m a physician and a life coach.  The original question for this blog was whether I could write as a professional about my own humanity.  Could I be open, vulnerable, in touch with fears and failings as well as strength and wisdom? When I began my life work four decades ago, it would have seemed unprofessional to put personal thoughts in a place where they could be read by anybody who happened by.  Now it seems not only permissible, but valuable.  I learn daily from blogging physicians and coaches who speak without fear.
Not a single feature of my current life could have been predicted four years ago.
In 2006 I was working per diem as a clinical professor of anesthesiology at a major medical school in the Pacific Northwest, looking forward to creating a life coaching practice that would have me out of the operating room in a few more years.  I anticipated that we’d either stay in the Pacific Northwest or move back to central California to be near my middle son and his wife.  I planned to research and write a book on greatness, interviewing prominent people who seemed unafraid to let their light shine in the world.  I was happily married, eight years into a second marriage with children in their teens. 
The first never-gonna-happen surprise is that I now live in Hawaii. Four years ago I had never spent a minute thinking I might live here.  I loved the Pacific Northwest.  Then in 2007 after a period of family inquiry, we chose to radically reshape our lives and move to the Big Island. I said I’d do whatever it took to make the Hawaiian adventure possible.  That turned my work life in an unexpected direction.
The second surprise is that instead of moving out of the operating room to be a life coach, I now practice anesthesiology full-time as chief of a high-quality rural practice on one of the outer islands. I thought I was burned out, done, tired of the whole thing.  I was increasingly afraid of the operating room.  I couldn’t have imagined practicing full-time and being responsible for a department, and I couldn’t have imagined loving this practice, its people, its challenges.
The third surprise is that my marriage has ended. I live by myself in a condominium on Kauai, not in the family home on the Big Island.  In the summer of 2009 my wife said that she no longer wanted to be married.  She wanted us to end the marriage and still be friends.  A year later, negotiations have failed to produce a simple or friendly agreement, and an appointment in divorce court seems likely.
Finally, and most surprisingly, I looked briefly on match.com last summer when it seemed that my marriage would soon be over.  I asked for a woman who was warm, loving, wise, kind, good-humored, sexy, and willing to love and be loved.  To my immense surprise that woman appeared, and we’ve been “together” for almost a year now despite my failure to finish a divorce as quickly as I’d predicted.  She’s exactly who I was asking for.  Once again, my experience could never have been predicted.
            I’m guessing that the blog will be another unpredictable experience.  Stay tuned. Where once I thought I had many of the answers, I now have mostly questions.  This is where I’ll explore them.  I welcome comments.  Without dialogue, I’m simply in my own head…

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