"Many times when we help we do not really serve. . . . Serving is also different from fixing. One of the pioneers of the Human Potential Movement, Ab… - Rachel Naomi Remen

The power of the expert is very great and the way in which an expert sees you may easily become the way in which you see yourself.

to her parents in relief, I asked if it was another one. “No,” her mother said, “it was the same one that was lost.” Dr. X had come that afternoon and brought it to them. I told them how glad I was that it had been found. “Yes,” her father said. “We are too.” Then he smiled. “She is safe now, no matter what happens,” he told me. The following morning, the surgery resident told me how the medal had been found. On the previous day, Dr. X had made his patient care rounds much as usual, followed by a dozen of the young surgeons he was training. But instead of ending the rounds in the ICU, he had taken them all to the laundry department in the subbasement of the hospital. There, he explained what had happened, and then he and all his residents and fellows had gone through the pediatric laundry from the day before

"Human being" is more a verb than a noun. Each of us is unfinished, a work in progress. Perhaps it would be most accurate to add the word "yet" to all our assessments of ourselves and each other . . . If life is process, all judgments are provisional, we can't judge something until it is finished. No one has won or lost until the race is over . . .

In our instinctive attachments, our fear of change, and our wish for certainty and permanence, we may undercut the impermanence which is our greatest strength, our most fundamental identity. Without impermanence, there is no process. The nature of life is change. All hope is based on process . . .

It is taken me somewhat longer to recognize that a diagnosis is simply another form of judgment. Naming a disease has limited usefulness. It does not capture life or even reflect it accurately. Illness, on the other hand, is a process, like life is.

Much in the concept of diagnosis and cure is about fixing, and the narrow-bore focus on fixing people's problems can lead to denial of the power of their process. Years ago, I took full credit when people became well; their recovery was testimony to my skill and knowledge as a physician. I never recognized that without their biological, emotional, and spiritual process which could respond to my interventions, nothing could have changed at all. All the time I thought I was repairing, I was collaborating.