Hitting the bulls-eye and how I learned Latin
Earlier this week at the patient conference, our esteemed Chief made his inspirational point of how easy medicine is. The art, he suggested, is where the mania happens - the ideas and the craft build into something different. This is the animal. The analogy is a game of hunters, and doctors must learn to pull the arrow far back, with an eye on the target - to strike the bullseye.
Today it seems we prefer to run guns ablaze, hitting everything in sight. There is no craft or precision in that. Modern medicine is becoming a madman with a gun. Arriving at that skill is not art, but almost exactly how I learned Latin. It requires the patience of a expert to do many non-expert exercises to achieve the goal.
When I was in college not long ago I chose Latin for my language requirement. This was the language I felt was the lesser evil and so I took it. I have no use for this class, however I needed to pass it and do well. I prefer learning a story, or how something works, but Latin was nothing but memorization; I hated this.
But I did one thing I am grateful for, and it was how I learned the subject. There were some old study spaces around campus and one in particular I loved – old chalkboards with wooden fixtures – and I found them empty on weekend mornings at which point I would begin to hesitantly write down a few things I knew, and would build outward. Over the course of hours I filled the boards with conjugations, verbs, and vocabulary. I was certainly no expert and this class drove my anxiety levels through the roof, but I was doing whatever I could. This strategy was not even a strategy, it just came to me out of desperation.
This strategy never felt productive, but I achieved a certain level of repetition and exhaustion just standing there writing things over and over, reading the board from afar and up close. Saying things out loud and scribble them in my little pad I held. I whispered the words over in my mind, in voice and would later type them up.
I managed to get A’s in the class and I believe there is nothing that helped me outside of making the choice to go back to those old stuffy rooms and doing this activity every week for an entire year.
And like the art of anything, we are too fascinated with the great chef or marksman but miss the truth: there is very little art involved for those experts; it is the product of breaking down the many pieces to their core, to rebuild them into a fluid motion, for the kill.
