Editorial Comment 9/29/2020: Learning To Be Well

I joined a recovery meeting last night, in itself no great surprise.  But two revelations were provided to me, perhaps one more significant than the other.  The more mundane one was that I found myself hearing old familiar friends clearly for once, in years.  Presbycusis yields to headphones and a volume knob. I had been content in meetings, whether in faculty committees, legislative hearings, or recovery groups with accepting that I was just never going to hear everybody’s voices clearly.  I was reconciled to some of the information slipping past me, on little winged feet, a murmur of inaudible syllables punctuated with tantalizing but never fully-explained references to “death,” “soup,” “”Wilson said,” etc.  But for once, whether on WebEx or Zoom or other electronic platforms, I can hear. And not merely hear; but no longer have any excuse for not listening.  The effect of this includes having a clearer understanding of the thoughts and wishes of many to whom I have been trying to listen for years.… There is of course the other possibility, that by not actually being present in the same physical space, I will be missing a dimension of their talk that does not transmit through a modem. Time will tell.

The second revelation was not peculiar to the communication setting, Zoom or otherwise.   It came from hearing someone declare, as I have heard others declare before, that they had recently been the recipients of a great disclosure relating to recovery, some principle in recovery such as the crucial necessity for honesty or the need to put two dollars in the basket instead of a single.  The thing was, the speakers had been heir to these disclosures for years, yet it only now awoke in them an understanding.  Repetition won out.

We speak sometimes of a readiness to hear things as central to acceptance. This, By the way, for the medical student readers facing their 2^nd year, is how you tackle the problem of neuroanatomy: read and examine; then repeat; repeat again; …at some magical point, there is a revelation.  And joyfully, incredulously, you suddenly understand where, within that great gray lump of fatty matter between the ears, all of those tracts and nuclei and networks connect!

 Editor-in-Chief: Dr. William Haning, MD, DFAPA, DFASAM