What's Up, Doc?

Last week, I received an e-mail from a young friend. He was lamenting the fact that, as a sophomore in college, he did not yet know exactly how his life would unfold - especially professionally.

After a light chuckle, I sent him a reply. I included the fact that, in span when I was about 20 to 25 years old, I had periods where I was in a novitiate, unemployed, a federal employee, a telemarketer and others that I have forgotten. I mentioned that none of these experiences were a waste of time. All of them helped, in some way, to lead me to where I am now - even if some of them helped me to know what I didn't want to do professionally.

I mention this story because we recently celebrated the Feast of St. Luke. In addition to being an evangelist, Luke was a physician. Having come from a physician family and having worked for a medical association, I have a significant amount of experience interacting with physicians. Early on, I sensed that many physicians view events and situations differently than non-physicians. Many years ago, I asked my personal physician to explain to me his thought process in diagnosing an illness I had based on the symptoms I presented and what he saw. The very first thing that he did was to come up with broad categories of what my illness was not. When he did that, there were few remaining illness possibilities. Then, based on hunches formed from his experience and training, he asked me questions and had me do some physical movements in an effort to determine if his hunches were correct. They were - I actually had a case of shingles! My physician diagnosed this in about 3 minutes and was able to do so only because his first step was to figure out what my illness was not.

So often we want easy answers when we might be far better off going through the process of arriving at the answers through the process of elimination. Going through that process forces us to think. I truly believe that there are no stupid people in the world - just mentally lazy people. We no longer take the time to figure things out - even though we could.

When looking for the easy answers, think of St. Luke.