Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

Dr. Darrell White's Personal Blog

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Archive for September, 2012

Regret vs. Remorse

It’s election time, the Regular Season, and Award Show Season, all at the same time. Everybody wants the air to be cleared, to have a clean slate as it were. It’s rather amazing how many apologies to which we’ve been subjected lately, eh? Famous athletes, movie and rock stars, politicians, all proffering “heartfelt” apologies for some indiscretion or another. But are they sorry? Sorry for what they have done? Or is it something more…I dunno…less? Regret, perhaps.

There’s quite a gulf between regret and true remorse. Remorse is a deep emotional response that touches on shame. Regret, not so much. Regret is a more superficial emotion, a sadness or maybe a disappointment, more closely attached to rational self-interest whereas remorse is more akin to altruism. Remorse is more outwardly projected: I’m sorry for the effect on the OTHER. Regret much more inward, more centered on self. Think about the last few very public “apologies” you’ve heard or seen recently. Any true remorse?

How does one apply this difference in every day life, other than as a determinant in how we feel about the news we read? Well, regret lends itself to strategy and tactics, a certain calculus or cost/benefit analysis applied to the road ahead, or applied to the fall-out of the road behind. Rational.

Remorse on the other hand seems to me to be purely reactive. Not amenable to planning because whatever we’ve done to prompt true remorse, to be truly sorry, to feel ashamed, is nothing one would ever make a rational choice to do. We FEEL sorry, we don’t think it. We feel the pain of the other and we feel truly sorry for our part in it.

And there, my friends, is where the line between regret and remorse lies. That outward extension of ourselves toward the other, so easy (I think) to see it when it’s real, and so obvious when it’s not. Just as regret could be seen as a form of rational self-interest (I’m sorry I got caught), we might think of remorse as emotional altruism (I’m sorry I’ve let you down).

To remember our remorse for actions in the past is to remind ourselves of the presence of others and our effect on them as we act now.

 

The Highlight Reel

Those of us who use CrossFit as our training program do so in order to be better at life in general. Real life in many ways is more like the CrossFit Games than it is like CrossFit training. In the Games we have winners and non-winners; in the Box we have you vs. you. We are trained it seems from early in life to not only compare ourselves with others, but to allow ourselves to be compared BY others. In this we somehow allow the creation of a zero-sum game of our own sense of self, and we allow the scores to be kept by others as well as ourselves.

Kinda like all those singing contests now on TV; the judges are supposed to be judging only the contestant singing at the moment, the contestant to be focused only on herself and the judges. Invariably though, both judges and judged compare the contestant with others, for this is an openly zero-sum game. Someone will only win because everyone else lost.

I’m more than OK with this for the Games, and I’m quite fine with this for all of those silly contests (which I admit are a guilty pleasure Chez bingo). There is a real problem, however, if we allow this kind of process, this kind of judging, to be a metric for how we view ourselves. We have an unavoidable frame of reference bias that threatens even the healthiest among us when we use these external controls to judge our internal outcomes.

Why? We tend to compare our “behind the scenes” moments, our rehearsals and our trial runs, with everyone else’s “highlight reels.” We are not usually privy to someone else’s dry runs, the failed efforts that eventually culminate in the masterpiece before us. We cannot forget our own struggles, the efforts we ourselves have made out of the limelight, and we all too often use these memories as the “compare to” when ourselves evaluate ourselves against others.

I’m reminded of a story that Grambingo tells often and well. I am one of 4. We were pretty successful youngsters, at least in the eyes of the community and at least by the standards then in place by which we (and by extension Gram and Grampbingo) were measured. My Mom would listen as fellow parents bemoaned this or that child-rearing difficulty, often followed by “oh Anne Lee, you wouldn’t know anything about this; your kids are all [whatever].” Grambingo would politely nod and smile, all the while thinking “oh boy…if you only knew!”

You see, Grambingo remembered all of the hard work, the heartaches when her kids disappointed and the battles fought so that they, the kids, might succeed. The other parents were comparing their “behind the scenes” with Grambingo’s “highlight reel”, but she knew better, she couldn’t help but remember her own “work in the gym” so to speak.

What’s the ultimate lesson here? We all compare, and we are all compared. It would be simply lovely if life were a non-zero sum game but alas, ’tis not. The lesson is as simple as making sure that you are always comparing things that are alike. Your rehearsals with someone else’s. Their highlight reel with yours.

When you are comparing apples to apples you must be sure that you are either looking at the fruit itself, or recalling the labor required to fill the basket.

 

 

The Highlight Reel: Sunday musings 9/16/12

Sunday musings…

1) Floss. Floss and then brush, or brush and then floss?

It’s the new “over or under” for a new century.

2) Flossing. Traditional PT, rest, injections? All ineffective, ultimately. Several sessions with a Voodoo Floss band sandwiching a trip to Savannah? No pain.

Do the Voodoo.

3) Epic. “There are decades where nothing happens; there are weeks where decades happen.” –Lenin

Do you have that same, eerie sense that one of those weeks is nigh?

4) 35. It seems that most Nobel Laureates make their signature discoveries before the age of 35. They may not get the word out right away, and given the average age of Nobel Laureates they certainly don’t receive recognition for those discoveries until years or decades later. Some of our non-Laureated geniuses certainly came up with their stuff pre-35 for sure. See Gates, Bill et al.

Doing a little math with a calendar in front of me it looks like a certain guy we know, a trainer with a little math in his educational background, came up with an idea at age 35 that has turned out to be pretty important in the fitness world.

A little thing called CrossFit.

5) Reel. Real life in many ways is more like the CrossFit Games than it is like CrossFit training. In the Games we have winners and non-winners; in the Box we have you vs. you. We are trained it seems from early in life to not only compare ourselves with others, but to allow ourselves to be compared BY others. In this we somehow allow the creation of a zero-sum game of our own sense of self, and we allow the scores to be kept by others as well as ourselves.

Kinda like all those singing contests now on TV; the judges are supposed to be judging only the contestant singing at the moment, the contestant to be focused only on herself and the judges. Invariably though, both judges and judged compare the contestant with others, for this is an openly zero-sum game. Someone will only win because everyone else lost.

I’m more than OK with this for the Games, and I’m quite fine with this for all of those silly contests (which I admit are a guilty pleasure Chez bingo). There is a real problem, however, if we allow this kind of process, this kind of judging, to be a metric for how we view ourselves. We have an unavoidable frame of reference bias that threatens even the healthiest among us when we use these external controls to judge our internal outcomes.

Why? We tend to compare our “behind the scenes” moments, our rehearsals and our trial runs, with everyone else’s “highlight reels.” We are not usually privy to someone else’s dry runs, the failed efforts that eventually culminate in the masterpiece before us. We cannot forget our own struggles, the efforts we ourselves have made out of the limelight, and we all too often use these memories as the “compare to” when ourselves evaluate ourselves against others.

I’m reminded of a story that Grambingo tells often and well. I am one of 4. We were pretty successful youngsters, at least in the eyes of the community and at least by the standards then in place by which we (and by extension Gram and Grampbingo) were measured. My Mom would listen as fellow parents bemoaned this or that child-rearing difficulty, often followed by “oh Anne Lee, you wouldn’t know anything about this; your kids are all [whatever].” Grambingo would politely nod and smile, all the while thinking “oh boy…if you only knew!”

You see, Grambingo remembered all of the hard work, the heartaches when her kids disappointed and the battles fought so that they, the kids, might succeed. The other parents were comparing their “behind the scenes” with Grambingo’s “highlight reel”, but she knew better, she couldn’t help but remember her own “work in the gym” so to speak.

What’s the ultimate lesson here? We all compare, and we are all compared. It would be simply lovely if life were a non-zero sum game but alas, ’tis not. The lesson is as simple as making sure that you are always comparing things that are alike. Your rehearsals with someone else’s. Their highlight reel with yours.

When you are comparing apples to apples you must be sure that you are either looking at the fruit itself, or recalling the labor required to fill the basket.

I’ll see you next week…

Posted by bingo at September 16, 2012 6:20 AM

 

Sunday musings 9/9/12 (Anniversary Addition)

Sunday musings…

 

1) Jobs. Need more. ‘Nuff said.

2) Job. “The best job is the one you don’t need. That way you have permission to do what needs to be done. You can always do the right thing.” Sheri Lansing (?)

3) Life. “We’ve added years to life, not life to years.” George Carlin.

My bid is that those of us who are doing CrossFit add quality years to our lives. We can expect our senescence to be much freer of decrepitude than that of our predecessors, which will allow us to spend less time simply checking the required boxes of our days.

We are also adding a communal life to our years, at least those of us who are members of an Affiliate gym or who engage the online CrossFit community. I’ve had more substantive   conversations about more varied topics with the people I’ve met in the CrossFit community than I have in my medical community. We engage one another. We join together in our WOD’s, join together in living.

We cram just as much life into every time domain as we do work in our WOD.

4) Anniversary I. We did “Haddie”, the memorial WOD for our beloved pet that left us this time last year. The WOD included Burpee PU and runs; Haddie had a stroke in her spine and for the last two years of her life would continually fall while running, only to pick herself up and keep going. Tough chick.

Pets, dogs in particular, teach us some valuable lessons. We learn responsibility because they depend on us for the essentials of life. Every day we see what unconditional love looks like when we are smothered in puppy love upon awakening. Heck, we get it when we return from a 90 second errand.

And we learn how to say goodbye. Our pets teach us that life is finite. Our love cannot change that, nor can theirs. Before we say goodbye to our people we typically have to say goodbye to one of our dogs. It’s a lousy, ouchy lesson; it’s a measure of their love for us that they typically handle it so much better than us. We are left with memories, and even here our dog teaches us about remembering our loved and lost.

Who, after all, really remembers anything truly bad about their dog?

5) Anniversary II. Mrs. bingo and I just celebrated our 27th wedding anniversary. My “Better 95%” and I have been together 30 years in all. Pretty cool. Actually, VERY cool. One of my CrossFit buddies noted that my ROI on that 5% I contribute is pretty huge!

Marriage is hard work, and given the atmosphere around here right now it’s probably not very cool for me to offer any advice, so I’ll just channel the grace offered to me on this occasion by another CrossFitter. Robin hoped that “[our] wedding day was the day that we loved each other least.” If CrossFit is seeking to become a better you tomorrow than the you of yesterday through the work you’ve done today, perhaps we can say this about marriage:

Seek to have more love tomorrow than you did yesterday by loving more than you ever thought possible today.

I’ll see you next week…

 

 

 

Secular Tailwind

“Well Hannah, we really think ABC, Inc. is poised for a big uptick. We see them riding a strong secular tailwind in the 3rd quarter with earnings to follow”

Excuse me? “Secular tailwind?” Seriously, WTF is a secular tailwind? Does the presence of a secular tailwind mean that there must be a secular headwind hiding out there somewhere? And how about the “secular” part of this weather front? Secular always seems to be accompanied by sectarian. You know, like Sunni’s and Shiites. The yin to someone’s yang. Heathens and infidels on one side, true believers on the other. If a “secular tailwind” is good, how bad is a “sectarian headwind”?!

For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, I not only play a doctor on TV, I also play one in real life. We doctors have been vilified for using impenetrable language to make ourselves look oh so very smart, all the while confusing the heck out of our patients and making them feel unintelligent. Small and embarrassed. Kinda like when you ask the wine steward for a suggestion and you just know… you KNOW… everything he said about the wine was pure nonsense, and your wallet’s about to get violated. Heck, at least we doctors had the decency to use opaque phrases in a different language. We really sounded pretty cool and very smart when we said everything in Latin or Ancient Greek.

Not the good folks in finance, though. The don’t even really SAY anything. They’re just making S__T up. “Secular Tailwind.” Seriously, how do they say stuff like that and keep a straight face? Maybe it has something to do with the fact that everyone who watches or listens to those financial shows is doing so by choice; unlike a patient in his doctor’s office who has some kind of illness to be sorted out, the people watching CNBC or MSNBC are voluntarily tuning into Cramer and his buddies. Not a soul in that audience needs to be listening. Their reward is to be insulted.

It turns out that the relative “literacy” rate for medical information is roughly akin to the vocabulary of an eighth grader. In other words, if I choose to use words or phrases that would not register with the average eighth grader a substantial percentage of my patients will not understand what I am trying to get across. Real research has been done on this stuff and reasonably so; it’s important to understand what your doctor is trying to tell you. Many of us in medicine really do get this, and really do try to neither speak above or speak “down to” our patients. Gone are the days of multisyllabic jargon sandwiched between words from a dead language.

Imagine if that wasn’t the case. Even worse, imagine what it would be like if physicians and other caregivers acted like all those financial talking heads and not only tried to confuse you but just blatantly made crap up while doing so. “Well Mrs. Jones, I’m afraid there’s a involitional reservoir of hard fluid residing in the retrosplenic attic which appears to have suspended all glomerular transport underneath. There are a number of ways it could have gotten there, and of course there’s no guarantee  that we are right, but we are pretty sure it was blown there by a Secular Tailwind.”

Don’t worry, though. We’ll just start a little IV Novena…

Panera Bread Cares (A Random Thoughtlet)

While driving to work this morning I had NPR on the radio as usual. The Business News segment was featuring the Panera Bread company and its “Panera Bread Cares” program. Briefly, Panera has converted about a dozen of its formerly for-profit stores into non-profits owned by the Panera Foundation. There are no prices in these stores, only “suggested donations.” Approximately 20% of patrons donate more than the suggested amount, 60% pay as if it is regular price, and the rest pay little or nothing.

Needless to say, the folks from Panera were more than a little self-congratulatory about this enterprise, and I think they have some reason to be so. Their stated goal is to raise awareness of “middle-class food anxiety”, not so much to provide food to the poor or the homeless. I imagine that the paying customers might be a little less prone to continue patronizing a store which all of a sudden started to be populated by the various and sundry homeless, especially those who look the part. Still, I do think this is an interesting experiment along the lines of Radiohead and music but for charity rather than as a business model.

Here’s the rub: a Professor Somebody from someplace opined that it is “exceedingly rare” that a business has a charitable venture that is indistinguishable from its for-profit core business. I wish I remembered the guys name. He intimated that it might actually be unique, not seen in any other business. Right. About that. This is the self-congratulatory part that rankles. Unique, as in only one, like never before seen?

Hardly.

How about the countless private doctors’ offices and clinics that have been seeing and treating patients for little or no payment, a phenomenon that began decades ago and continues today? Have we become so jaded about doctors and healthcare that an economics or business professor can state, presumably with a straight face, that a company offering to give away its core product in its usual setting is unique and almost unprecedented?

Come on now.

I’m reminded of a story one of my older partners used to tell. Dr. Scheie, namesake of the Scheie Eye Institute at Penn in Philadelphia, was a pioneer in cataract surgery. Every one of his patients had the same experience in the operating room itself, and Dr. Scheie personally did every single surgery; no one was denied surgery by the great Scheie, regardless of their ability to pay. Where they spent the next several nights (this was in the days of sand bags and immobilization) was determined by what, if anything, they did pay. Regular patients, those who paid the “recommended donation”, were the majority of the patients and they stayed in semi-private or double rooms. Those less well off who paid little or nothing were tended to in a dormitory like ward. There were two private rooms reserved for those who were of more substantial means. When asked what surgery would cost if one were to spend the night in a private room Dr. Scheie would reply: “you should pay what you feel you should.” The eye clinic never lost money.

I think the idea and philosophy behind the “Panera Bread Cares” is pretty cool, but let’s be real about both the phenomenon and the real rationale underlying these “pay what you can/want” stores. Panera is getting enormous publicity and goodwill from a trivial number of store conversions. It is getting great feedback and outsized credit for something that is so common in medicine that business professors seemingly forget that and get on NPR and say stuff like Panera Bread Cares is so rare that it might be a one-off. They are giving away bread bowls, for Heaven’s sake.

Doctors have been giving away something much more valuable to those who can’t pay every day for decades.

 

Sunday musings 9/2/12 (From Savannah)

Sunday musings…

1) Savannah. Cool town ya got here.

2) Volume. Heard on the street last night:”Ya, but how many is that in ‘dog beers’?”

3) Bogart. “The problem with the world is that everyone is always a couple drinks behind.” Humphrey Bogart.

Bogart, an accomplished drinker, is also making a statement about a general atmosphere of tension and angst in his world. While I don’t necessarily condone his solution, now or then, his observation is spot on, now AND then.

Things are generally better than we are admitting out loud to others, generally better than we are admitting to ourselves. Really. To see this shouldn’t necessarily require beer goggles.

4) Ghosts. Savannah is populated by hundreds, maybe thousands, of ghosts. In truth if we met any last night I either didn’t notice or don’t remember. They, the ghosts that is, are all said to be sad or angry. If Savannah does indeed have ghosts it stands to reason that they ALL aren’t angry or sad, and that got me to thinking about ancestors.

Have you ever examined your heritage? You know, looked at what’s swimming in your gene pool, and where it’s been through history? There’s probably a ton in there, probably a ton of information that is worth knowing. History is awfully cool, a rich and vibrant panorama that can be viewed from any spot and examined in either direction. Your OWN history is like this. You should know your own story.

Some of your heritage may still be around, their panorama moving ever slower as they spool toward the end of their part of the story. Are they happy? Are they fulfilled? Have they imparted all they, and you, need? If they were to leave this life, if there be ghosts, would they be those quiet, happy types, or the sad angry ones that provide fodder for tour guides “crawling” the haunts of Bogart and his ilk? Time grows short for your living heritage, for them and for you.

If there be ghosts, might you be wise to learn their stories before they cross over?

I’ll see you next week…

Posted by bingo at September 2, 2012 6:50 AM

 

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