Reserve Capacity: Sunday musings…4/27/2025
1.Pulchritudinous. Beautiful. Funny, such an awkward, and frankly not terrifically pretty word to say “beautiful”. A favorite for Bugs Bunny, I’m told that it is the longest word for “Beautiful”.
No reason. My buddy Ken told everyone at dinner they were pulchritudinous last night. Not sure if I’ll be able to work it in but the reactions he got make it worth trying!
2. Gathering. Every year there are two large national meetings in the world of my day job. This weekend I find myself in Los Angeles among a few thousand folks who do pretty much the same thing that I do for a living. While LA is not my favorite convention setting, the presence of so many people I know, repsect, and like makes the venue almost irrelevant.
Kinda like an annual family reunion in the town you couldn’t wait to leave.
3. Maya Angelo. “When someone shows who they are, believe them the first time.”
I have to admit, until I read this quote some time ago I thought Ms. Angelo was kinda soft. Digging just a tiny bit below the surface of her life, writing, and speeches and it is clear that I was wrong. Indeed, just this single, simple sentence is indicative of a person who has been forced to learn this lesson in some type of hard way, and likely more than once. It is a lesson worth learning, but as is the case with so many lessons, one that can be challenged by nuance.
You meet someone for the first time. Someone to whom you’ve never been introduced, with whom you’ve never spoken, but of whom you have heard. Perhaps your foreknowledge is mostly quite positive, or maybe there is conflicting information, not all of which is quite so laudatory. Has this intel gathered from third parties informed you of who the introductee really is? Or rather, are we to take Ms. Angelo at, a writer noted for the precision of her words, at her EXACT words? That is, when the person shows you themself who they are?
Not gonna lie, if I am introduced to a new someone by a trusted friend with nothing but good things to share during the introduction, I find it easier to take Ms. Angelo’s exhortation a little on the softer side. To extend a little bit of grace if my first impression is less positive for whatever reason. If my friend thinks highly of someone I am inclined to let this new person offer up a couple of efforts at telling me who they really are.
Funny, though. As I get older and meet more folks, it’s the ones I may have heard less favorable things about prior to our introduction to whom I am inclined to offer a bit of grace. For me at least, in these circumstances I tend to wait for the person to tell me who they really are themselves. To try as best I can to withhold my ultimate accounting of the person before me until I hear it from them.
Your mileage may vary, of course, and one could do much worse than taking a broader view of Maya Angelo’s advice. One can never have enough friends; waiting to meet one in person, rather than via third person, has brought me friendships I might have missed had I not done so.
4. Everything. My professional world is filled with intelligent and kind people blessed with extraordinary talents that they choose to share with not only their patients, but also with each other. Roughly half of them, other in the larger sense in and in my closer personal circles, are women. It has been my great privilege to be a various times best friend, big (or little) brother, confidant, and provider of counsel. As with so many other worlds, in my world of eye surgeons the women typically carry a greater workload, a larger share of life’s burden if you will, than we men do.
So it was that once again I found myself with a young friend, alone together in a large, noisy gathering, trying to help her maneuver through the maze of “everything” that confronts these women in my life. For our “conversation” here on “musings…” this morning it doesn’t matter who she is where she lives, of the granular details of her problem. Like so many others who have asked for at sympathetic ear she is extraordinary in every way. An accomplished, busy eye surgeon. An internationally recognized expert whose counsel is routinely sought by our professional organizations and industry partners. A wife and a mother. How could she possibly keep all of this going? How was she to handle the sense that she was letting someone down? What was she to say to that nagging voice in her head that everywhere she found herself, there was someplace else she was supposed to be?
“There’s no balance between my work and my life. What if I stop? What if I just step away from everything that takes me away from home? I can’t stop feeling that I am missing too much, that my kids are missing their Mom too much. Will people understand? Will they forget me?”
Seriously, it was heartbreaking.
Once again I return to the concepts my daughter Megan I and worked so hard on some years ago. There really is no such thing as “work/life balance” because there isn’t really a “/” between the two; work is simply a part of life. No more, no less. What we should be seeking is harmony between all of the aspects of our life. Our job, our family, and what it is in ourself that makes us who we are. The trap that my dear young friend has fallen into is the canard of “having everything” where everything is, well, literally every thing.
You can, indeed, have everything, but to do so you must carefully define what constitutes your own personal everything. Having done so it IS possible to have everything, with one very important caveat: you can’t have your everything all at the same time. In fact, most of the time you will find that harmony lies in only having a portion of your own collection of everything right then. It is only over time, perhaps even only over a lifetime that you will realize that you have had “everything”. Indeed, some parts of everything will only harmonize at a very certain point in time. Think Little League baseball or Junior Prom. The first tooth under the pillow for the Tooth Fairy. Easing your new associate into the practice.
Some stuff only fits into the symphony at a very specific part of the music.
It was a very quick chat. We only had a few minutes to share before the rest of the crowd noticed us. I hugged my friend and told her that she already knew the answers to all of the questions. If all she needed was for someone she trusted to say “yes”, to follow the music she was hearing, that I was there to help. How could anyone not understand? Who could ever forget such a wonderful, caring, loving person?
Just before we let go I told her I won’t.
Reserve. Every few meetings I run into my friend Mark. His story is extraordinary, and I love telling it. Here is a story of hearts with a deep reserve of love to give.
How much space do you have in your heart? We talk here about work capacity, but I’m wondering about the capacity to extend your heart to others. Let me tell you a story.
Some 40 years ago a young man was struck by a car and suffered a concussion. While he was hospitalized his mother became ill and died in another hospital. For reasons too complex to share here, the young man’s father was not capable of raising the boy and his older brother so they were taken in by their uncle, the mother’s brother, and his wife and 3 kids.
A little extra room in that house, but not really enough. Ditto money. What they did have enough of it turns out was room in their hearts for two boys suddenly without a family. Room it turns out to treat the nephews as if they were their own children. They sent all 5 children to college, and all 5 have graduate degrees if memory serves. All supported by a couple who found that they had enough room in their hearts to simply make enough room everywhere else.
Fast forward 30 years or so from that fateful day in the hospital. The brothers are sitting with the only parents they have (the father died long ago), celebrating the first day of school for a son. The aunt and uncle who took them in said they had but one regret, that they had not formally adopted the boys when they took them in. The boys, now men, had clearly learned the lesson of the untapped capacity in one’s heart. At age 40 and 45 and with the blessings of their cousins, they arranged to be adopted by the uncle and aunt who found room everywhere else when it was clear they already had room in their hearts. A next generation now officially has grandparents.
Each and every day we learn that our physical boundaries are artificial, self-made restrictions on our capacity. Indeed, the more we expand our physical capacities the more unbounded they seem to become. The lesson in my friend’s story, I’m sure, is that we have a similarly broad and probably untapped capacity in our hearts for love. Like that aunt and uncle, each of us has more room in our hearts than we imagine, just waiting like our broad fitness capacity, for that time when its needed.
With that much untapped capacity in our hearts I’m sure that somehow we, too, would find enough room for everything else.
I’ll see you next week…
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