Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

1) Memory 1. Music is a very powerful trigger for memories, isn’t it? Driving to the barn with Beth this morning and my brother calls with a challenge: when was the first time you heard “Close to You” by the Carpenters? With just the tiniest prompt (“it was summer”) I was thrown back to age 7 or 8 and the boardwalk amusement park on the Northern Jersey shore.

We “walked along” together past the “Win an Album” wheels, “Close to You” and “American Woman” back to back for miles.

2) Memory 2. Man, the White family is just a huge bunch of Olympics junkies. On that same drive this morning I was thinking about the massive “hangover” we will all have next Sunday when our fix goes on a 2 year hiatus. Skeleton on TV, leaning over the rail with Beth, the kids and my folks watching the sleds fly by in Park City in my mind. We saw almost everything in 2002.

It’s such a pleasure to see it all again.

3) Memory 3. Sonny, one of my teammates and good friends from college called out of the blue yesterday. Seems he has decided to write a biography of his Dad (note to self: this is a great idea) and was going through old letters as part of his research. In that printed pile of memories he came across a couple of letters I sent to him while he was in Japan teaching English while he tried to figure out what he wanted to be when he grew up.

Yup. Letters. Mind you, this was in 1982. Calling Japan was expensive. No cell phones, texting, WhatsApp or Signal. A postcard from Disney World reminded me of how much fun my closest friend Rob and I had that summer. We were jewelry display repair men, traveling all over the U.S. fixing displays in places like Zayres (RIP) and Eckert Drugs. We did 5 days of work in 3 and spent the remaining time exploring whatever city we parachuted into.

Best indoor summer job ever.

4) Memory 4. Sonny also sent me a picture of a full-on letter written on airmail paper (overseas snailmail was expensive, too!) in which I gave him the play-by-play of the 1982 Williams-Middlebury football game. Middlebury is about 45 minutes south of Burlington where I went to medical school. Sonny and I had dozens of friends still playing for Williams and the “good guys” won.

But the gold in that letter was my description of my guest at the game, UVM senior Beth Hurst. Yup, my very first date with the love of my life! John could barely get the words out as he read my description of how badly I burned the scallops I made for dinner after we got back to Burlington. Pretty sure the wine had more sugar than a 12 oz. can of Sprite, too. Thankfully Beth saw past my obvious culinary limitations.

Happy Valentine’s Day Dollie!

5) Free Skate. “I blew it. When I skated on to the ice my head was filled with negative thoughts. I just blew it.” –Illia Malinin, U.S. figure skater.

Man, there have been other Olympic athletes who were considered a stone, cold lock for gold as big as young Master Malinin–Alexiev in weightlifting, Gable in wrestling, the basketball HOF-packed Dream Team, Greg Louganis in diving, every German luge team, speed skater Eric Heiden–but the list of heavy favorites who underperformed in their final appearance so badly that they performed themselves off the podium entirely is rather small. Poor Illia went from first to 8th with a score <75% of his rather mediocre (for him) team score.

No one was more shocked than Malinin.

Before I get into the meat of this let me take a moment to send out massive kudos to the 21 year old Malinin for his grace and maturity, walking over to the gold medalist and immediately congratulating him, then while handling the onslaught of questions that followed his skate. Less than 10 minutes after his performance he was interviewed by NBC and uttered the words above. No excuses. He owned his performance and admitted that he had no idea why he entered the arena with those negative thoughts as he prepared to perform.

There’s no place to hide for the solo athlete. Tennis, golf, downhill skiing, equestrian, and many others. Out there competing pretty much alone. Circumstances exist in team sports that are similar. Think penalty shots in hockey or soccer, or perhaps playing cornerback in man-to-man coverage. I definitely relate to that last one. Win with grace or own it when you are beaten. All of them have much in common with Illia Malinin.

When you enter any of those lonely arenas it’s important to enter with visions of success. Until that fateful free skate I think that was one of Malinin’s strong suits; the kid expected not just victory but dominance in the process. Error free excellence at a minimum. Imagine bounding down the length of a 3-meter springboard and thinking about slamming your head on the board as you pass it on the way down instead of a perfect entry with no splash. Planning for and playing to the thought of success rather than, as Malinin described it, inexplicable thoughts of failure.

Do you know where else this is key? Surgery. Surgery of all kinds. There are no crowds watching. Certainly no one cheers at the end of a procedure. Why? Because the expectation isn’t the overwhelming favorite in the event, the acknowledged best-in-the-world surgeon is going to ace the performance, it’s that every single “athlete” in the tournament is going to ace it. Has to ace it.

Every. Single. Time.

Every surgeon enters the OR as if they are one of those solo athletes headed into the arena or onto the ice. The mental approach is like any other “event”: you have to bury any and all negative thoughts and visualize only success. It doesn’t matter what your “event” is. Neuro, eye, cardiac, transplant surgery, it doesn’t matter. The mental approach is the same: visualize only success. Nobody bats 1.000 in anything and surgery is no different. We sometimes don’t get the results we seek on behalf of our patients because of the very nature of surgery, the complexity inherent in performing surgery where every patient is singular and unique. But surgeons walk into every OR with only visions of success.

There are no games played in the operating room.

I’ll see you next week…

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 15th, 2026 at 5:09 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.