Much to Learn

I don't miss my career job nearly as much as I do the hospital. From 2008-2018, I volunteered in an ER at a Pittsburgh hospital. In those 10 years, I learned more about life than I ever did as an engineer/IT manager. Both were good but one changed me more.

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Several rooms fill with staff and desperation as the floors collect unimaginable amounts of the plastic and packaging of medical litter. I bring a family a few bits of minor comfort – ginger ale, popsicles and graham crackers, but I wish I could bring them more. There is something very hard to see in their eyes when taking them to that room – the one with a sofa, leaf-print decor and soft lighting - where all I can say is the doctor will speak to you here. Every time this happens, it feels like lying when they ask how their loved-one is doing and I can’t tell them anything of substance. This is never easy, but ever important to me. Sometimes, I’ll go into an empty treatment room for a few minutes, collect myself and pretend everything is okay. It changes you in a humbling way to be around the great group of people who work there and experience this far more many times than I ever will.

Why I don't write over there any longer

Even if we are certain of the truth in our belief of what to abhor, the wholesale debasement of others or their ideologies, who believe oppositely with their own script of truth, harms everyone equally. This damage is often greater than “the cause” held in each sovereign hand. Can both be right or is one only, or are both wrong? Such questions sit in unending debate while the opportunity to discover that real progress is primarily made by the direct demonstration of the good we asseverate.